"In the 1935 Telling, Redistribution Was the Mechanism of Abundance"

"Even in those invocations of abundance, the stark differences between the socialist abundance movement of 1935 and the moderate abundance agenda of 2025 are apparent. The concept of 'production for use' is in contrast to the capitalist profit motive. In socialist thought, one of the core issues of a capitalist economy is that profit motives result in wealth accumulation becoming divorced from the creation of actual economic value. A production for use system makes production and allocation decisions based on need (or 'use value'), rather than market prices."

Dylan Gyauch-Lewis at The New Republic describes "An Altogether Different Kind of Abundance Agenda."

"The Earliest Neoconservative"

"Banfield did not abandon altogether the possibility of policy interventions, although it’s true he thought policymakers' room to maneuver was severely constrained. Likewise, Kristol remarked in his 1985 retrospective that 'the failure (or at least non-success) of so much of social policy in the past twenty years can be exaggerated. Not every program failed and there are a few important ones that represent positive achievements.' Indeed, 'The Public Interest has always emphasized the modestly positive along with the skeptical.' Yet on the right writ large there has been a clear decline from skepticism toward nihilism—toward a belief that policy interventions fail so often and character is so intractable that it is almost never worth it to attempt to solve social problems through policy."

Joshua Tait at The Bulwark recalls political scientist Edward C. Banfield.

And David Klion at The Nation looks at varying definitions of "neoconservatism."

"But They Disliked Democracy and Taxes and Regulation Far More"

"The aura of evil around the Nazis can make everything associated with them seem exotic and remote. It may be hard for us to imagine how respectable business leaders could enthusiastically support Hitler's election campaign. But their motives were mundane and familiar: pragmatism with a dash of ideological conviction."

Benjamin Hett at The New Republic argues that "[n]early a century later, many of our business leaders are blithely repeating the experiences of their German predecessors."

Trump's Bonus

"The early 1930s resembled the present moment in some striking ways. The nation's economy was in free fall, connected to a global economic downturn, with no clear end in sight. Previous years of national prosperity had badly deepened economic inequality, making the crisis all the more severe for those left behind during the boom times. At home and abroad, authoritarian movements were on the march, demonizing ethnic and racial minorities and trashing liberal democratic values. Dissatisfaction was rampant, but it remained unclear who or what would replace the status quo."

Sean Wilentz at Rolling Stone compares Donald Trump to Herbert Hoover.

"Unlikely Business Owners"

"In Birmingham in the 1930s, a young musician by the name of Herman Blount—later known as Sun Ra, the incomparable jazz bandleader—regularly visited the party's Ella Speed Bookstore, where he enjoyed public lectures and conversations on culture and politics with employees and customers. Decades later in Baltimore, the Black Arts poet Sam Cornish frequented the Free State's successor, the New Era Bookstore, which published one of Cornish’s earliest poetry collections under its in-house Sacco Publishers imprint (named for Sacco and Vanzetti)."

Joshua Clark Davis at Jacobin looks at the history of Communist Party bookstores.

"To Understand Neoliberalism, You Need to Understand Where It Came From"

"From the late 1980s to 2016, neoliberal ideas held hegemonic sway among the Democratic elite. But the economy created by this ideology—and the ensuing crises—is a major reason why Clinton lost to Trump and the party is completely out of power today. This obvious failure has provided an ideological opening that the American left has been eager to fill.
"Yet even the left-wing is divided about the best way forward. Should it follow Elizabeth Warren's lead and promise a return to the trust-busting ways of the early 20th century? Or should it emulate the more sweeping, Nordic-style politics of Bernie Sanders? Or perhaps the Democratic Socialists of America are right and something even more extreme is needed."

Ryan Cooper at The Week starts a series to "address each of these factions in the Democratic Party, reckoning with their failures and analyzing their potential to transform the country." First up: neoliberalism.

"Federal Programs Reinforced Segregation"

"Suburban expansion financed by the Federal Housing Administration, another New Deal agency, was also discriminatory. In the Los Angeles area, Panorama City, developed by Henry J. Kaiser in the late 1940s, and Lakewood, developed by Mark Taper and his partners, were FHA-supported on explicit condition that African Americans be barred. FHA rules stated that 'incompatible racial elements' would disqualify builders from essential federally backed loans. The FHA also frequently required that property deeds prohibit resale to African Americans."

Richard Rothstein in the Los Angeles Times writes that "government's unconstitutional and systematic insistence on segregated housing in the mid-20th century" created "patterns that persist to this day."

Katie Nodjimbadem at Smithsonian Magazine interviews Rothstein.

And Steve Hochstadt at History News Network discusses Rothstein's The Color of Law.

"This Historical Distinction Between Liberalism and Socialism Has Resurfaced"

"The gulf between liberalism and Old Left ideas—socialist ideas—has only grown since the 1930s. Unlike liberals, who emerged from the 1960s prioritizing the political freedoms associated with individual rights, the socialist left has posited that most people—the working class—remain effectively powerless if capitalists control work, wages and welfare.  In their view, the left's mission—the reason for its existence—ought to be expanding the idea of political freedom to include economic freedom."

Andrew Hartman at The Washington Post argues that "The left is back--and millennials are leading the way."

The Proto-Alt Right

"In the years before the outbreak of World War II, people of German ancestry living abroad were encouraged to form citizens groups to both extol 'German virtues,' around the world, and to lobby for causes helpful to Nazi Party goals."

Alan Taylor at The Atlantic provides photos of the German American Bund of the 1930s.

"No One Should Think That Gives Us the Protection We Need"

"Dodd-Frank sought other ways to safeguard the system. It toughened capital requirements for banks and required the biggest financial firms to develop liquidation plans so they could be more easily shut down if they teetered near collapse. And the so-called Volcker Rule prohibited banks from trading for their own profit and limited their ownership of risky investments.
"But there's no question that the repeal of Glass-Steagall led to consolidation in the U.S. financial system."

Jim Puzzanghera in the Los Angeles Times looks at the question of reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act.

"To Push Their Legislative Programs through Congress, the New Dealers Sold Their Souls to the Segregated South"

"The calculation was simple enough. Thanks to the disfranchisement of blacks and the reign of terror that accompanied it, the South had become solidly Democratic by the beginning of the 20th century, the Deep South exclusively so. One-party rule translated into outsize power on Capitol Hill: when Roosevelt took office, Southerners held almost half the Democrats’ Congressional seats and many of the key committee chairmanships. So whatever Roosevelt wanted to put into law had to have Southern approval. And he wouldn’t get it if he dared to challenge the region’s racial order."

Kevin Boyle in The New York Times reviews Ira Katznelson's Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time.

"A Continuation of a Long-Standing Tradition"

"The Army chief of staff at this point, by an unfortunate accident of history, was Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Accompanied by Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton, MacArthur led his soldiers onto Pennsylvania Avenue just as government workers were leaving work and pouring out onto the street. The workers assumed this was a military parade. They lined the sidewalks and applauded their troops. The veterans thought the same thing. So they came out of their buildings and waved their own regimental banners and battle flags and applauded.
"Then, suddenly, the parade stopped and the soldiers charged."

Alan Brinkley on Politico compares Occupy Wall Street with the 1932 Bonus Army.

Log-Rolling in Their Time

"Today, although protectionism lingers on the left, it is mostly a spent force. But in the decades following the Civil War, tariffs were considered pivotal to Americans’ well-being. Republicans championed tariffs to protect domestic industry. Democrats were anti-tariff, because farm states, especially the southern cotton and tobacco states, were exporters. But there was nothing like the modern notion of globalization, and congressmen were proud to assert their 'nationalism.' Yet even then, Smoot-Hawley was a solution in search of a problem. Trade walls were already high: in the late 1920s, only 3 percent of the manufactured goods consumed in America were imported. Plainly, industry did not need more protection."

In The New Republic, Roger Lowenstein reviews Douglas A. Irwin's Peddling Protectionism: Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression.

"Spending on Jobs Would Be Worth the Cost"

"The lesson for Obama in all this is that stimulus works, and the sooner and more aggressive, the better. The vast infrastructure upgrades that were achieved by the WPA were in many ways a side-product, but an important one that is still paying national benefits. Given the country's potholes, sagging bridges, rickety electric grid and spotty broadband coverage, a push today on new infrastructure would also provide lasting and necessary benefits. In the first round of stimulus spending, jobs were saved and some infrastructure projects got underway, but there's still much more to do."

Nick Taylor in the Los Angeles Times calls for a new Works Progress Administration.

"A Few Timid People, Who Fear Progress, Will Try to Give You New and Strange Names for What We Are Doing"

"In retrospect, it is obvious that Social Security's Depression-era opponents engaged in fear-mongering, not economic reality. Their opposition was based on a free-market fundamentalist ideology that abhorred any attempt to use government to improve Americans' living conditions.
"Just as the early battle over Social Security wasn't really about old-age insurance, current fights over public policy are really placeholders for broader concerns. They are about what kind of country we want to be and what values we consider most important. Today, business groups and right-wing zealots oppose healthcare reform, tougher financial regulations, stronger workplace safety laws, policies to limit climate change, higher taxes on the rich and extension of unemployment insurance to the long-term jobless."

Peter Dreier and Donald Cohen in the Los Angeles Times counter doomsday rhetoric about Social Security.

The Ignoble Experiment

"In fact, Wheeler’s devotion to the dream of a dry America accommodated any number of unlikely allies. Billy Sunday, meet pioneering social worker Jane Addams: you’re working together now. The evangelical clergy of the age were motivated to support Prohibition because of their faith; reformers like Addams signed on because of the devastating effect that drunkenness had on the urban poor. Ku Klux Klan, shake hands with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW): you’re on the same team. The Klan’s anti-liquor sentiment was rooted in its hatred of the immigrant masses in liquor-soaked cities; the IWW believed that liquor was a capitalist weapon used to keep the working classes in a stupor."

In its May 2010 issue, Smithsonian magazine publishes an excerpt from Daniel Okrent's Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.

A Switch in Time Saved Nine

"Shesol also draws attention to a more mundane but nevertheless considerable factor in the shift of the court. In 1937 Roosevelt supported, and Congress approved, a bill to assure retired justices that they would continue to receive their judicial salaries even after retirement. The absence of such benefits had deterred some aged justices from retiring; once the pensions were assured, several of them resigned."

Alan Brinkley in The New York Times reviews Jeff Shesol's Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court.

"These Bolshevik Balladeers"

"We did not know that the folk boom was a reverberation of an earlier boomlet, a foray into American music roots, many of whose movers and shakers were as Red as a bowl of cherries. Who on our suburban street knew that Woody Guthrie, the hero of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan, had been a columnist for the Daily Worker? Or that the man from whom we heard rollicking sea chanteys, a Briton named Ewan MacColl, was at one point kept from entering the United States as an undesirable alien? Then there was the cuddly-looking guy with the slightly pedantic six-record set and companion volume, Burl Ives Presents America’s Musical Heritage. If my parents or any of the neighbors were aware that Ives had been summoned, in 1952, to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and had identified Pete Seeger as a communist, they kept the details to themselves."

Lauren Weiner in First Things traces the political underpinnings of the 1950s folk revival.

Black October

"Those who questioned the New Era gospel were ostracized as knaves or fools. The most persistent spoilsport was the economist Roger Babson, whose gloomy forecasts were mocked even as the economy stagnated in the sweltering summer of 1929. On Sept. 5, 1929, Babson reiterated his doomsday cry: 'Sooner or later a crash is coming, and it may be terrific.' This time, instead of yawning, the market sold off sharply in what was dubbed the 'Babson Break'—the first sign of market fragility. President Hoover turned to Thomas W. Lamont, the senior partner of J. P. Morgan & Co., for reassurance. Five days before Black Thursday, Lamont obliged him with this stunning bromide: 'The future appears brilliant.'"

Ron Chernow in The New York Times marks the eightieth anniversary of the 1929 stock market crash.

And We Can Face the Music Together

"'Dancing in the Dark' is old-school cultural history, with a whiff of Matthew Arnold and the best that has been thought and said. Well before he gets to Woody Guthrie, Dickstein signals with his title a keen interest in popular song (he’s a big fan of Bing Crosby’s recording of Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz’s ballad). He also looks at photographs and design and mentions dance and painting. But his principal focus is on books and movies, and his bias is in favor of high art. 'I made no effort to cover everything,' he writes in his preface; he chose instead to concentrate on 'unusually complex, enduring works.' That’s good news for those of us who welcome any reminder of the glories of ’30s literature and film. When Dickstein sends us back to Faulkner’s 'As I Lay Dying' or Fitzgerald’s 'Tender Is the Night' or 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,' that extraordinary, unclassifiable collaboration between James Agee and Walker Evans, when he prompts us to listen again to the sly screwball banter of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in 'Bringing Up Baby,' we can only thank him."

Adam Begley in The New York Times reviews Morris Dickstein's Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression.