Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: The Democratic order as a political project
- 1 When does politics change?
- 2 Creating political orders: the logic of the Democratic experience
- 3 Democratic opportunities in the crises of the 1930s
- 4 Passing the Wagner Act and building a new Democratic state
- 5 Party and movements in the Democratic upsurge, 1935–7
- 6 Progressive liberalism as pragmatic common sense
- 7 Surprising years: electing Truman and sustaining the Democratic order, 1947–9
- 8 Passing Taft-Hartley: what the losers won (and what the winners lost)
- 9 New political fronts? growth and civil rights in the 1940s
- 10 Democratic anti-Communism and the Cold War
- 11 From Truman to Kennedy: the reach and limits of Democratic power
- 12 Was the Democratic order democratic?
- Index
6 - Progressive liberalism as pragmatic common sense
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: The Democratic order as a political project
- 1 When does politics change?
- 2 Creating political orders: the logic of the Democratic experience
- 3 Democratic opportunities in the crises of the 1930s
- 4 Passing the Wagner Act and building a new Democratic state
- 5 Party and movements in the Democratic upsurge, 1935–7
- 6 Progressive liberalism as pragmatic common sense
- 7 Surprising years: electing Truman and sustaining the Democratic order, 1947–9
- 8 Passing Taft-Hartley: what the losers won (and what the winners lost)
- 9 New political fronts? growth and civil rights in the 1940s
- 10 Democratic anti-Communism and the Cold War
- 11 From Truman to Kennedy: the reach and limits of Democratic power
- 12 Was the Democratic order democratic?
- Index
Summary
When it became necessary for the Government to fill gaps in the national structure in which private business enterprise was an obvious failure, the myths and folklore of the time hampered practical organization at every turn. Men became more interested in planning the culture of the future – in saving posterity from the evils of dictatorship or bureaucracy, in preventing the American people from adopting Russian culture on the one hand, or German culture on the other – than in the day-to-day distribution of food, housing, and clothing to those who needed them.
– Thurman Arnold, 1937Thurman Arnold's commentary illustrates core themes identified with New Deal political and social thought – skepticism about received wisdom, disbelief in the conventional public/private distinction, and a practical focus on immediate problems. This image of what progressive liberal leaders thought is too simple. Arnold and colleagues thrived on a self-presentation as realistic and pragmatic. Yet if they deserved recognition for these virtues, it was largely due to how they established a new framework for political argument.
Previous chapters have examined the construction of the Democratic order in terms of the choices of emerging political forces in a turbulent and challenging political and social setting. I have often referred to the themes of the Democratic leadership and of new political and social movements – it is not possible to explain the decade's main events without doing so.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Building a Democratic Political OrderReshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s, pp. 162 - 189Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996