Cowie is the author of "Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor" and "Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class" so I expect this book to be a must-read as well:
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10583.html From the Introduction: From the perspective of liberal historians, perhaps the most dominant view in the field, the post–World War II decades constituted the new mainstream of the nation’s politics: the final product of a long struggle for American reform. Postwar liberals might differ on whether FDR had led the “third American Revolution” or a “halfway revolution,” but there was a sense that a version of the industrial democracy, called for since the nineteenth century, had finally arrived. The new “liberal consensus” recognized that state involvement in social and economic policy was now a proven benefit in redistributing wealth, propping up consumption, and bolstering the foundation for the future expansion of the liberal project. Its permanence at the time seemed obvious to many. As the literary critic Lionel Trilling famously and prematurely noted in 1950, “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”5 A sharply different view emerged from the turmoil and heightened political expectations of the New Left of the 1960s. For scholars influenced by the new social movements, New Deal liberalism was simply a form of “corporate liberalism” that sought not to transform society but merely to prop up capitalism in its time of need and, more importantly, to contain and control a deeper, more popular, and more radical threat to the system. Despite the changes the New Deal did bring, as the argument is developed by one of its leading proponents, Barton J. Bernstein, the New Deal “failed to solve the problem of depression, it failed to raise the impoverished, it failed to redistribute income, it failed to extend equality and generally countenanced racial discrimination and segregation.” Rather than a transformative moment, Bernstein argues that New Deal policy “was profoundly conservative and continuous with the 1920s.”6 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
