The Politics of Upheaval: 1935-1936, The Age of Roosevelt, Volume III: The Politics of Upheaval 1933-1936 Vol 3 by Schlesinger Jr." Arthur M

Author:Schlesinger, Jr.", Arthur M. ["Schlesinger, Jr.", Arthur M.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2003-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

III

Some of the changes of 1935 were at first hard to detect. But what was unmistakable was the change in personnel. The key figures of the First New Deal were Moley, Tugwell, Berle, Richberg, Johnson. From 1935, their influence steadily declined. The characteristic figures of the Second New Deal were Frankfurter, Corcoran, Cohen, Landis, Eccles, in time William O. Douglas, Leon Henderson, and Lauchlin Currie. The shift in TVA from Arthur E. Morgan, the biographer of Edward Bellamy, to David Lilienthal, the protégé of Felix Frankfurter, was symptomatic.

The second New Deal was eventually a coalition between lawyers in the school of Brandeis and economists in the school of Keynes. But in 1935 the economists were still in the background; the neo-Brandeisian lawyers were at first the dominant figures in the new dispensation. As for the old Justice himself, he watched the events of the year with growing delight. Black Monday, the day the Supreme Court struck down NRA, seemed to him “the most important day in the history of the Court and the most beneficent.” The three decisions, he said, far from rushing the country back to “horse and buggy” days, only “compelled a return to human limitations.” The time had come to correct the “lie” that the country could make an advance as a whole; it could advance, he said, only locally—in particular communities and particular industries. Everything was beginning to look better—the reversion of social security to the states, the holding-company battle, the tax message, the rise to influence of his disciples. “F.D. is making a gallant fight,” he wrote Norman Hapgood early in August, “and seems to appreciate fully the evils of bigness. He should have more support than his party is giving him; and the social worker-progressive crowd seems as blind as in 1912.”

Brandeis's cry of triumph did not mean the literal triumph of Brandeis’s ideas. His faith in smallness was too stark and rigorous. To Milo Perkins of the Department of Agriculture he held forth, as Perkins reported to Tugwell, on “the sanctity of littleness in all fields of human activity.” To place men in jobs calling for superhuman abilities, Brandeis suggested, was to corrupt or to destroy human nature. The transition back to small units would be worth any cost in dislocation or suffering. As Perkins rose to leave, the old man told him earnestly to go back to Texas—back to the hinterland, where the real movement to reshape America would originate.

When Brandeis talked in this mood, when he told Tom Corcoran to send his boys back to the state capitals, when he decried the automotive industry on the ground that Americans ought to walk more, he was speaking for an America that was dead. His words were morally bracing but socially futile. There was, indeed, a conflict in the heart of Brandeis’s social philosophy. Much as he admired competition, he admired smallness even more; and, when the two principles clashed, it was competition which had to go under. Thus he wanted government action

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.