For those not held captive by obsolete theories, our current moment presents a chance to draw on some of the best aspects of the New Deal's achievements--bold public investment that stimulates economic recovery, generates jobs, provides socially useful infrastructure, leverages input from local communities, and safeguards taxpayer money through careful oversight.

Julian and Eric have both pointed us to John Kenneth Galbraith's concept of "countervailing power," the idea that the state can, essentially, make a fairer society by helping empower constituencies who have previously been left out of the political system. And Susan has directed our attention to the importance of state action to ensure widespread economic security--"freedom from want," as FDR put it. Picking up on these themes, I want to look at how one of the tensions within the New Deal--how best to spend public monies to construct infrastructure--is playing out with respect to Obama's stimulus plan. In short, who will benefit?

During the New Deal, FDR's advisers famously divided over how to put people back to work. Harold Ickes, the Interior Secretary, was a fan of building public works projects via contracts given to private firms, requiring them to hire workers off the relief rolls, and monitoring their performance closely. Carrying this out was, to put it mildly, a time-consuming undertaking. These delays led to the creation of the Works Progress Administration in 1935. Run by Harry Hopkins, the WPA tried to maximize employment, putting people to work directly and avoiding the contracting system. (Outraged construction firms labeled Hopkins "the high prophet of no profits.")

This tension--between private contracting and maximizing employment--is evident in the current stimulus plan. I think here of Scott Myers-Lipton and his colleagues, who have been doing great work in pushing for a Gulf Coast Civic Works Act--they are concerned that public works built on a contracting model will prevent public money from reaching those who need it the most. (For more on Myers-Lipton, keep an eye peeled for his forthcoming book, Rebuild America: Civic Works for a 21st Century New Deal.)

Continuing on this point--who will benefit?--it is worth pausing to consider exactly who will be employed under Obama's plan. Recently, over one thousand historians--organized by Alice O'Connor, Eileen Boris, Linda Gordon, and Jennifer Klein--signed an open letter to Obama, voicing deep concerns that stimulus dollars will be spent creating jobs in sectors that primarily employ men. "For all our admiration of FDR's reform efforts," these historians argue, "we must also point out that the New Deal's jobs initiative was overwhelmingly directed toward skilled male and mainly white workers. This was a mistake in the 1930s, and it would be a far greater mistake in the 21st century economy, when so many families depend on women's wages and when our nation is even more racially diverse."

Indeed, in many respects the New Deal bypassed the earlier Progressive Era focus on developing a "maternalist" welfare state, and in racial and gender terms it reinforced, rather than transformed, the boundaries evident in labor markets. In looking to the past for ideas that can inform us today, then, it seems safe to say that we would be well-served to pay attention to the New Deal's shortcomings as well as to its accomplishments.

"History," of course, cannot tell us exactly what to do right now. But it can provide an invaluable perspective on the present. Given the state of the economy, it seems a safe assumption that Obama's stimulus plan will not be the last legislative attempt to create jobs. If future efforts are undertaken with a fuller understanding of the New Deal, though--both its success and its failures--we might yet say of Obama's administration what FDR once said of the New Deal: that it can provide "a smashing answer for those cynical men who say that a democracy cannot be honest and efficient."