How World War II saved the New Deal

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 1993 by John Willson

World war II was a godsend to American liberals. The New Deal had been dead in the water since 1937, torpedoed by its fundamental failure to effect an end to the Depression and its increasingly annoying meddling with traditional patterns of American life. A conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats blocked almost all of Pres. Franklin a Roosevelt's initiatives until the foreign policy crisis of 1939-41.

That crisis renewed the President's vigor and allowed him gradually to maneuver the U.S. into a position that made entering the war in Europe and the Pacific inevitable. He was aided immeasurably by the recklessness of the Japanese and Germans. Nothing unites people like a common enemy. Since foreign policy always reflects domestic policy (and that goes for military policy, too), it should surprise nobody that the New Dealers geared up for war in New Deal ways. What happened between 1941 and 1945 was an expansion of the national state so vast as to be virtually irreversible.

Conservative Americans were pretty sure this would happen. Sen. Robert A. Taft (R.-Ohio), son of Pres. William Howard Taft, a patrician educated for leadership, and a traditional American from the heartland, is a case in point. "The basic foreign policy of the United States," he said in 1939, should be strength, independence, and to "preserve peace with other nations, and enter into no treaties which may obligate us to go to war." He argued that Americans have little business trying to affect the outcomes of conflicts that are not their own and that war would "almost certainly destroy democracy in the United States."

Taft was especially suspicious of the notion that the U.S. should "undertake to defend the ideals of democracy in foreign countries." He added that no "single nation should range over the world, like a knight-errant, protect democracy and ideals of good faith, and tilt, like Don Quixote, against the windmills of fascism." The national interest of the U.S., he believed, was to protect liberty at home, not extend it abroad. "We have moved far toward totalitarian government already," he warned in 1939. "The additional powers [already] sought by the President in case of war, the nationalization of all industry and all capital and all labor ... would create a socialist dictatorship which it would be impossible to dissolve once the war is over."

He opposed every Roosevelt war initiative, the draft and Lend-Lease particularly (although he supported a strong defense, especially an air force). He even refused a deal that might have given him the 1940 presidential nomination. Once the bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor, however, Taft knew which side he was on and rallied others to the Allied cause. Nevertheless, as he confessed in private to his wife, he still feared that the war would harm the nation, dragging it towards "war and bankruptcy and socialism all at once. Let's hope I'm wrong."

Ironically, the New Dealers shared Taft's pessimism, but for different reasons. They did not realize that the war finally had helped them to achieve what they could not in peacetime. In December, 1943, FDR told the press that "Dr. New Deal" had given way to "Dr. Win the War." The New Deal poet laureate Archibald MacLeish lamented soon afterwards that "Liberals meet in Washington these days, if they meet at all, to discuss the tragic outlook for all liberal programs, the collapse of all liberal leadership, and the defeat of all liberal aims."

True, Congress kept cutting back on New Deal programs. During 1942-43, the Civilian Conservation Corps, Works Progress Administration, National Youth Administration, and National Resources Planning Board were axed. The Farm Security and Rural Electrification Boards were cut back. The expansion of Social Security was put on hold. To this day, most historians who write about wartime liberalism call this chapter in history "The Waning of the New Deal," "The New Deal at Bay," or "The Conservative Coalition." The truth was that only the tail of the New Deal was cut off; it bled a little, but no major arteries were touched.

MacLeish and his liberal friends undoubtedly were in near despair because they knew the stakes the war allowed them to play for: "We who win this war will win the right and the power to impose upon the opening age the free man's image of the Earth we live in. We who win this war will win the future." Taft and his fellow conservatives understood this, too, at least in part. They also knew, as Taft said, "there is only one way to beat the New Deal[ers] and that is head on. You can't outdeal them." Taft led all the fights to repeal the New Deal and seemed to win some of them. However, three examples serve to show how temporary and incomplete these victories were.

First, the conservatives were patriotic Americans and wanted to win the war. Yet, Congress is only secondarily responsible for waging war. It falls to the President as Commander-in-Chief to take war-winning initiatives, and FDR ran a New Deal war. He instituted crisis regulation the scope of which no American could have dreamed of as late as 1939. They included four main elements: price control (Office of Price Administration), rationing, command over production (War Production Board), and control over labor (National War Labor Board). Together, they represented a bewildering interlocking complex of agencies and resulted in a command economy that differed only in tone and detail from totalitarianism.