A new collection of Fraser’s essays, Mongrel Firebugs and Men of Property: Capitalism and Class Conflict in American History, brings together many of his most notable responses to lingering questions about our recent history. What is the legacy of the New Deal? What are the points of similarity and of disconnection between the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century and our current era of inequality? And is there a way to salvage hope about the future from the remnants of the postwar liberal era?
But what was the “New Deal order” in the first place? The 1989 book that popularized the term, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, coedited by Fraser and historian Gary Gerstle, defined it as a period when leading Democrats and Republicans both professed their support for the expanded federal government, welfare state, and labor unions that had formed during the Great Depression. The assumptions, worldview, and ideology of this style of liberalism ruled, no matter which party happened to occupy the White House and Congress. The New Deal, instead of simply being a package of legislation aimed at the Great Depression, was a template for a particular way of thinking about society, a way of managing the pressures and dynamics of capitalism. It established a framework to redress problems of insecurity and poverty, albeit one that later scholars argued had in certain ways reified existing hierarchies of race and gender. Despite its limits, this was the governing vision for U.S. society into the 1970s, when it was blown apart by an ascendant conservative movement.
The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order brought together the work of a generation of historians who had grown up in the liberal era, and who sought to explain the dismantling of the ethos that had shaped their own political expectations. Fraser’s contribution was to focus on the role of labor in this system. His story was simultaneously one of triumph and loss. According to Fraser, the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the successes of industrial unionism during the New Deal transformed the politics of the United States, enshrining a new social order in which the working class would be able to obtain material security and inclusion in the mainstream politics of the country. But the ascent of the CIO also marked the end of an earlier labor culture, a radical confidence in utopian change that emerged out of the violence and chaos of the early days of industrial capitalism. Security, purchasing power, employment—these would become the watchwords of the New Deal, replacing an earlier, more militant and humane vision of labor as the core of social power.