Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

G. William Domhoff is a Research Professor in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Michael J. Webber is Professor of Sociology at the University of San Francisco.

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CLASS AND POWER IN THE NEW DEAL

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Acronyms..........................................................................viiAcknowledgments...........................................................................ixIntroduction..............................................................................1CHAPTER ONE The Power Actors.............................................................31CHAPTER TWO The Agricultural Adjustment Act..............................................90CHAPTER THREE The National Labor Relations Act...........................................104CHAPTER FOUR The Social Security Act.....................................................142CHAPTER FIVE Aftermath and Implementation................................................187CHAPTER SIX The Shortcomings of Alternative Theories of the New Deal.....................217Bibliography..............................................................................253Index.....................................................................................275

Chapter One

Six recognizable networks of power participated in the conflicts concerning the origins, aftermath, and implementation of policies during the New Deal. Three of them—corporate moderates, ultraconservatives, and plantation and agribusiness owners—were segments of an ownership class that was dominant in terms of its power to defeat other power networks and shape government policy to its liking. At the same time, the three segments often had disagreements among themselves even while they agreed wholeheartedly on one crucial issue: for them to maintain class power and high profits, their opponents on the other side of the class divide—primarily the trade unionists and the liberals, but also the Communist Party and other leftist groups—had to be thwarted on all their main policy suggestions.

As it turned out, the trade unionists and liberals had even more disagreements and antagonisms among themselves than did the ownership class at the onset of the Roosevelt Administration. Their differences made it all the more difficult for them to gain any traction against an ownership class that entered into the conflicts with many advantages provided to it by previous generations of wealthy land and business owners, who already had shaped the Constitution for their benefit. Earlier generations of property owners also had passed federal legislation that furthered the interests of private property in general and corporations in particular, and obtained rulings from the Supreme Court—which consisted in large measure of corporate lawyers—that made any attempt to challenge the status quo seem all but impossible (see, for example, Burch 1981a, 1981b; Carp and Stidham 1998, for information on Supreme Court justices).

This chapter focuses mostly on the corporate moderates and the plantation capitalists because they had the most fully developed organizational bases and played the major role in originating—or resisting—the policies that we analyze. Organized labor and the small band of liberals are discussed less fully because their separate histories and their relationship are more brief and less complex. Moreover, their coalition did not develop until the New Deal was under way, which means the story of their relationship is best told in the context of the New Deal itself.

Our consideration later in the chapter of the role of the Communist Party may come as a surprise to many readers, but we think the new information that emerged in the 1990s from previously secret Soviet and American files about its large-scale financial support and extensive union involvements provides support for political scientist Harvey Klehr's (1984, p. ix) earlier contention that the party played "a supporting role" in some of the major conflicts of that era. The Communists possessed a combination of ideological, organizational, and financial resources that gave them the potential to have a significant impact. Moreover, they had a larger hand in the disruption during the 1930s than is emphasized by protest-disruption theorists, who stress the threat of grassroots upheaval in explaining New Deal policies. In the final analysis, though, the party had little or no impact beyond, first, its highly organized demonstrations in the early 1930s that contributed to a growing mood of protest and, second, its substantial contribution to the creation of industrial unions in the late 1930s. The Communists' deference to instructions from the Soviet Union on many key policy issues—but not on joining forces with the new industrial union movement, in which the American leaders took the initiative—and their derisive attitude toward liberals and union leaders made them a very unwelcome ally. The exception to this generalization concerned the union-building efforts after 1935, when the anti-Communist leaders of the industrial unions entered into a secret bargain with Communist officials in order to make use of many dozens of the party's union organizers (Haynes, Klehr, and Anderson 1998, pp. 52–68). As the most exhaustive and convincing study of the complex role of Communists in the union movement in the 1930s concludes, they were the strongest expression of working-class radicalism in the United States "despite the supine and craven obedience" of the party's leaders to the political dictates of Soviet leaders (Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin 2003, p. 1).

THE CORPORATE COMMUNITY: MODERATES AND ULTRACONSERVATIVES

The appearance of a reasonably cohesive group of corporate moderates just as the twentieth century began was due to two loosely related developments in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, a period in which major technological and transportation advances and the rise of a factory system transformed the economic landscape. First, there were several intensely violent conflicts between workers and their employees that began in 1877 and erupted periodically thereafter. It was an era characterized by several waves of strikes and work stoppages by workers, fierce resistance to unions by almost all employers, and repressive action against labor militancy by all levels of government and corporate-financed detective agencies.

Second, there was a gradual adoption of the corporate form of ownership by business owners in order to raise more capital, limit liability, and allow businesses to continue after the deaths of their founding owners (Roy 1997). The corporatization process started with textile companies and railroads in the early nineteenth century, then spread to coal and telegraph companies after mid-century, and finally to industrial companies in the late 1880s, leading to the creation of dozens of new manufacturing corporations starting in the 1890s (see, for example, Bunting 1987; Roy 1983). At the same time, commercial and investment banks on Wall Street had an integrative role in these developments through their ability to raise capital in Great Britain, France, and Germany; they also contributed to the general leadership of the corporate community and provided large campaign donations to candidates in both political parties (see, for example, Alexander 1992; Carosso 1970; Overacker 1932). Between 1897 and 1904 alone, $6 billion worth of...