POL 499: Senior Seminar in Political Science: FDR: The Rise of the Left

The Hoover-Roosevelt debate of the 1930s is the contemporary American political, economic, and moral conversation that shapes public policy in the twenty first century in a very powerful way.

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Norman Thomas, for over fifty years a relentless advocate for justice and equality for all Americans, was convinced that socialism was the sole path to economic and political justice. He advocated the adoption of economic programs that ultimately became the fabric of American life social security, unemployment insurance, minimum wage laws, a ban on child labor, workers compensation, and anti-discrimination laws. Raymond F. Gregory examines Norman Thomas life from the perspective of his lifelong endeavor to attain justice and equality for the poor and the oppressed of his time."

The Depression era saw the first mass student movement in American history. The crusade, led in large part by young Communists, was both an anti-war campaign and a movement championing a broader and more egalitarian vision of the welfare state than that of the New Dealers. The movement arose from a massive political awakening on campus, caused by the economic crisis of the 1930s and the escalating international tensions and threat of world war wrought by fascism. This book makes an important contribution to the emerging portrait of political life in the 1930s.

This anthology assembles the contemporary writings not only of the New Dealers - the men who devised and executed the programs of the government in the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but also of the "social critics" who "gathered in various stances and at various distances around the Roosevelt fires." Here is a sampling of the famous movers and shakers of the 1930's: Thurman Arnold, Henry Wallace, Rexford Tugwell, David Lilienthal, Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickes, Frances Perkins, John Maynard Keynes, and of course Roosevelt himself. Here too are the voices of those who thought the New Dealers were going "too far" such as Walter Lippmann and Raymond Moley, and of those who thought they were not going "far enough"; like John Dewey, W. E. B. DuBois, Norman Thomas, Lewis Mumford, and Carey McWilliams. In his Introduction Howard Zinn defines the boundaries of the New Deal's experimentalism and attempts to explain why it sputtered out. The result is a book that captures the spirit of the New Deal hopeful, pragmatic, humane yet remains hardheaded about its accomplishments and failures.