Fear Itself (5 page)

1
A Journey without Maps

F
EAR
, M
ICHEL DE
M
ONTAIGNE
maintained in the sixteenth century, “exceeds all other disorders in intensity.”
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Likewise, Francis Bacon thought that “nothing is terrible except fear itself”; the statesman and political theorist Edmund Burke observed that “no passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear”; and Henry David Thoreau believed that “nothing is so much to be feared as fear.”
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Why might this be the case? What distinguishes deep anxieties that generate fear from more ordinary uncertainties and risks? Taking such admonitions and claims seriously during the Roosevelt and Truman years requires identifying the era’s objects of fear. The politics and policymaking of the period were not conducted in ordinary circumstances. Spreading like fire from rooftop to rooftop, fear provided a context and served as a motivation for thought and action both for America’s leaders and ordinary citizens.

Without grappling adequately with this political and cultural climate, the historical landscape tends to be seen like a series of disconnected but well-mapped roads, each with specific factors said to have caused this or that key outcome. We consider, as examples, how legacies from the past helped cause one landmark law of 1933, the National Industrial Recovery Act, to fail, but another, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, to succeed; we ask whether the 1935 Wagner Act, which established a framework for union development, was the result of labor pressure or business interests; we evaluate the reasons for, and the consequences of, the lapse into deep recession in 1937–1938; and we investigate whether the global preferences of internationally oriented capitalists propelled the foreign and domestic policies of the United States.
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The background assumption in such studies is that the politics and policymaking of the period were conducted in customary circumstances of risk. But they were not. Overall, the New Deal had to travel uncharted territory, often without maps in hand.
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To comprehend its achievements and their price, we must incorporate uncertainty’s state of doubt, and identify the objects of fear and the effects of being frightened.
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I.

D
ELIVERING AN
address to a Charter Day audience at Berkeley on March 23, 1933, the very day the Reichstag passed its powers to Adolf Hitler and Germany’s first concentration camp opened at Dachau,
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the journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann sought to understand the time’s deep uncertainty. He noted how “the certain landmarks are gone,” and how “the fixed points by which our fathers steered the ship of state have vanished.” He further identified the rupture between past and present—in the democracies as well as the dictatorships—with two revolutionary developments in modern politics he believed to be “wholly without precedent in history.” First was the active and self-conscious participation in government by “the masses of men,” making of “modern government in our Western World, even under the dictatorships,” something of “a daily plebiscite.” The legitimacy of any government thus had come to depend on its ability to solve problems and formulate policies to which the governed would offer consent, both active and passive. Second was the vastly enlarged scope of governmental action. “Never before has government been on so vast a scale, touching such numbers of men in the vital concerns of their lives. The interests which modern governments are called upon to manage are as novel as they are complicated,” and they now included issues that no nineteenth-century government had faced. These new questions included “relationships between producers and their markets,” “forms of economic organization,” including a place for labor, profound challenges of war and peace in an age of warfare fought by conscript armies and revolutionary violence, and problems of “external and internal political control.”
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To this list concerning capitalism, workers, military might, and security, he might have added the issue of citizenship, for if politics had become a politics of masses, then defining the qualifications for membership had become ever more pressing. In all, “there is a widespread feeling today among the people” that older codes, conventions, rules, policies, and institutions “lack the power to guide action.”
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In accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature a quarter of a century later, Albert Camus summed up the shocking sequence of overlapping developments that his generation had endured during “more than twenty years of an insane history.”

These men who were born at the beginning of the First World War, who were twenty when Hitler came to power and the first revolutionary trials were beginning, who were then confronted as a completion of their education with the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the world of concentration camps, a Europe of torture and prisons—these men must today rear their sons and create their works in a world threatened by nuclear destruction.
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Not only to Camus but to so many others, as well, this was an age of broken certainties. “When the World War, in which aircraft was employed for the first time on an intensive scale as an instrument of combat broke out, there were few conventional rules and naturally little or no customary law in existence,” a learned commentator wrote in 1924.
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Across a wide swath of domestic and international issues, policymakers and the public alike had to proceed in similar circumstances. With Western civilization robbed of much of its ethical and political authority, the New Deal confronted novel challenges. The key political question was whether democracies, with their fractious parties, parliaments, and polarization, could invent solutions and find their way while holding on to their core convictions and practices.

Many inside the democracies had serious doubts. Their misgivings grew when economic recovery proved sporadic. Over the course of the 1930s, the globe’s circumstances grew more forbidding. Violence became more common, more intense, more threatening. Security seemed elusive. Commenting in 1936, the English novelist Graham Greene wrote how “our world seems particularly susceptible to brutality.”
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The constitutional scholar Karl Loewenstein noted in 1937 how dictatorial, antidemocratic regimes possessing seductive emotional power are “no longer an isolated incident in the individual history of a few countries.” Rather, they have “developed into a universal movement which in its seemingly irresistible surge is comparable to the rising of European liberalism against absolutism after the French Revolution.”
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No one, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, wrote in 1938, “can fail to see increasing evidence that democracy is in grave danger.” Stationed in Berlin from 1933 to 1938, Dodd witnessed the dramatic crumbling of a once-democratic republic. The United States, he warned, “facing the same dangers ahead,” is not exempt.
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That year, before Nazi armies crossed into Poland to begin the European phase of World War II, the distinguished émigré sociologist Pitirim Sorokin announced that the twentieth century had become “the bloodiest century in the whole history of the Western World.”
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That year as well, George Kennan, then the head of the Russian desk at the Department of State and soon to be the most important architect of the strategy of anti-Soviet containment during the Cold War, started drafting a book recommending that the United States travel “along the road which leads through constitutional change to the authoritarian state,” a state he believed would have to be led by a specialized elite who “would have to subject themselves to discipline as they would if they entered a religious order.”
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What these observers and commentators shared was an understanding that theirs was a time when uncommon uncertainty at a depth that generates fear had overtaken the degree of common risk that cannot be avoided. Any circumstance of contingency is marked by risk of the usual kind. Choices are made based on past experience. Because the properties of most things remain fairly constant, and because the relationship between cause and effect is mostly predictable, it is possible to assess probabilities intelligently. When firms invest, when parents decide which school to select for their children, when individuals buy a house, or when political leaders bargain, vote, and make laws, most of the time the distribution of likely results from particular actions can be calculated, either intuitively or on the basis of statistical analysis. This is the basis for most strategic calculations and rational estimates based on a reasonable degree of confidence.

But when deep uncertainty looms, the ability to choose is transformed. The University of Chicago economist Frank Knight identified such circumstances of “unmeasurable uncertainty” as those that are uncommonly unsure because any valid basis for classifying instances is absent. Effects and outcomes of action cannot be calculated because such situations are unlike any other. In commonplace risk he wrote, “the distribution in a group of instances is known . . . while in the case of uncertainty this is not true, the reason being in general that it is impossible to form a group of instances, because the situation dealt with is in a high degree unique.” The novelty and depth of this kind of uncertainty is radical. It is the kind of risk that cannot be ensured against, for the very premises underlying prediction are undermined. Looking ahead, estimates of possibilities and effects grow increasingly opaque. Modeling the future becomes ever more elusive.
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Measurable risk generates worry. Unmeasurable risk about the duration and magnitude of uncertainty spawns fear. A large and growing literature in social psychology has examined the question of how persons deal with such realities in thought, feeling, and behavior by attempting to reorganize situations in order to restore consistency and predictability. Under conditions of fear, these various theories and studies about the management of uncertainty reveal that people develop a heightened mindfulness and self-awareness about the constraints on free action, and take, as a central goal, the desire to restore a higher degree of coherence and certainty; that is, they try to reduce deep uncertainty to ordinary risk.
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This is how I have come to understand the New Deal. Over the course of its two decades, the reality of deep uncertainty progressively extended the sense that the United States confronted unparalleled dangers. Faced with economic collapse, total war, genocide, atomic weapons, and postwar struggles with Communism, political leaders sought to find means to restore a sense of normal risk. Because they possessed no fixed or sure policy approaches or remedies for the domestic and global crises of the day, they could consider a very wide repertoire of policies. The collective result of the various choices and selections they made to reduce uncertainty to risk, particularly in Congress, where southern members played a disproportionate role, became, in effect, a new national state, a state with a procedural and a crusading face.

II.

C
URIOUSLY, THOUGH,
a time when the presence of fear was pervasive is not how the New Deal era is ordinarily portrayed. A fit of amnesia distorts the era, thus risking an excessively sentimental and simple set of understandings. This tendency appeared from the beginning. Within a week of Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration, Walter Lippmann, who only weeks earlier had spoken of the uncertainty of the times, celebrated how “the manner in which the Administration has conducted itself fully justifies the public approval which is manifest everywhere. It has proceeded rapidly, surely, and boldly, dealing directly with the essentials, accepting responsibility without hesitation, relying confidently upon the willingness of the people to face realities.” Heralding a redemptive theme that later organized the narrative of most New Deal histories, Lippmann rejoiced in how “the nation, which had lost confidence in everything and everybody, has regained confidence in the government and in itself.”
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It was as if he had worried too much at Berkeley; yet he had not.