In popular imagination, the New Deal has come to be identified with far-reaching reforms that empowered workers and created the infrastructure for an enduring social safety net. But these achievements were only possible because vibrant mass movements reshaped the political landscape and pushed Roosevelt to the left. The Wagner Act, which required corporations to engage in collective bargaining with workers for the first time in U.S. history, offers a case in point. Its passage made possible the birth of the modern industrial labor movement, and “when passed,” as one legal scholar has written, it “was perhaps the most radical piece of legislation ever enacted by the United States Congress.” But Roosevelt had little to do with its enactment. The president “never lifted a finger” for the bill, his Labor Secretary Frances Perkins would recall later. She continued: “Certainly, I never lifted a finger. . . . I, myself, had very little sympathy with the bill.” In 1934, the year before the bill passed, hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike and took to the streets of cities across the country. This action generated irresistible momentum for the new collective bargaining law. At the same time, unemployed workers rallied for relief; seniors demanded a measure of economic security in retirement; and populist Louisiana Senator Huey Long spawned a network of 27,000 “Share Our Wealth” clubs that would loom as an electoral threat to FDR in 1936. These powerful social movements transformed the 1932 apostle of austerity into the president who declared at a 1936 campaign rally that the forces of “organized money . . . are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
With Election Day just weeks away, it is worth recalling this New Deal dynamic of mass movements and social reform. For many of us, the 2020 Democratic primaries left a bitter taste of disappointment and resentment. The rapid consolidation of the Democratic establishment—and of the primary electorate—in support of Joe Biden in the days before Super Tuesday thwarted the left’s hopes of nominating a transformational standard bearer. And Biden, of course, has many shortcomings: a centrist legislative record, sometimes head-scratching rhetorical ineptitude, and an outdated penchant for bipartisan compromise. Yet history suggests that what you see on the campaign trail, or even in a candidate’s past legislative record, is not necessarily what you get from a president once in power.