Eric Rauchway, in his introductory post, asks "What kind of government did the New Deal leave us, and why?"

I'd like to take some liberty with this question, and reframe it just a bit: "What was the essence of the New Deal, and why have historians argued about its nature and significance for so long?"

To begin thinking through this question, it makes great sense to begin with Eric's book, The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction. It's an elegant, concise, and analytically sharp account of the 1930s and the many implications that this period holds for what comes afterwards. But perhaps more interestingly, the points of emphasis in his narrative point to how historians, generally, have wrestled with defining the New Deal. And, I would suggest, what we include and what we leave out shapes the understandings of the past that we are able to bring to our present moment.

The New Deal is a famously protean and multifaceted project, and one of the many great accomplishments of Eric's account is that he not only brings coherence to a past that is often messy, he does so in a way that actually clarifies this messiness for his readers. Some parts of the New Deal worked fairly well, he argues (the New Deal rescued the nation's banking system, provided relief and jobs to the unemployed, and created a social safety net, to name but several), some parts did not work (the National Recovery Administration, most notably), and other accomplishments of the New Deal eventually played their part in ameliorating subsequent ups and downs in the business cycle (Rauchway, page 4).

The book, in short, is notable for its clear, evenhanded, and sober assessment of the New Deal's strengths and weaknesses. It is also, I must observe, notable for its intellectual generosity of spirit. In his footnotes and suggestions for further readings, Eric has opened up the New Deal for a new generation of readers. I was (and still am, I must confess) pleased to see how he explicitly relies on my book (Building New Deal Liberalism) at various points, and should note that he also recommends the work of a number of younger scholars, such as Neil Maher (Nature's New Deal) and Sarah Phillips (This Land, This Nation). Indeed, there is now a wide range of striking work underway that will continue to reshape how we think about this period of reform. (To give just one example, see Steven Attewell's UC Santa Barbara dissertation-in-progress, on the evolution of public employment and its relationship to liberalism.) Eric's book marshals the contributions of historians, both newer and older, and builds on this scholarship to give us--as advertised--a very short introduction to some very complicated stuff.

Are there costs to this approach? What's been left out? Well, on the latter point, "not much," I would say--for a comprehensive and sophisticated narrative, Eric's book makes an ideal starting point. Yet at the risk of appearing ungrateful and asking for the impossible--A Much Longer Yet Still Very Short Introduction to the Great Depression and New Deal would have made for an awkward title, to say the least! --let me briefly suggest two areas where Eric might have gone into greater depth.

The first, in a word, is "politics." To be sure, Eric's book hits all of the high points, politically--a thoughtful account of Hoover's missteps, a rich discussion of FDR and the New Deal's significance, and a smart postlude that addresses post-New Deal institutions and innovations (the IMF, World Bank, and Marshall Plan). But, I wonder, could this book have done more work in pointing out the deeply political qualities and achievements of FDR and his advisers? We get Harold Ickes, running the Public Works Administration, and Harry Hopkins, running the Works Progress Administration, but we don't really hear much about Jim Farley (the head of the Democratic Party and Postmaster General) or Louis Howe (FDR's brilliant aide, a combination of David Axelrod and David Plouffe). The New Deal, in Eric's account, is mainly a set of policy responses to an economic crisis--but it was also, I would argue, the political project of the Democratic Party. And the New Dealers, themselves, were aware of this.

As Harry Hopkins once put it, the key to the New Deal's success was that it was a political regime that could "tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect." While this phrase has been subsequently derided by the Right as the empty ideology of "tax and spend liberalism," in my work I have argued that by taking Hopkins seriously we can recapture the powerful and controversial essence of New Deal liberalism: By using the taxing and spending powers of the state, these reformers were able to remake a society's politics. But the New Dealers did more than this. Through its public works programs, the New Deal developed the state capacity to build infrastructure in all but three counties in the United States, transforming the American economy and the nation's landscape, as well as its political system. New Dealers, in short, built a powerful political regime, and in the main they accomplished this through public works. The scale and scope of this dramatic federal investment in infrastructure had a range of consequences, from providing crucial foundations for postwar economic growth to presaging the national highways and the military-industrial complex. This public investment was also smart politics for the Democratic Party and placed the Republicans on the defensive for years. Restoring politics, in this sense, to our understanding of the New Deal provides an important clue as to why the Amity Shlaes of the world so desperately want to rewrite history.

I wonder, also, if Eric might have pressed further in considering how the ideological project of New Deal liberalism was (or was not) connected to changes in the attitudes and experiences of everyday people. This is, of course, a tall order, and profoundly unfair to ask of a brief narrative that is explicitly designed to introduce readers to a rich and diverse period. Yet I raise the question, and should add that I have had to face it myself in talking about my work. For what it may be worth, perhaps the best answer that I have come across is from the late cultural historian, Larry Levine. In his essay, "The Folklore of Industrial Society," Levine recounts how Gerda Lerner once asked him how he dealt with the relationship between cultural texts and what they can tell us about the ideological worldviews of their audiences. "It's an important question to which I gave a flip response," Levine writes. "I handled that relationship, I informed her and the audience, just as brilliantly as historians have handled the relationships between the Puritan divine Cotton Mather and his parishioners, between the editor Horace Greeley and his readers, between the politician Franklin Roosevelt and his constituents. In other words, I didn't really handle it at all." Indeed, Levine continues, "Historians, in fact, deal relatively poorly with this question at all levels."

In any event, I raise the question here not to be unfair to the book that Eric has given us, but rather because I would love to hear what he might have to say on the relationship between political elites, on the one hand, and ideological changes among everyday people, on the other.

The New Deal, it is clear, changed the nature of American governance, created the welfare state, and saved American capitalism. But how did it change Americans?

Looking forward to the unfolding discussion, and many thanks to Eric for providing us all with such an intellectual stimulus.