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Overview
The first history of the new deal in global context
The New Deal: A Global History provides a radically new interpretation of a pivotal period in US history. The first comprehensive study of the New Deal in a global context, the book compares American responses to the international crisis of capitalism and democracy during the 1930s to responses by other countries around the globe—not just in Europe but also in Latin America, Asia, and other parts of the world. Work creation, agricultural intervention, state planning, immigration policy, the role of mass media, forms of political leadership, and new ways of ruling America's colonies—all had parallels elsewhere and unfolded against a backdrop of intense global debates.
By avoiding the distortions of American exceptionalism, Kiran Klaus Patel shows how America's reaction to the Great Depression connected it to the wider world. Among much else, the book explains why the New Deal had enormous repercussions on China; why Franklin D. Roosevelt studied the welfare schemes of Nazi Germany; and why the New Dealers were fascinated by cooperatives in Sweden—but ignored similar schemes in Japan.
Ultimately, Patel argues, the New Deal provided the institutional scaffolding for the construction of American global hegemony in the postwar era, making this history essential for understanding both the New Deal and America's rise to global leadership.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400873623 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/12/2016 |
| Series: | America in the World , #21 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 456 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The New Deal
A Global History
By Kiran Klaus Patel
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-7362-3
CHAPTER 1
A GLOBAL CRISIS
A Fragile Boom
"In the large view, we have reached a higher degree of comfort and security than ever existed before in the history of the world." Herbert Hoover's inaugural address very much summarizes the spirit in America in spring 1929. Also in 1929, journalist Charles Merz proclaimed that a "brand-new America" was coming about, boasting the "triumph of the urban culture" and "prowess of the giant mills." More fundamentally, he asserted, "the rules of thumb that once seemed everlasting principles" had been overturned. Many Americans amassed unknown wealth during the course of the 1920s, leaving behind the want and shortcomings of the past, but also the traditional ways of life. The departure into a new age was fueled by the belief that everything was possible and that (social) technology was the key to success. The United States self-fashioned itself and was seen internationally as a, if not the, quintessentially modern nation. Hence, the Great Depression unfolded against the backdrop of not only an economic success story but wider changes in American society, too.
After a short decline during 1920–21, America experienced substantial economic gains. Between July 1921 and May 1923, industrial production rose by 63 percent. The intervening years until 1929 also saw significant growth — between 1921 and 1929, the gross domestic product (GDP) rose by almost 50 percent. The car industry and its suppliers formed the backbone of the boom in America. Prior to World War I, railroads and waterways had been the largest and most prestigious infrastructure projects, whereas the road network was much less developed. Rural transportation posed a particular problem, since many important connections remained dirt roads made impassable by a few days of rain. During World War I, the transport systems could barely cope with the new demands of the war effort and national mobilization. Motor transportation was seen as the best solution to the challenge, and this latest revolution in American transport infrastructure drove the economic upsurge. The trend was further substantiated by the war in Europe, which turned into a major testing ground for the potentials of infrastructure and logistics built around the combustion engine. In this context, US federal and state governments intensified their efforts to get farmers out of the mud and improve driving conditions outside urban centers. Economic and social debates went hand in hand with the idea of building a new America: in 1916, President Woodrow Wilson trumpeted how new streets would not only connect the various parts of the country but also support the "nationalization of America." His insouciant Republican successor, Warren G. Harding, then became the first American president to ride to his inauguration in a car rather than a carriage — thus heralding not just an important political change in US political history but also the breakthrough of the automobile age.
Despite their instrumental role in initiating and building new roads and highways, state actors were not in the driving seat of the boom. Even before Americans had decent roads to drive on they had started to purchase cars, which both symbolized and stimulated this newfound prosperity. In 1926, Ford's Model T produced some 40 percent of all new cars sold in the United States; all in all, the company built fifteen million units of this model. The connection between the overall economic situation and Ford Motor Company's performance was especially close: a temporary recession in 1927 reflected Henry Ford's decision to stop production for six months in order to retool for the new Model A. Alongside changes in individual transportation, bus services grew in importance during the 1920s. Starting as a one-man show in 1914, the Greyhound system was operating forty thousand miles of scheduled services by 1933.7 Tractors and trucks also fueled the trend, reducing the isolation of rural America and speeding the shift away from rail and ship. Instead, gas stations, garages, and suburban sprawl became the hallmarks of the American landscape of the 1920s.
Other consumer industries also played a crucial role in the boom of the 1920s. Electrification, albeit far from complete, paved the way for domestic appliances like radios, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and most commonly in 1929, electric irons. All these products, hardly in use before World War I, had become widespread in the United States by the eve of the Great Depression; the electric iron, for example, had found its way into 60 percent of all American homes. Rising incomes made these gadgets affordable, and the new economic instrument of installment credits facilitated their purchase. Moreover, rising earnings and declining work hours revolutionized leisure activities. Tourism became a significant economic factor, with the number of visits to national parks rising from half a million in 1917 to 2.4 million in 1930. National Park Service director Stephen T. Mather stood at the forefront of innovative public relations strategies to raise these figures still further. Professional sports became big business, and during the 1920s Hollywood became the film industry's world capital. To be sure, big business and finance were not alone in driving prosperity; state assistance and new consumption patterns also contributed substantially. And not all sectors of the economy profited to the same extent from these developments. Some, especially mining and farming, stagnated, and the boom was neither incessant nor ubiquitous, nor even expansive.
Still, prosperity did a lot to knit Americans closer together. Roads and radio stations began to lift rural isolation, and the changes affected more than transport and communication. A 1929 sociological study listed no less than 150 "social effects" of the radio — most important, that it increased the "homogeneity of peoples ... because of like stimuli." Admittedly, there were clear limits to such convergence. The South remained less affected by these changes, with Mississippi having the lowest number of radios per household, and critics deploring such innovations as the latest invasion of Yankee culture. The rumble of vacuum cleaners was heard primarily in the homes of the middle class, while refrigerators were even more exclusive. Also, historiography has been too quick to assume that the new mass culture embraced all workers and eradicated difference. Many of Chicago's numerous foreign-born citizens, for instance, liked listening to the "Polish" or "Italian" hour on their local networks, and did not simply aspire to an all-American, middle-class lifestyle. Despite these qualifications, the new prosperity impacted the lives of all Americans in various respects. It was perceived as a particularly American experience. And as such, it also changed America's role in the world.
Exporting the American Dream
The strongest new global ties were economic, too. American exports more than doubled between 1911–15 and 1921–25, and the United States was set to overtake Great Britain as the world's largest trading nation and dominant industrial force. American industrial products now achieved international visibility — Hoover vacuum cleaners, Gilette razors, and Ford cars became household names as well as objects of aspiration, epitomizing modernity not only in Poughkeepsie, NY, and Pasadena, CA, but also in Havana, Hamburg, and Hiroshima. The United States accrued a large export surplus, particularly with Europe, which continued to be its most important trading partner. The annual trade surplus stood at $1.8 billion in the decade after the war, a sevenfold increase compared to the prewar years.
This new position did not result just from America's strength; it also came from the weakness of others. The United States' two most important competitors, Great Britain and Germany, were both diminished by the Great War and relatively poor economic performance throughout much of the 1920s. The Japanese economy did not participate in the boom, and its rather loose economic connections beyond East Asia also reduced its global impact.
The United States utilized its new commercial position to amplify its global role. Only part of the trade surplus went into monetary reserves; American bankers used the rest for large-scale, demand-driven foreign lending and investment. Between 1924 and 1929, the United States loaned some $6.4 million to foreign borrowers — almost twice the total of Great Britain, the other global lender (see table 1). Obviously, Americans did not shy away from deep economic entanglements with other parts of the world.
Moreover, the lending patterns differed from those of Great Britain. For the United States, Africa was nonexistent and Asia much less important than for Britain, due to its global empire. US lending until 1929 went largely to the Americas, but Europe was also a higher priority than for Britain.
Americans did not just lend money but also acquired lasting management and business interests abroad. US foreign investment was particularly strong in car production in the early 1920s, especially in Canada and Latin America, and subsequently in Europe, South Africa, India, Malaya, and Japan. Commercial interests often trumped political considerations: in 1929, the Ford Motor Company sold $40 million worth of automobiles and parts to the Soviet Union, also giving technical assistance to a manufacturing complex at Nizhniy Novgorod, the birthplace of writer Maxim Gorky and heart of the Volga-Vyatka economic region. By the late 1930s, the "Gorkovsky Avtomobilny Zavod" in the "Soviet Detroit" was producing some eighty to ninety thousand "Russian Fords" annually. Henry Ford's anticommunism was conspicuously less orthodox than sometimes thought. Not only did he trade with Joseph Stalin, he actually became the dictator's largest foreign business partner between 1929 and 1936. Ford even developed an affectionate friendship with a Communist, Mexican intellectual Diego Rivera, building on a shared belief in technology, the feasibility of social change, and by and large, an illiberal vision of modernity. Ford's competitors were not quite as aggressive, yet they were equally pragmatic; America's largest car producer, General Motors, for example, set up plants in places as far away as Osaka, Japan, and Anvers, France.
Foreign lending, direct investment, and trade created strong commercial links with other parts of the world, especially Europe and the Americas. Britain and the United States were the powerhouses of economic globalization. The 1920s, normally characterized as a period in which globalization ebbed due to instability and nationalism after the war, would have been much more strongly deglobalized had it not been for America. This counterfactual argument is often not taken into account.
Still, the continental size of the United States and its huge domestic demand made it easy to overlook its new global role. US foreign trade amounted to only some 7 percent of overall production — whereas all other major economies, with the exception of the Soviet Union, depended much more heavily on exports. It would be wrong to assume that America's international rise took place in a fit of absentmindedness; but still, for many Americans it seemed rather marginal. At first blush, the United States could do it alone, and if anything, others were much more dependent on America than vice versa — two suppositions that were to be proven wrong during the Depression.
At the political level, the United States was less willing to take the lead. America never joined the League of Nations, even though it had been enthusiastically promoted by President Wilson and formed the institutional centerpiece of his famous Fourteen Points program of 1918 for securing international peace in the postwar era. The United States also remained absent from other pillars of interwar internationalism, such as the World Court. Still, it did not withdraw completely from international politics. A closer look at the League is revealing. Many of its services would have collapsed without the financial help of US philanthropic organizations. The Rockefeller Foundation, for one, heavily funded the League of Nations' Health Organization, a predecessor of the World Health Organization, and by the early 1930s it was paying the salaries of one-third of the Health Organization's staff members. Taking all its branches together, the League of Nations employed more than two hundred Americans. Meanwhile, most of the trustees of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which was engaged in similar activities, maintained close ties to Washington: one of its directors considered running for the presidency, another played an instrumental role in founding the International Labour Organization(ILO) in Geneva, and the Carnegie Endowment as a whole was crucial in the creation of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, outlawing war as a means of foreign policy.
Alongside these indirect routes to internationalism, the US government played a visible and critical role, such as in the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22 limiting fleet sizes and the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Salesmanship, philanthropy, and statesmanship were not mutually exclusive, however. Instead, American elites reveled in creating ever-closer synergies between them. The Carnegie Endowment, for instance, promoted international peace and free trade, championing a system built on the pillars of democracy and capitalism. More and more, America became identified with such a model, and in comparison to prewar diplomacy, its involvement in international affairs was unprecedented. It therefore would be wrong to call the 1920s an age of isolationism for America.
But America did not just project economic and political power. It also became a major cultural force. Technical innovations were one side of the equation; jazz, Hollywood, and the new role of women were another. When, in 1901, British journalist William Thomas Stead announced the "Americanization of the world," this had still been rather prophetic; by the 1920s, it had turned into reality. It was "obvious" in 1923 to Stead's compatriot Bertrand Russell that "the next power to make a bid for world empire will be America," and its resources "are more adequate than those of any previous aspirant to universal hegemony." Americanization or, for that matter, hegemony never meant that American cultural practices simply spread across the globe. Americanization stood for intense discussions, particularly in industrialized countries, in which America was seen as the quintessential materialization of modernity, as the desired or abhorred future of one's own society. Although, paradoxically, the debates about Americanization were predominantly nationally framed, they shared fundamental similarities. French and German intellectuals, for instance, invested great energy in underlining their differences — yet the two national discourses drew from an identical pool of stereotypes and interpretative patterns. Debating "America" brought communities closer together, even if they did not realize it.
Nonetheless, American ideas and practices did travel around the world. As early as the 1920s, the United States started to build an "irresistible empire" of commercial commodities and mass consumption. Fordism, Taylorism, and business practices more generally, but also haircuts, manners, and tastes, were promoted internationally, especially in Europe. The Old World served, as Victoria de Grazia has shown, as America's prime theater to stage "a great imperium with the outlook of a great emporium."
As another example, American cosmetics advertising had a tremendous impact on the image of the "modern girl," characterized by her fashionable apparel, explicit eroticism, and independence. This applied not only to the French garçonne or German Neue Frau; far beyond Europe, America's mores also impacted China's modeng xiaojie or India's kallege ladki. Actresses like Hollywood star Clara Bow became role models. Indian film star "Glorious" Gohar, for instance, referenced her bobbed hair, large eyes, and mascaraladen eyelashes, but combined this with Indian elements such as a sari and Indian-style jewelry. To be sure, America did not simply set the one and only path for the "modern girl." Instead of one-to-one copies, we find a whole host of appropriations, which in turn had an impact on America. The modern girl did have American roots, yet was ultimately a global hybrid.
Against this backdrop, many Americans strove for stronger engagement with the wider world. During the 1920s, some forty thousand US citizens lived in France alone — among them Cole Porter and Ernest Heming way, but also many who did not compose or write, such as businessmen or well-heeled American women with cash-strapped aristocratic European spouses. In America, many groups began to embrace their ethnic heritage. From the mid-1920s onward, ethnic American identities gained traction, overcoming the "antihyphenism" of World War I. The village of New Glarus, WI, epitomizing an imagined Swiss homeland, is only one illustration of how images of the wider world were imported into the lifestyles of (white) Americans. Building on their prewar work, African American intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois or the more radical Marcus Garvey continued to transcend the structures of the nation-state and constraints of ethnicity — for instance, by intensifying their links to the rising anticolonial movements in Europe as well as in African and other colonies. By and large, the 1920s were a golden age of Pan-Africanism, and powerful transcontinental links were established in 1930, when Haile Selassie became emperor of Ethiopia; Garvey's American and particularly Jamaican followers saw this as the realization of the biblical prophecy that kings would come out of Africa. Even before this, Wilson's call for national self-determination at the end of World War I — primarily meant for American and European ears — had fired the imagination of anticolonial groups in Egypt, China, and India, thereby adding legitimacy to their quest. Philanthropic organizations pushed for peace and social reform and started to globalize their activities beyond a US and European focus. The Rockefeller Foundation, for example, gave major financial support to several universities in China, mainly to introduce Western economic ideas, while also promoting Christianity. Such work bolstered the global network of American missionaries and organizations like the Young Men's Christian Association, which had already built a distinctly Protestant American moral empire with global pretensions prior to World War I. At the same time, the fate of two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, tried and executed in Massachusetts, reveals a paradox typical of the age: on the one hand, they were scapegoats for a growing fear of all ideas perceived as foreign; on the other hand, their execution stirred the solidarity of workers in places as far a field as Montevideo, Marseilles, Moscow, Milan, and Casablanca. America's new global role and self- projected image as a beacon of freedom and democracy turned any flagrant violation of justice into an international issue. In light of all these activities, it does not come as a surprise that Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jane Addams saw a "nascent world consciousness" developing during the 1920s. Addams had been a transnational actor of sorts herself since the 1880s, and yet the new level of global interaction in the decade after 1918 impressed her greatly. If these movements did not have a larger impact on the official US position, it was mainly because internationalist organizations were highly fragmented and fought for fundamentally diverging causes. Their very pluralism and diversity thus reduced their political clout.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The New Deal by Kiran Klaus Patel. Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiAbbreviations xi
Prologue 1
Chapter 1
A Global Crisis 10
A Fragile Boom 10
The Crisis and Its Origins 24
Chapter 2
In Search of New Beginnings 45
Setting Stages 45
Many New Deals 56
Planning and Mobilization 90
Chapter 3
Into the Vast External Realm 121
Gold, Silver, and Other Bombs 121
Good Neighbors 139
Borders, Hard and Soft 171
Chapter 4
Redefining Boundaries 190
Deeper into the Alphabet Soup 190
Broadening Security 218
Roads Traveled, Built, and Untraveled 242
Chapter 5
The American World Order 261
The New Deal State at War 261
A Global Legacy 278
Notes 301
Bibliography 351
Index 415
What People are Saying About This
"The first book to globalize the history of the New Deal, this is an amazing tour de force with fresh insights on virtually every page. Many historians will wish they had written it."—Akira Iriye, Harvard University"This indispensable book reveals the national, comparative, and global dimensions of the Great Depression and New Deal. Attentive to the global circuitry of policy options and supported by a vast knowledge of other national responses, Kiran Klaus Patel transforms our understanding of the formation and nationalist shape of the New Deal. One cannot claim to understand the New Deal without reading this book."—Thomas Bender, author of A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History"Kiran Klaus Patel boldly advances the effort to transnationalize historians' understanding of the New Deal, convincingly demonstrating the need to understand the United States in the 1930s as embedded in a larger world confronting a shared crisis. This formidable book decisively challenges exceptionalist claims about mid-twentieth-century reform in the United States."—Paul A. Kramer, author of The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines"A stunning world tour, full of surprises and insights into government action in the 1930s in many nations and across a vast policy terrain. This is comparative and transnational history at its best."—Gary Gerstle, author of Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present"The New Deal is usually thought of as a quintessentially American historical moment. But as Kiran Klaus Patel's penetrating book shows, it was also a deeply international event, both in terms of Americans transmitting their ideas abroad as well as importing innovations from often-unexpected places around the world. Insightful and original, The New Deal: A Global History will challenge preconceptions and change the way we perceive a seminal moment in world history."—Andrew Preston, University of Cambridge"Kiran Klaus Patel provides a strikingly broad and comprehensive treatment of the New Deal and brings a remarkable range of global knowledge to bear on the subject. An extraordinary mine of information, this unique and valuable book will be an indispensable reference point in future debates over the global 1930s."—Daniel T. Rodgers, professor emeritus, Princeton University"An astute, powerfully synthetic global history of the New Deal, this book covers a vast terrain, substantively and geographically, blending a discerning reading of the enormous literature on the New Deal with judiciously targeted primary research. The result is a fresh perspective on the global dimensions of innovation within the American state—and a book for which there is an overwhelming need."—James Sparrow, University of Chicago