Fear Itself
The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
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“A powerful argument, swept along by Katznelson’s robust prose and the imposing scholarship that lies behind it.”—Kevin Boyle, New York Times Book Review
A work that “deeply reconceptualizes the New Deal and raises countless provocative questions” (David Kennedy), Fear Itself changes the ground rules for our understanding of this pivotal era in American history. Ira Katznelson examines the New Deal through the lens of a pervasive, almost existential fear that gripped a world defined by the collapse of capitalism and the rise of competing dictatorships, as well as a fear created by the ruinous racial divisions in American society. Katznelson argues that American democracy was both saved and distorted by a Faustian collaboration that guarded racial segregation as it built a new national state to manage capitalism and assert global power. Fear Itself charts the creation of the modern American state and “how a belief in the common good gave way to a central government dominated by interest-group politics and obsessed with national security” (Louis Menand, The New Yorker).
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Katznelson revivifies an often shop-worn subject in this new history of the New Deal. Rather than seeing FDR's brainchild as simply a great experiment in economic recovery and the enlargement of government responsibility, Katznelson emphasizes three often neglected aspects of that extraordinary era which, it's worth noting, he dates from 1933 to 1952 (e.g., through Truman's White House years). The first is the fear of poverty, totalitarianism, and atomic warfare that hung over those two decades. The second is the pressure that the examples of Nazi and Soviet regimes put on American politics. And the third is the "southern cage," a "Faustian terrible compromise" that held American government and the New Deal itself in the grip of racialist and militarily assertive policies. Emphasizing the long New Deal, putting it in its global context, and shifting the focus from the White House to Congress makes this book a major revision of conventional interpretations. But it's the extent of the permeating influence of Southern Democrats on national politics that is the work's revelation Katznelson rues the New Deal's surrender to special interests at the expense of the public good. Overall, a critical and deeply scholarly work that, notwithstanding, is compulsively readable. 24 illus.
