Harvey J. Kaye: The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016.
We now mark a publishing event: the first book I’ve seen that came to reviewers with a publicity packet including not only the usual blurbs, bio, and boilerplate hype, but a list of “talking points.” Sheltered creature that I am, I’d associated talking points with documents enlivened by cartoon elephants and donkeys, cheerful notices to partisans offering hints on how to talk persuasively to relatives and neighbors. But here we have something that at least looks like a history, complete with 60 pages of endnotes, yet accompanied by a bullet list of things-done-and-to-do, to wit:
• “In 1930, Franklin Roosevelt stated that Americans needed to make America ‘fairly radical for a generation.’ And through the labors and struggles of the New Deal and then in the course of World War II that is exactly what they did….
• “In 1941, FDR articulated their progressive accomplishments and aspirations in the Four Freedoms: Freedom of speech and worship, Freedom from want and fear….
• “Moreover, at war’s end they made the United States the strongest and richest nation on earth….
• “After 35 years of deepening inequalities and insecurities, of declining industries and decaying public infrastructures—indeed, of denying who we are—we need to do what our parents and grandparents did….
• “We need to harness the powers of democratic government in favor of progressive policies and programs….
• “We need to mobilize, organize, and bolster progressives like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Bill de Blasio. We need to make American radical for at least a generation.”
I especially admire that use of the word “need,” which recalls its deployment at sub shops and diners in my adopted home of Michigan. In those lighthouses of the liberal portion, “Do you need cheese on that?” really means, “Do you want cheese on that?” O reason not the need, Cordelia of The Coney Hut, and slap some right on.
What’s not to like, with this talking points stuff? How much better our world might be, had the publicity mavens at the University of Chicago Press gotten off their verandas back in 1975 and issued
Talking Points for THE ARGUMENT AND THE ACTION OF PLATO’S LAWS
• In early fourth-century BCE, Plato penned his most political and pious work, asking himself, ‘What would have happened if Socrates had gotten out of jail, free, instead of drinking poison?’
• If he were alive today, Plato would have told us that goodness and kinship are two very different things and therefore all is not in the family, the Bunker archē notwithstanding.
• Infants are crazy, but lately they’ve been getting tenure-track positions.
• The best and truest kind of equality can be called monarchic, since the sole rightful ruler is the Intellect.
• Military training of women and, more generally, equal education of both sexes is to counteract the misplaced or excessive piety to which the female sex is prone.
• No man’s nature is sufficient for knowing what is conducive to political life and, if knowing it, for always being able and willing to do what is best.
• Many members of the Nocturnal Council that rules the city will lack the ability to raise and answer the most important questions—the true art of conversation.
• In the end, the Laws points back to the lesson of the Republic: Don’t let your mouth write a check your body can’t cash.
With ammo like that, President Ford’s National Endowment of the Humanities director Robert A. Goldwin might have won the culture wars, fending off the Carter Administration before it even got elected. And—theoretical wisdom being timeless and universal—many of these points make perfect sense for use in publicizing Professor Kaye’s book, with obvious application not only to monarchic Franklin and pious Eleanor, but to the science of administration the New Deal dealt out.
Speaking of the will to power, Nietzsche would have classified this book as monumental history, a hero tale of Progressivism. This presents a problem of sorts. If neither God nor nature guides human conduct, if we take our moral and political bearings from history—conceived no longer so much as a literary genre or a mode of inquiry but as the course of events, unfolding in a lawful way toward an end or purpose—then the most authoritative thing lives not above us in Heaven or in and around us in nature but ahead of us in time. According to Progressivism, the most authoritative thing is the Future. But a history—a narrative of the course of events—looks to the past. What’s a good Progressive to do, especially if, like Professor Kaye, he wants to call us to remembrance of glories lost? “We need to remember what conservatives have never wanted us to remember and what liberals have all too often forgotten”—namely, that “we are the children and grandchildren of the men and women who rescued the United States from economic destruction in the Great Depression and defended it against fascism and imperialism in the Second World War,” a generation whose greatness consisted precisely in doing those things on behalf of the “Four Freedoms” enunciated by President Roosevelt in his Annual Message to Congress, of January 6, 1941. That is, the United States the greatest generation rescued and defended was most particularly the New Deal state, about which FDR’s Attorney-General and Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Jackson said, “We too are founders,” and “We too are makers of a nation.”
Now, to charge that conservatives have never wanted us to remember the New Deal or the Progressive ideology that animated it is surely unfair. In fact, conservative scholars have been the ones to revive scholarly interest in Progressivism, as seen in books and articles beginning at least as far back as Paul Eidelberg’s 1974 book, A Discourse on Statesmanship, and continuing in the work of Paul Marini, Dennis Mahoney, Sidney Milkis, Ronald J. Pestritto, along with many others. But such a whining complaint ignores the obvious: meticulous engagement with the scholarly literature is not the purpose of Professor Kaye’s project, which leans toward the inspirational.
It is impossible to reproduce the full range of his revival-sermon voice, but here are some highlights. The Roaring Twenties was “a time of economic growth and prosperity,” but only “for a certain class of people”—by which Professor Kaye means the rich, not the middle class and the urban working class. For those who would leap up to cite pesky stats about middle- and working-class real wages rising 20% in that decade, or the mass production of consumer goods that sharply increased Americans’ buying power, what don’t you understand about monumental history? Please be quiet. To continue: luckily, as the rich got richer, polio-stricken Franklin Roosevelt convalesced under the benevolent eye of his wife, receiving a “continuing ‘liberal education,’ dispensed by Eleanor, even as she herself became more active in politics and reform efforts”—an imagined scenario which, I must confess, brings out my inner Alice Roosevelt Longworth a bit too much for the ease of my conscience. Be that as it may, the (talking) point is that while greedy, bathtub-gin-swilling jazz-age bacchanalians careened toward The Crash, the soberer souls of Hyde Park were steeling themselves for the struggles to come.
And they were ready. “Roosevelt and the New Dealers… initiat[ed] a revolution in American government and public life” by means of the stronger regulation of capital, “relief on a grand scale,” and “pursuing social- and industrial-democratic policies and programs,” thereby “redrawing the nation’s constitutional order” and aiming at bringing “the nation ever more progressively toward social and industrial democracy”—all in the face of those villains, the “economic royalists” and “Tory Republicans” who sought to defend their “industrial dictatorship” and “economic autocracy.” True, for a short time the Nine Old Men on the Supreme Court stood, palsied, in History’s way, but FDR’s eventual appointment of seven new justices began “nothing less than a Constitutional Revolution.” The vast benefits of this revolution rippled long past the world war; America’s postwar decades of economic prosperity occurred, thanks to the prior “investments” in infrastructure by the New Dealers, the G.I. bill, and “the profits, savings, and technical investments and ‘know how’ accumulated in the fight against fascism and imperialism.” What, you ask, of America’s sheer physical advantages over bombed-out Europe and Japan, and the postwar tax-cuts. Don’t be silly; such stuff deserves no place on the honor roll of economic causation.
Alas, “Harry Truman was no FDR.” He began the Cold War, while the labor movement’s purges of communists from their organizations made it “cease to be the militant progressive force it had been.” Just as bad, liberals and progressives (read: Henry Wallace and his allies) “differed critically over how to handle the Soviets and America’s own communists”; “the horrors of fascism, Nazism, and communism” led even some ‘Left’ intellectuals “to question the prospect of giving too much power and authority to the state.” And with that heresy, things only got worse. President Lyndon Johnson, a loyal New Dealer, nonetheless failed “to break the Cold War’s grip,” supporting “the authoritative and corrupt U.S.-created South Vietnamese state” against “the Communist North and revolutionary Viet Cong”—who, if my own memory serves, were merely mass-murderers and tyrants. After the “infamous red-baiter,” Richard Nixon, defeated “liberal and antiwar” George McGovern in 1972, and then fell victim to his own corrupt thuggery, Democratic President Jimmy Carter could do not better than to invoke God’s help—a call “as vacuous as it was ineffectual.” This opened the door for that slow-cured old Hollywood ham, Ronald Reagan, who had the effrontery to praise the Greatest Generation even as he jettisoned “what made the Greatest Generation and its greatest leader truly great”: the social and industrial democracy implied by the Four Freedoms.
And today? After some promising campaign rhetoric, President Obama has failed, not because he “ask[ed] too much of Americans” but because “he asked too little,” compromising on national health care and worrying about the federal deficit—to the extent of saying such a thing as, “We have to cut the spending we can’t afford o we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.” After an outburst like that, we should probably start calling him Barack Harding Obama. No wonder we “need” to “get radical”—and not just “fairly” radical—”for at least a generation.” Such an extensive list of sins will take a long time to purge.
A reader might ask, what is the real point of this militant nostalgia for a past future that never quite was? Professor Kaye would like to do two thing which run just slightly under the cover of his rhetoric. He would like to revive the old Popular Front strategy of the mid-1930s, whereby leftists united—at least they seemed to unite—against those nasty conservative, reactionary, corporate crypto-fascist elites. Ah, for the golden year of 1935, when “Communist intellectuals, who had previously scorned liberal democracies and other leftists… receiv[ed] welcomed new party directives from Moscow” to “promote the causes of labor and democracy.” In those days, Pete Seeger breathed free.
As a second task, Professor Kaye evidently wants to undo at least some of the tortured doings of the intellectual Left of the past two generations: the ‘postmodern,’ too-ironical, dubious-about-the-white-collar-bureaucratic New Left. After all, it wasn’t only conservatives, libertarians, and postwar, ‘vital-center’ liberals who question the Progressive-New Deal confidence in the possibility of combining populism with the science of administration. Tom Hayden, Mark Rudd, Stokely Carmichael, C. Wright Mills, and Paul Goodman made that attack while trying to form a new kind of radical Left, one that rightly made all the components of the old Popular Front coalition exceedingly nervous. Professor Kay would like to overcome the odd combination of cynicism and millennialism the New Left has left us, and do it with nothing less than that old-time, New-Deal religion.
My guess? Some of what he says may find its way into the speeches of Hillary Clinton, as the former Madam Secretary weaves her way back toward the White House, blogospherics flaring—and watched by at least one earnest, enthusiastic democratic-socialist professor, his soul in a condition of mesmerized agony.
For if—as FDR maintained—we must fight the economic Titans, are not Titans followed by Olympians? And what if, after the fight, the Titans of industry prudently marry the Olympians of the administrative state? Will their offspring not grow into rebellious adolescents who eventually mature into academic and corporate-welfare careerists? Careerists named Bill and Hillary Clinton, for example—those adepts of rearranging the deck chairs on our new ship of state. No myth of a high-flying Icarus will hold them back, but they sure can use the myth.
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