Guest Blog by John Broesamle: Is America on the Threshold of a Transforming Era of Reform? (Part II – Q&A)

Doug Parker has posed several excellent questions concerning my earlier remarks about reform movements. I will attempt to respond to them briefly and provide some examples, but each of Doug’s questions could inspire a whole book. ~ J.B.

Does all reform inherently involve a devolution of power/wealth from the more powerful/wealthy to the less powerful/wealthy?

Not necessarily. One can cite two reform eras since the Civil War that have had only a marginal effect on the distribution of wealth – the Progressive Era (1900-1917) and the Great Society (1964-1968). But political power was redistributed during the first of these through widespread adoption of the initiative, referendum, and recall; the direct election of United States Senators (previously chosen by the state legislatures); and granting women the right to vote. The latter two reforms required constitutional amendments. The Great Society era redistributed political power to the extent that it guaranteed African Americans the right to vote. The secondary effects on wealth – for example, through access to higher education under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – have been considerable yet also disappointing; the wide differential between the wealth of black and white families has remained stubbornly persistent since that time. Still, neither the progressives nor the Great Society set out on a direct path to redistribute wealth per se, focusing more on spreading equity and opportunity.

The New Deal (1933-1939), however, did quite intentionally redistribute both wealth and power. The most pro-labor President in American history, Franklin Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act, and labor made major advances during World War II. Roosevelt loathed ordinary welfare – the so-called dole. He also loathed deficit spending, but undertook it in order to mount costly programs that provided jobs (“work relief”) for the unemployed. Together, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) gave jobs to some 12 million people; additional programs provided work for millions more. The national debt nearly doubled, from $23 billion in 1933 to $43 billion in 1940. By contrast, World War II spiked the debt to $259 billion by 1945. Taxes, too, went up. Marginal tax rates jumped from a maximum of 63 percent at the time FDR took office in 1933, to 81 percent in 1940, to 94 percent by 1945. Rates remained in the 90s right through the postwar economic golden age. In 1964, they were finally lowered by the Johnson Administration.

The New Deal was dramatic, to say the least. But the greatest wealth and power shift that any reform era has ever brought about occurred during the administration of Abraham Lincoln. By freeing the slaves – who were, after all, property under the law – Lincoln wiped out half the regional wealth of the South, amounting by one estimate to some $13 trillion in today’s dollar value. William Tecumseh Sherman promised to make the South howl through calculated destruction directed against the biggest plantations, whose owners Sherman blamed for the war. The South is still howling a century and a half later, as though the mansions were still ablaze. In the meantime, even at the height of a war that threatened to permanently tear the country apart, Lincoln signed legislation for a transcontinental railroad, as well as for the system of land grant colleges that matured into today’s public universities. And he established environmental precedent by setting aside Yosemite for permanent protection on account of its unique beauty. What gave him this kind of leeway? The seceded states, for four years, went unrepresented in Congress.

Has any historical reform effort been confronted by as powerful an anti-reform group (or group with its own very different ideas of “reform”) as the Trump base?

Yes. The secession of the South, followed by the Civil War, provides the most vivid example. Abolitionism was the greatest reform cause of the nineteenth century; according to recently revised estimates, this reform came at a cost of 750,000 lives. Race has since proved a perennially confounding issue. By the 1890s, while continuing to pay lip service to racial equality, the GOP had basically given up on implementing it. The Democrats were even worse. Beginning in 1913, the Woodrow Wilson Administration began formally segregating the federal government. But under FDR and the New Deal twenty years later, things began – cautiously – to improve. They improved sufficiently that the 1936 election began the transition of African Americans (where they were allowed to vote at all) into the Democratic coalition. Following World War II, Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces by executive order. In 1964, 1965, and 1968 Lyndon Johnson presided over passage of the transformative civil rights measures of the twentieth century. Knowing civil rights reform had to come, eager to be the instrument, nonetheless success left Johnson gloomy. 

Johnson knew civil rights would cost Democrats the South for at least a generation. Every time the party had made a great attempt to make this into a more inclusive nation, they had paid a price in the South. In 1928, the party for the first time nominated a Roman Catholic, Al Smith, for President. Due to Smith’s religion, the Democrats lost five otherwise completely reliable southern states. In 1948, Harry Truman called for civil rights legislation. He lost four southern states. Accordingly, Lyndon Johnson knew perfectly well what the price would be after 1964. The presidential results in Georgia this November suggest that things may finally be tipping back the other way.

Has a successful reform party ever been confronted by not only vigorous opposition from without but as serious division within as seems to be the case with Democrats today?

Yes, both parties have.  We can start with the Republicans. In 1912, the GOP split apart when Theodore Roosevelt tried to return it to its reform roots as the party of Lincoln. Having served as President from 1901 to 1909, Roosevelt was denied the GOP nomination in 1912. Stalking out of the party, he ran on the Progressive Party (“Bull Moose”) ticket. This third party drew up what I consider the most significant political platform of the twentieth century. It called among other things for women’s right to vote, social security (as we now call it), and some form of national health care. (Perhaps we should consider it the most significant platform of the twenty-first century, too.) Roosevelt bested the sitting Republican President, William Howard Taft, but came in second. His candidacy guaranteed that the Democratic nominee, Woodrow Wilson, would win with just 42 percent of the popular vote. 

The early twentieth century humorist Will Rogers famously quipped that “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” For a time, the many achievements of the Wilson Administration papered over the fact that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Democratic Party was politically schizophrenic. It consisted of the big industrial cities of the North and Middle West, with their teeming immigrant populations and political machines–together with the Solid South, which was suspicious of cities, immigrants, and political machines. At the party’s 1924 national convention in Madison Square Garden, brawling broke out between the delegates over whether to nominate an Irish Catholic New Yorker (Al Smith) or a Californian supported by rural/small-town America and the Ku Klux Klan (William Gibbs McAdoo). The party wound up compromising on a New York corporate lawyer, John W. Davis. It required 103 ballots before Davis was finally nominated, a record that is likely to stand forever. 

One final nod to the strife that race and sectionalism have inflicted on this country. Davis argued 140 cases before the United States Supreme Court. His final appearance, in a companion case to Brown v. Board of Education (1954), was to defend segregation in public education. Having lost the case, Davis returned his fee.

John Broesamle, a previous contributor to RINOcracy.com, is Emeritus Professor of History at California State University, Northridge. His books on American politics and society include Reform and Reaction in Twentieth Century American Politics, Twelve Great Clashes that Shaped Modern America: From Geronimo to George W. Bush (with Anthony Arthur), and, most recently, How American Presidents Succeed and Why They Fail: From Richard Nixon to Barack Obama.