Fear Itself (114 page)

28
Daniel T. Rodgers,
Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence
(New York: Basic Books, 1987), p. 201. For a discussion along these lines that similarly identifies what was new about the New Deal’s orientation to interests groups, see David E. Hamilton,
From New Day to New Deal: American Farm Policy from Hoover to Roosevelt
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

29
Ibid., p. 207.

30
Robert A. Dahl,
A Preface to Democratic Theory
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. 124–51; Truman,
The Governmental Process,
pp. 50–51.

31
E. E. Schattschneider,
The Semi-Sovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), p. 30.

32
This theme is developed in the rich review by Donald Brand, “Three Generations of Pluralism: Continuity and Change,”
Political Science Reviewer
15 (1985): 109–41.

33
J. David Greenstone,
Labor in American Politics
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969); Fred Block, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule: Notes on the Marxist Theory of the State,”
Socialist Revolution
, 7, no. 33 (1977): 6–28. For an empirical portrait of pre–New Deal patterns of interest representation in Washington, see E. Pendleton Herring,
Group Representation before Congress
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1929).

34
For a comparative overview, see Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz, “Comparative Perspectives on Inequality and the Quality of Democracy in the United States,”
Perspective on Politics
9 (2011): 841–56.

35
Theodore J. Lowi,
The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy, and the Crisis of Public Authority
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), p. 76. See also J. David Greenstone, ed.,
Public Values and Private Power in American Democracy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); and the book on which its essays comment, Grant McConnell,
Private Power and American Democracy
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966).

36
Hans J. Morgenthau, “Another ‘Great Debate’: The National Interest of the United States,”
American Political Science Review
46 (1952): 970–71, 978, 987; see also Hans J. Morgenthau,
In Defense of the National Interest: A Critical Examination of American Foreign Policy
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951).

37
New York Times,
November 12, 1952.

38
C. Wright Mills,
The Power Elite
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1956). Daniel Bell, a sharp critic, made this observation about the place of decisions regarding violence in Mills’s book. See Daniel Bell,
The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties
(New York: Collier Books, 1961), p. 54.

39
Robert A. Dahl, “Atomic Energy and the Democratic Process,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
290 (1953): 1–2, 6 (italics in original).

40
The only dissenter was Justice Harlan Stone. This decision was reversed in 1944 in
West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette;
Justice Frankfurter dissented.

41
Harold D. Lasswell, “The Garrison State,”
American Journal of Sociology
20 (1941).

42
Tony Smith,
America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Michael S. Sherry,
In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Michael J. Hogan,
A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Aaron L. Freedberg,
In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Elizabeth Borgwardt,
A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Robert David Johnson,
Congress and the Cold War
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

43
For an assessment of the “single, glaring fact” about the modern United States “as a ‘security state,’” see Bartholomew H. Sparrow, “American Political Development, State-Building, and the ‘Security State’: Revisiting a Research Agenda,”
Polity
40 (2008): 358.

44
Harold D. Lasswell,
National Security and Individual Freedom
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), p. 1.

45
For outstanding empirical overviews, see Michael Paul Rogin,
The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967); David Oshinsky,
A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy
(New York: Free Press, 1983); Ellen Schrecker,
Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). For incisive theoretical considerations, see Morton Grodzins,
The Loyal and the Disloyal
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956); Edward A. Shils,
Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies
(Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1956). Especially interesting is Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
Secrecy: The American Experience
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

46
For a spirited treatment, see Garry Wills,
Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State
(New York: Penguin, 2010).

47
Theodore J. Lowi,
Poliscide: Big Government, Big Science, Lilliputian Politics
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990); David M. Hart,
Forged Consensus: Science, Technology, and Economic Policy in the United States, 1921–1953
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

48
Los Angeles Times,
May 11, 1950.

49
The most thorough overview is Barton T. Bernstein, “The Oppenheimer Loyalty-Security Case Reconsidered,”
Stanford Law Review
42 (1990): 1383–1484.

50
“The Eternal Apprentice,”
Time,
November 8, 1948, p. 76.

51
See http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Letter_from_William_L._Borden_to_J._Edgar_Hoover,November_7,_1953.

52
Bernstein, “The Oppenheimer Loyalty-Security Case Reconsidered,” p. 1440.

53
In addition to Bernstein, “The Oppenheimer Loyalty-Security Case Reconsidered,” see Robert Erwin, “Oppenheimer Investigated,”
Wilson Quarterly
18 (1994): 34–45; Charles Thorpe and Steven Shapin, “Who Was J. Robert Oppenheimer? Charisma and Complex Organization,”
Social Studies of Science
30 (2000): 545–90.

54
Cited in Erwin, “Oppenheimer Investigated,” p. 43.

55
See Michael J. Neufield,
Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); Wayne Biddle,
Dark Side of the Moon: Wernher Von Braun, the Third Reich, and the Space Race
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).

56
Rodgers,
Contested Truths,
p. 209.

57
For a discussion of the lesser evils that are permitted as societies confront greater evils, see Michael Ignatieff,
The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

58
Avishai Margalit,
On Compromise and Rotten Compromises
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 13.

59
Ibid., p. 2.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
F NOT FOR TWO PERSONS,
it is unlikely that I would have written this book. First is Frima Rosenbaum, my maternal grandmother. She is the source of my first political memory. It dates to a Sunday family visit to her Washington Heights apartment in northern Manhattan shortly before the presidential election of 1952. I was eight years old, too young to quite understand why my father and mother, who worshipped Adlai Stevenson, were so visibly stunned to learn that she did not plan to vote. Striking her dining room table with a copy of the Yiddish-language
Daily Forward
, Bubbeh Frima explained, “Since Roosevelt, they are all pygmies.”

Sometimes it feels as if I have been considering her historical claim ever since. In truth, it was not until the late 1980s when I was teaching at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research that I began to think about the New Deal in a scholarly way. Well before that, however, during my decade at the University of Chicago, J. David Greenstone persistently challenged me to think harder and more broadly about the American experience. When I took up a post there in 1974, he quickly became my fast friend and mentor. Since I had earned a Ph.D. in history, David served as a surrogate for the graduate school political science teachers in American politics I never had. More than anyone before or since, he prodded me to integrate questions drawn from the stock of political theory with systematic empirical methods. David died in 1990, just fifty-two. I fervently wish he had been able to critique earlier drafts of this book, and assess its concerns with race and labor, both being subjects about which he wrote with great acuity.

At the New School, with support from the Ford Foundation, I constituted a research group that first sought to compare the ambitious conservative program of the Reagan administration with the liberal initiatives of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. As it turned out, the articles I wrote with Kim Geiger, Daniel Kryder, and Bruce Pietrykowski, the primary graduate student participants in that project, focused almost exclusively on the 1930s and 1940s. With their help, I had begun to find my subject. Concurrently, my commitment to write analytical history deepened. I spent countless hours talking about historical analysis in the social sciences with the consummate practitioners who constituted the Committee on Historical Studies, including Richard Bensel, Eric Hobsbawm, Elizabeth Sanders, Charles Tilly, and Louise Tilly. My closest colleague in this group was Aristide Zolberg, with whom I taught a proseminar on politics, theory, and policy, and convened a MacArthur Foundation workshop on national security, democracy, and postwar American liberalism, the very themes that later came to animate this book.

Since I moved to Columbia University in 1994, it proceeded in fits and starts. For a long span, I pursued mostly other projects but continued to wrestle with the New Deal. At Columbia, my work has been nourished by colleagues and students in an outstanding political science department in the tradition of Franz Neumann and David Truman that places the study of institutions front and center, and an exceptional history department in the tradition of Richard Hofstadter and Fritz Stern that seeks to deepen the long-term study of political affairs. I have profited especially from interactions in the cross-disciplinary workshop on American politics and society that Alan Brinkley and I have been convening for more than a decade and a half. Working relationship, joint teaching, hearty discussions, and shared endeavors at Columbia—with Karen Barkey, Volker Berghahn, Akeel Bilgrami, Charles Cameron, Partha Chatterjee, Eric Foner, Alice Kessler-Harris, Sudipta Kaviraj, Robert Lieberman, Mark Mazower, Nolan McCarty, Justin Phillips (with whom I enjoyed a period as a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation), Alfred Stepan, Nadia Urbinati, Gregory Wawro, and well over a dozen others—fashioned a particularly productive environment in which this book has been crafted.

Along the way, I have profited from the intellectual stimulation and superb substantive and technical assistance offered by Columbia’s graduate students. Counted among them especially are John Lapinski, Rose Razaghian, Sean Farhang, and Quinn Mulroy, who compensated for my deficiencies in statistical skill and legislative research experience. Each became a coauthor. Each served as a research assistant at the American Institutions Project, housed at Columbia’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, before moving on to assistant professorships, respectively at Yale, Yale, Berkeley, and Syracuse. Other key participants in AIP have been Melanie Springer, Chrissy Greer, Thomas Ogorzalek, David Park, Amy Semet, and Alissa Stollwerk. The project also gained much from its Columbia College and Barnard College research assistants, including Rachel Barza, Donna Desilus, David Goldin, Olivia Gorvey, Elysse Ross, Dennis Schmelzer, Ellen Yan, and, most notably, Seth Weiner, whose detailed legislative histories instructed me in the nooks and crannies of southern congressional preferences and strategies. Thanks also are owed to the institute within which AIP has been housed, for first making it possible for Greg Wawro and me to launch an annual conference on the theme “Congress and History,” from which I have learned much that informs this book.

Over the years, I have spoken about parts of
Fear Itself
at too many venues to properly name and thank. They may not remember, but I cannot forget the prodding comments offered at these events by Anthony Badger, Brian Balogh, the late Brian Barry, Walter Dean Burnham, James Cobb, Joshua Cohen, Lizabeth Cohen, Daniel Carpenter, Michael Delli-Carpini, Ariela Dubler, Jonathan Fanton, Janice Fine, Morris Fiorina, Jess Gilbert, Michael Goldfield, Andrew Grossman, David Hart, Matthew Holden, Robert Horowitz, Meg Jacobs, Jeffrey Jenkins, Michael Katz, Anne Kornhauser, Margaret Levi, Nelson Lichtenstein, Michael Lipsky, the late Harry Magdoff, Jane Mansbridge, Cathie Jo Martin, Anthony Marx, David Mayhew, Uday Mehta, the late Robert K. Merton, Sidney Milkis, Gary Mucciaroni, Carol Nackenoff, Norman Nie, Anne Norton, Alice O’Connor, Ann Orloff, Benjamin Page, Sunita Parikh, Kim Phillips-Fein, Paul Pierson, Frances Fox Piven, Gretchen Ritter, Eric Schickler, the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Ellen Schrecker, Theda Skocpol, Stephen Skowronek, Rogers Smith, Bat Sparrow, Thomas Sugrue, Mary Summers, Kathleen Thelen, Richard Valelly, Eric Wanner, Dorian Warren, Margaret Weir, Heather Williams, William Julius Wilson, John Witt, Erik Olin Wright, Julian Zelizer, and Olivier Zunz.

I owe a distinct obligation to Martin Shefter, who, by enticing me into a project concerning international influences on American political development, persuaded me that I had to devote more time and words than I had intended to the global dimensions of the New Deal. I also am indebted to the librarians and collections at the remarkable research libraries of Columbia University and Cambridge University; and to Fred Coccozzelli, Benjamin Fishman, Maura Fogarty, Jessica Olsen, and Cheryl Steele, who hauled books, photocopied articles, checked data, and otherwise lent support to this project.

When much of the penultimate draft was complete, Brian Balogh convened an extraordinary helpful session at the Miller Center of the University of Virginia, at which three brilliant scholars—David Kennedy of Stanford University, Daryl Scott of Howard University, and Richard Valelly of Swarthmore College—offered detailed and uncommonly helpful comments and criticisms. Further, once I had a full draft, Alan Brinkley, Eric Foner, Michael Janeway, William Janeway, Alice Kessler-Harris, James Patterson, and Richard Valelly read and commented in detail either on all or on large chunks of what I had written. So you can see how beholden I am to many persons, none of whom is responsible for what I have written, but each of whom has improved the book at hand.

My recitation of appreciation is not done. Gloria Loomis, whose literary agency has represented my interests, guided me to understand how the architecture of this book could build on my prior
When Affirmative Action Was White
and prodded me to take chances as I moved ahead. My penultimate draft was made much clearer, better organized, and more direct by the application, in London, of Tessa Harvey’s uncommonly fine editorial intelligence. At Liveright in New York, a revived imprint at W. W. Norton,
Fear Itself
has benefited from extraordinary editorial care. Bob Weil is an editor without equal. Guided by historical learning and distaste for infelicitous prose, he read every line more than once and, to the profit of my readers, heavily marked the script. Bob identified Carol Edwards as the best possible, tough-minded copyeditor. Her professional skill further honed its prose and worked to ensure exactness in its references. Bob has been ably assisted by Philip Marino in the book’s early stages and Will Menaker as it moved through production toward publication. Further, Roby Harrington nudged the manuscript along, both as a friend and as a Norton editor who loves books.

My sweetest supporters are my wonderful family. I dedicate this book to Deborah Socolow Katznelson and her ever-expanding bounty. Ever since we met as undergraduate Young Democrats at the House of Representatives in January 1964, her loving and critical intelligence has deeply shaped all that I do. We share enormous pride in our children, Jessica, Zachary, Emma, and Leah, their spouses Brad, Isabel, Yosi, and Josh, and our growing brood of grandchildren, so far including Rachel, Nathan, Cleo, Azai, and Ezra. Nothing matches these satisfactions. Our growing family continues to offer gifts of affection, energy, and circumstance that support my authorial ambitions. I wish I knew how to say a proper thank you.

CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND

July 2012