Reviewed by Barry Anderson University of Delaware
The New Deal by Paul K. Conkin is part of the AHM American History Series edited by John H. Franklin and Abraham S. Eisen-stadt. The book consists of four separate essays first published in 1965, but revised somewhat for re-release. The first essay is titled simply “Roosevelt” and presents a rather impressionist character analysis of the thirty-second president. Conkin is clearly fascinated with the character traits which he believes separated Roosevelt from other men and made many of his presidential achievements possible. This fascination manifests itself on virtually every page of the first essay as the author delves deeply into the origins of Roosevelt’s personality. We are told, for instance, that Roosevelt’s “unusual and politically invaluable self assurance” was the result of an unconventional childhood.
Young Roosevelt’s “rigid, possessive, but loving mother” and his “elderly, increasingly ill, indulgent father” provided him with “a large farm estate with trees and gardens; nurses, tutors and loneliness for other children; a patterned almost regimented tempo of life; and such Victorian virtues as duty, honesty, and fair play.” (p. 2) As if these advantages were not enough, the author reports that Roosevelt was an only child who was “breastfed, with no competitors for a mother’s love, catered to by innumerable servants and relatives, indulged by gifts and toys and pets” and therefore able to grow up “secure and happy reflecting the vitality and commanding presence often observed in single children.” (p. 2) The rest of the chapter continues in this vein attempting to explain Roosevelt’s personality in terms of his origins and his subsequent career in terms of his personality. The problem with this sort of analysis is that it comes dangerously close to committing the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy of logic. Simply because Roosevelt was raised in a particular environment and in a particular way does not prove that either the environment or the manner of his upbringing produced his particular collection of character traits. Other explanations are possible. For instance, one might argue that his personality was determined entirely by genetic factors, or by some combination of environmental and genetic factors, or by his astrological sign for that matter. Without statistical or experimental proof, any of these hypotheses is as plausible (i.e. as difficult to refute logically) as any of the others. Viewed in this light Conkin’s narrative is reduced from scientific inquiry to mere conjecture, interesting but hardly persuasive.
The second essay, “Clouds Over a New Era, 1932-1934,” dis-cusses the problems of general economic depression and Roose-velt’s proposals to deal with them. It devotes considerable attention to early New Deal programs and the “alphabet soup” of new agen-cies created to run them. The National Recovery Administration (NRA), the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), the Civil-ian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) are but a few of the agencies whose goals and performance are discussed. Because so many programs are mentioned, however, none is given very much attention. (The TVA, for instance, is covered in but one page and a half.) The result is a nice overview but very little depth.
Unfortunately, there are two flaws in this chapter which seriously reduce its overall quality. The first appears in the introductory discussion of the role of government in a free market economy. In that discussion, Conkin points out that government secures property rights, grants corporate charters, taxes for community needs, provides a currency, and conducts an array of other activities designed to provide a social “matrix” for economic activity (p. 25). This is all true enough. In the same discussion, however, he repeats the common misconception that “some classical economists” were unaware of the extent and importance of governmental influence in maintaining that matrix. Who among the prominent classical economists could possibly be guilty of such naiveté? Certainly not Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, or Mill. Certainly not Bentham, Lauderdale, or Sismondi. Even a cursory reading of these writers reveals their clear understanding of the importance of government for maintaining the social order that underlies a market system. Implying that any of them lacked this understanding betrays an ignorance of their work that is difficult to justify in any critic, especially one who is an historian. The second major flaw is a crime of omission, Almost completely missing is any discussion of New Deal monetary policy.
A growing economic literature on the causes of the Depression indicates that it was largely the result of the bank panics that occurred in the early thirties. Once in motion, those panics reduced the money supply by one third, a blow severe enough to cripple aggregate demand and almost by itself force the economy into depression. The Federal Reserve was responsible for the panics, and therefore the Depression itself, because it had the power to prevent them but refused to act. Since the Federal Reserve was the governmental agency most able to arrest the continuing economic decline, one would expect it to receive’ some attention in any general review of the early New Deal. Such attention is conspicuous in the second essay only by its absence.
The third essay, “Origins of a Welfare State, 1934-1936,” describes the changes which the Depression wrought in the American political concensus about welfare and the welfare state. Conkin argues that the enormous suffering of the Depression changed the American view of welfare from “a repudiation of responsibility” and “a catalyst of character decline” to an institution which is generally seen as conventional and orthodox and quite necessary in a modern industrial society (p. 52). He describes Roosevelt’s awareness of this change and his willingness to move with it. The Social Security Act, the Wagner Act, and the Banking Act, for instance, would have been unthinkable in 1929 yet all three had been passed in 1935 and, as Conkin points out, passed at presidential behest. The notion that the Depression marked a turning point in. American political thought is, of course, not new, but it is well presented in this essay.
Interestingly, the discussion of monetary policy, expected in vain in the second essay, appears briefly in the third. In describing the specifics of the Banking Act of 1935, Conkin presents a variant of the famous liquidity trap argument to explain why during deep depression central bank policies are almost useless unless supported by fiscal policy or by direct controls (p. 67). Conkin’s rejection of the view that monetary policy can be useful against depression is evident elsewhere in the piece when he criticizes Roosevelt for temporarily supporting in 1933 the “pseudosolution” of monetary inflation, (p. 42) or monetary reflation as it might more accurately be called. Conkin’s belief that monetary policy was impotent in the thirties explains why he excused the Federal Reserve from his list of important recovery agencies.
Unfortunately, the popular Keyne-sian view that money does not matter during depression was refuted in 1963 by Friedman and Schwartz in their classic, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, a work which appears in Con-kin’s own bibliography.
The concluding essay, “The Perils of Depression Politics, 1936-1938,” discusses the backlash to the New Deal which developed in the mid-thirties and brought it to an end by 1938. The furor over the Court Bill of 1937 is discussed and Roosevelt given the usual low marks for his conduct. Conkin points out that the political losses Roosevelt incurred during the court fight were magnified by the contraction of 1937, which he correctly identifies as the last precipitous economic decline in American history. Unfortunately, as important and severe as the contraction was, Conkin provides little insight into its causes. His claim that it was caused by the timidity of corporate leaders “still overreacting to misinterpreted New Deal policies” (p. 94) is facile and unpersuasive. It also ignores a sizable economics literature which again finds monetary forces at the root of a contraction. As Friedman and Schwartz, Chandler, and others have shown, the doubling of reserve requirements between August 1936 and May 1937 was a devastating blow to a financial system just recovering from collapse. The resulting scramble for reserves produced a credit crunch which certainly played a key role in dampening the economy. Conkin’s failure to recognize these findings (and make some effort to refute them if he holds otherwise) weakens his fourth essay considerably.
In conclusion, The New Deal is a weak effort with serious flaws in each of its four essays. If it has a redeeming feature, it is cer-tainly its ample bibliography which directs the reader to a number of stronger works on this important period.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chandler, Lester V. America’s Greatest Depression, 1929-1941. New York: Harper
& Row, 1970. Friedman, Milton and Schwartz, Anna. A Monetary History of the United States,
1867-1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.
