Synopses & Reviews
The New Deal: where does it fit in the big picture of American history? What does it mean for us today? What happened to the economic equality it once engendered? In
The Great Exception, Jefferson Cowie provides new answers to these big questions. Beginning in the Great Depression and through to the 1970s, he argues, the United States built a uniquely equitable period that contrasts with the deeper historical patterns of American political practice, economic structure, and cultural outlook.
During those exceptional decades, which Cowie situates in the long arc of American history, the government used its considerable resources on behalf of working Americans in ways that it had not before and has not since. The crises of the Depression and World War II forced realignments of American politics and class relations, but these changes were less a permanent triumph of the welfare state than the product of a temporary cessation of enduring tensions involving race, immigration, culture, class, and individualism. Against this backdrop, Cowie shows how any renewed American battle for collective economic rights needs to build on an understanding of how the New Deal was won--and how it ultimately succumbed to contrasting patterns ingrained in U.S. history. As positive as the era of Roosevelt was in creating a more equitable society, Cowie suggests that the New Deal may necessarily belong more to the past than the future of American politics.
Anyone who wants to come to terms with the politics of inequality in U.S. history will need to read The Great Exception.
Synopsis
The Description for this book, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics, will be forthcoming.
Synopsis
"Linking the past and present in an arresting way, Cowie urges us to see the New Deal and the postwar liberal era not as the rule but as the exception. This book will cause both academics and the interested public to sit up and take notice. I predict that it will become a key book in modern American history."--Edward D. Berkowitz, George Washington University
About the Author
Jefferson Cowie holds the ILR Deans Professor Chair at Cornell University, where he teaches history. He is the author of Capital Moves: RCAs Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor and Stayin Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. His work has also appeared in such publications as the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.