The Woman Behind the New Deal

The Woman Behind the New Deal
Author: Kirstin Downey
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 498
Release: 2010-02-23
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1400078563

“Kirstin Downey’s lively, substantive and—dare I say—inspiring new biography of Perkins . . . not only illuminates Perkins’ career but also deepens the known contradictions of Roosevelt’s character.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR Fresh Air One of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s closest friends and the first female secretary of labor, Perkins capitalized on the president’s political savvy and popularity to enact most of the Depression-era programs that are today considered essential parts of the country’s social safety network.

Class and Power in the New Deal

Class and Power in the New Deal
Author: G. William Domhoff
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2011-06-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0804779023

Class and Power in the New Deal provides a new perspective on the origins and implementation of the three most important policies that emerged during the New Deal—the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Social Security Act. It reveals how Northern corporate moderates, representing some of the largest fortunes and biggest companies of that era, proposed all three major initiatives and explores why there were no viable alternatives put forward by the opposition. More generally, this book analyzes the seeming paradox of policy support and political opposition. The authors seek to demonstrate the superiority of class dominance theory over other perspectives—historical institutionalism, Marxism, and protest-disruption theory—in explaining the origins and development of these three policy initiatives. Domhoff and Webber draw on extensive new archival research to develop a fresh interpretation of this seminal period of American government and social policy development.

The Politics of U.S. Labor

The Politics of U.S. Labor
Author: David Milton
Publisher: New York : Monthly Review Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 1982
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

"The alliance of the industrial labor movement with the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt has, perhaps more than any other factor, shaped the course of class relations in the United States over the ensuing forty years. Much has been written on the interests that were thereby served, and those that were coopted. In this detailed examination of the strategies pursued by both radical labor and the capitalist class in the struggle for industrial unionism, David Milton argues that while radical social change and independent political action were traded off by the industrial working class for economic rights, this was neither automatic nor inevitable. Rather, the outcome was the result of a fierce struggle in which capital fought labor and both fought for control over government labor policy. And, as he demonstrates, crucial to the outcome was the specific nature of the political coalitions contending for supremacy. In analyzing the politics of this struggle, Milton presents a fine description of the major strikes, beginning in 1933-1934, that led to the formation of the CIO and the great industrial unions. He looks closely at the role of the radical political groups, including the Communist Party, the Trotskyists, and the Socialist Party, and provides an enlightening discussion of their vulnerability during the red-baiting era. He also examines the battle between the AFL and the CIO for control of the labor movement, the alliance of the AFL with business interests, and the role of the Catholic Church. Finally, he shows how the extraordinary adeptness of President Roosevelt in allying with labor while at the same time exploiting divisions within the movement was essential to the successful channeling of social revolt into economic demands."--Amazon.com viewed November 16, 2020

The Roosevelt I Knew

The Roosevelt I Knew
Author: Frances Perkins
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2011-06-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1101535350

A vivid and intimate portrait of the New Deal president by the first woman ever appointed to the U.S. Cabinet. When Frances Perkins first met Franklin D. Roosevelt at a dance in 1910, she was a young social worker and he was an attractive young man making a modest debut in state politics. Over the next thirty-five years, she watched his career unfold, becoming both a close family friend and a trusted political associate whose tenure as secretary of labor spanned his entire administration. FDR and his presidential policies continue to be widely discussed in the classroom and in the media, and The Roosevelt I Knew offers a unique window onto the man whose courage and pioneering reforms still resonate in the lives of Americans today.

Making a New Deal

Making a New Deal
Author: Lizabeth Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 569
Release: 2014-11-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1107431794

Examines how ordinary factory workers became unionists and national political participants by the mid-1930s.

New Deals

New Deals
Author: Colin Gordon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 1994-07-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780521457552

This book, an economic history of the interwar era, is the first major reinterpretation of the New Deal in thirty years.

The Green New Deal and the Future of Work

The Green New Deal and the Future of Work
Author: Craig Calhoun
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2022-08-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0231556063

Catastrophic climate change overshadows the present and the future. Wrenching economic transformations have devastated workers and hollowed out communities. However, those fighting for jobs and those fighting for the planet have often been at odds. Does the world face two separate crises, environmental and economic? The promise of the Green New Deal is to tackle the threat of climate change through the empowerment of working people and the strengthening of democracy. In this view, the crisis of nature and the crisis of work must be addressed together—or they will not be addressed at all. This book brings together leading experts to explore the possibilities of the Green New Deal, emphasizing the future of work. Together, they examine transformations that are already underway and put forth bold new proposals that can provide jobs while reducing carbon consumption—building a world that is sustainable both economically and ecologically. Contributors also debate urgent questions: What is the value of a federal jobs program, or even a jobs guarantee? How do we alleviate the miseries and precarity of work? In key economic sectors, including energy, transportation, housing, agriculture, and care work, what kind of work is needed today? How does the New Deal provide guidance in addressing these questions, and how can a Green New Deal revive democracy? Above all, this book shows, the Green New Deal offers hope for a better tomorrow—but only if it accounts for work’s past transformations and shapes its future.

Capitalism Contested

Capitalism Contested
Author: Romain Huret
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2020-12-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812252624

In the historical narrative that prevails today, the New Deal years are positioned between two equally despised Gilded Ages—the first in the late nineteenth century and the second characterized by the world of Walmart, globalization, and right-wing populism in which we currently live. What defines these two ages is an increasing level of inequality legitimized by powerful ideologies, namely, Social Darwinism at the end of the nineteenth century and neoliberalism today. In stark contrast, the era of the New Deal was first and foremost an attempt to put an end to inequality in American society. In the historical longue durée, it appears today as a kind of golden age when policymakers and citizens sought to devise solutions to the two major "questions"—labor on one side, social on the other—that were at the heart of the American political economy during the twentieth century. Capitalism Contested argues that the New Deal order remains an effective framework to make sense of the transformation of American political economy over the last hundred years. Contributors offer an historicized analysis of the degree to which that political, economic, and ideological order persists and the ways in which it has been transcended or even overthrown. The essays pay attention not only to those ideas and social forces hostile to the New Deal, but to the contradictions and debilities that were present at the inauguration or became inherent within this liberal impulse during the last half of the twentieth century. The unifying thematic among the essays consists not in their subject matter—politics, political economy, social thought, and legal scholarship are represented—but in a historical quest to assess the transformation and fate of an economic and policy order nearly a century after its creation. Contributors: Kate Andrias, Romain Huret, William P. Jones, Nelson Lichtenstein, Nancy MacLean, Isaac William Martin, Margaret O'Mara, K. Sabeel Rahman, Timothy Shenk, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Jason Scott Smith, Samir Sonti, Karen M. Tani, Jean-Christian Vinel.

A New Deal for China’s Workers?

A New Deal for China’s Workers?
Author: Cynthia Estlund
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2017-01-02
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0674971396

China’s leaders aspire to the prosperity, political legitimacy, and stability that flowed from America’s New Deal, but they are irrevocably opposed to the independent trade unions and mass mobilization that brought it about. Cynthia Estlund’s crisp comparative analysis makes China’s labor unrest and reform legible to Western readers.