Fear Itself (77 page)

33
Alexis de Tocqueville,
The Old Regime and the French Revolution
(1856; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 95.

34
Ibid., pp. 95, 83, 86. His passion, he explained, consisted of a “strong . . . taste for freedom.”

35
They were “historical moments when the basic metaphors of politics were up for grabs.” See Daniel T. Rodgers,
Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Independence
(New York: Basic Books, 1987), pp. 11–12.

36
Bernard Bailyn, “Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America,”
American Historical Review
67 (1962): 339.

37
George Steiner, writing about the complex friendship of Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, observes how both the “minute particular” and the “generalizing interference” might “alter the whole landscape of our historical, literary, and social perceptions.” See Steiner, “The Friend of a Friend,” in
George Steiner at the New Yorker,
ed. Robert Boyers (New York: New Directions, 2009), p. 208.

38
Studs Terkel, “Hard Times,”
Pen America
10 (2009): 39, 43.

39
For the distinctions between acute and chronic fear, and between “the direct object of the fear and the effects of being frightened by it,” see John Hollander, “Fear Itself,”
Social Research
71 (2004): 865, 868.

40
One of England’s leading historians, Lewis Namier, collected his essays on the 1936–1940 period under the title,
Europe in Decay: A Study of Disintegration
(London: Macmillan, 1950).

41
Congressional Record,
72d Cong., 1st sess., May 5, 1932, p. 9644.

42
Barron’s
is cited in Ronald Steel,
Walter Lippmann and the American Century
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), p. 299. It is mistakenly attributed to Walter Lippmann by Jonathan Alter,
The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 187.

43
Denis W. Brogan,
Democratic Government in an Atomic World: A Lecture Delivered under the Auspices of the Walter J. Shepard Foundation
,
April 24, 1956
(Columbus: Ohio State University, 1956), pp. 15, 31.

44
Ibid., p. 21.

45
Ibid., p. 20.

46
Ibid., pp. 20, 32.

47
Richard Wright, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch,” in
American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose and Verse by Members of the Federal Writers’ Project
(New York: Viking, 1937), p. 45.

48
Milton had backed a successful fusion movement of Tennessee Republicans and prohibition Democrats in 1910. George Fort Milton, “Also There Is Politics,” in
Culture in the South,
ed. W. T. Couch (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934), pp. 117, 118.

49
W. E. B. Du Bois, “Black North,”
New York Times Magazine,
November 17, 1901.

50
An excellent appraisal of national race relations that makes these points, if also underplaying differences between the South and the rest of the United States, is Desmond King and Stephen Tuck, “De-Centering the South: America’s Nationwide White Supremacist Order after Reconstruction,”
Past and Present
,
no. 194 (2007): 213–53.

51
For a representative sample of the copious work of Du Bois, see Eric J. Sundquist, ed.,
The Oxford
W. E. B. Du Bois Reader
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Charles S. Johnson,
Growing Up in the Black Belt: Negro Youth in the Rural South
(New York: American Council on Education, 1941); Charles S. Johnson,
Patterns of Negro Segregation
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943); St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton,
Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945); Allison Davis,
Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941); Gunnar Myrdal,
An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944).

52
Ralph J. Bunche,
The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of Age of FDR
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 66.

53
Braeman, “The New Deal,” p. 72.

54
“In order to change policies . . . a certain number of individual or collective actors have to agree to the proposed change. I call such actors
veto players.
” See George Tsebelis,
Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 2.

55
Stephen A. Grant,
Conscience and Power: An Examination of Dirty Hands and Political Leadership
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), p. viii. Roosevelt apologized to Stalin for dealing with Darlan; Stalin replied that the policy was “perfectly correct.” See Susan Butler, ed.,
My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspndence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 62.

56
See Norbert Frei,
Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration
(New York: Columbia University Press), 2002.

57
Of the era’s strange bedfellow collaborations, one of the most surprising was the decision of the Republican Party to advertise its own opposition to war during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact in the
Daily Worker,
America’s Communist newspaper. Noted in Gunther,
Roosevelt in Retrospect,
p. 311.

58
Reinhold Niebuhr,
Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), p. 4.

59
Unusual but not entirely unprecedented in the way it governed as a liberal state at home and as a unitary state projecting might abroad; such, of course, had been the character of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century states of Britain and Third Republic France.

60
Rodgers,
Contested Truths,
p. 175. He elaborates on this observation in chapter 6, “Interests,” pp. 176–211.

61
Juan J. Linz, “Crisis, Breakdown, and Reequilibration,” in Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan,
The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 48.

62
Theodore J. Lowi,
The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy, and the Crisis of Authority
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), p. 97.

63
Ibid., p. 71.

64
C. Wright Mills,
The Power Elite
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1956); Michael J. Sandel,
Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Lowi,
The End of Liberalism.
For similar critiques, see also E. E. Schattschneider,
The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960); Grant McConnell,
Private Power and American Democracy
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966).

65
Lowi argues that “the most important difference between liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats—however they define themselves—is to be found in the interest groups they identify with. Congressmen are guided in their votes, Presidents in their programs, and administrators in their discretion by whatever organized interests they have taken for themselves as the most legitimate; and that is the measure of the legitimacy of demands.” See Lowi,
End of Liberalism
, p. 72.

66
Walter A. McDougall,
Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

67
For a discussion of how the postwar enemy was understood and represented, see Marc Silverstone,
Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945–1950
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

68
Cordell Hull, “Europe’s Democratic Future,”
American Journal of Economics and Sociology
4 (1945): 542.

69
See Steve Vogel,
The Pentagon—A History: The Untold Story of the Wartime Race to Build the Pentagon—and to Remove It Sixty Years Later
(New York: Random House, 2007).

70
In 1953, fully $56 billion of the country’s $80 billion budget was spent on defense. Office of Management and Budget, “Historical Tables,”
Budget of the United States Government Fiscal Year 2005
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2005), pp. 45–52; available at http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_military_spending_30.html#usgs302.

71
See Elias Canetti,
Crowds and Power
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1960).

72
“The key problem, however, is that Sicily does not exist in isolation but rather forms part of the
modern
Italian nation.” See Nelson Moe,
The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 245.

73
There are partial exceptions, to be sure, including Frank Freidel,
F.D.R. and the South
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965). Yet in the larger compass of his work, this remains a peripheral theme.

74
Jean Edward Smith,
FDR
(New York: Random House, 2007), p. 374.

75
Toni Morrison,
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
(New York: Random House, 1992), pp. 18, 11.

76
W. E. B. Du Bois famously opened each chapter of
The Souls of Black Folks
with a sorrow song. He explained:

They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days—Sorrow Songs—for they were weary at heart. And so before each thought that I have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men. Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely. They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine. . . . Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.

See Du Bois,
The Souls of Black Folk
(1903; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1996), pp. 204–5. For a discussion of this “electrifying manifesto,” see David Levering Lewis,
W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919
(New York: Henry Holt, 1993), pp. 277–91.

77
Hajo Holborn,
The Political Collapse of Europe
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965); Gregory M. Luebbert,
Liberalism, Fascism, or Social Democracy: Social Classes and the Political Origins of Regimes in Interwar Europe
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Joseph Rothschild,
East Central Europe between the Two World Wars
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994); MacGregor Knox,
To the Threshold of Power, 1922/33: Origins and Dynamics of the Fascist and National Socialist Dictatorships,
vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

78
Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens,
Capitalist Development and Democracy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Linz and Stepan,
The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes;
Lois E. Athey, “Democracy and Populism: Some Recent Studies,”
Latin American Research Review
19, no. 3 (1984): 172–83; Leslie Bethell, ed.,
The Cambridge History of Latin America,
vol. 7,
1930 to the Present
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier,
Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, The Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Evelyne Huber and Frank Safford, eds.,
Agrarian Structure and Political Power:
Landlord & Peasant in the Making of Latin America
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995); Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith,
Modern Latin America,
6th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 51–54.

79
Anthony J. Badger, “Huey Long and the New Deal,” in Badger,
New Deal/New South
(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007), p. 1. Like Thurmond and Wallace, Long was a plausible presidential candidate before his assassination in September 1935.

80
When the Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas implored President Roosevelt to back an antilynching bill that had been introduced in the Senate in January 1934, FDR explained why he could not risk offending southern leaders, and added, “Now come, Norman. I’m a damned sight better politician than you are. I know the South, and there is arising a new generation of leaders and we’ve got to be patient.” Cited in David M. Kennedy,
Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War,
1929–1945
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 210.