Empire of the New Deal: The Roosevelt Program Unchecked
If historians still generally regard the New Deal as (in William Leuchtenburg’s phrase) “a halfway revolution,” there remains intense debate over why the New Deal should have made such moderate progress toward material and political equality. Some historians attribute the modesty of the New Deal’s ultimate achievements to the limited ambitions of the New Dealers themselves; others to the strength of the opposition they faced. We propose to answer this question by examining the New Deal in those places where the Roosevelt administration faced least opposition: in the US territories of Alaska, Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Here there were no state governments or political factions to block their efforts; here, unusually, the Supreme Court gave the federal government extraordinary latitude.
When largely unchecked—and dealing with considerably nonwhite populations—what did the New Deal look like?
Kathryn S. Olmsted is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and the author of five books on US history in the twentieth century, on subjects ranging from the Congressional and journalistic investigations of the CIA and FBI after Watergate to the isolationist media of the 1930s and 1940s.
Eric Rauchway is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and the author of books on US history including four on the era of the New Deal and the Second World War.
