End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War
Author: Alan Brinkley
When Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Democratic party won a landslide victory in the 1936 elections, the way seemed open for the New Deal to complete the restructuring of American government it had begun in 1933. But, as Alan Brinkley makes clear, no sooner were the votes counted than the New Deal began to encounter a series of crippling political and economic problems that stalled its agenda and forced an agonizing reappraisal of the liberal ideas that had shaped it - a reappraisal still in progress when the United States entered World War II. The wartime experience helped complete the transformation of New Deal liberalism. It muted Washington's hostility to the corporate world and diminished liberal faith in the capacity of government to reform capitalism. But it also helped legitimize Keynesian fiscal policies, reinforce commitments to social welfare, and create broad support for "full employment" as the centerpiece of postwar liberal hopes. By the end of the war, New Deal liberalism had transformed itself and assumed its modern form - a form that is faring much less well today than almost anyone would have imagined a generation ago. The End of Reform is a study of ideas and of the people who shaped them: Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, Harold Ickes, Henry Morgenthau, Jesse Jones, Tommy Corcoran, Leon Henderson, Marriner Eccles, Thurman Arnold, Alvin Hansen. It chronicles a critical moment in the history of modern American politics, and it speculates that the New Deal's retreat from issues of wealth, class, and economic power has contributed to present-day liberalism's travails.
Publishers Weekly
A central tenet of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, at least through 1937, was the belief that government's mission is to counterbalance the structural flaws and inequalities of modern industrial capitalism. But in FDR's second term, argues Columbia professor of American history Brinkley (Voices of Protest), this goal was abandoned, and after 1945 liberals turned away from the early New Deal's experiments in statist planning and antimonopoly crusades. Instead, a new liberalism that has since dominated much of American political life embraced the belief that the key to a successful society is economic growth through high consumption. Brinkley identifies the hallmarks of this new liberalism as commitment to a compensatory welfare system, Keynesian fiscal policies for increasing public spending and a ``rights-based'' emphasis on personal liberties and entitlements for various groups. The author provides a revealing look at FDR's inner circle, weighing its members' rhetoric against their accomplishments and against the ideological attenuation of New Deal philosophy. (Feb.)
Library Journal
Brinkley's latest book complements his earlier Voices of Protest (LJ 4/1/82), a celebrated study of popular 1930s movements led by Huey Long and Father Coughlin. As in Voices, Brinkley is concerned with a lost tradition in American reform, but now he examines the altogether different milieu of the economists and officials who shaped federal economic policy during the latter period of the New Deal and World War II. This was a period, he argues, when liberals abandoned any real interest in restructuring U.S. political economy as liberalism gave up its quarrel with concentrated economic power and instead embraced a more constructed concept of reform based upon Keynesian ideas and attention to consumption rather than production. This is a major reinterpretation of the New Deal; a graceful, careful, and accessible study of difficult terrain in economic history and a timely historical backdrop to the position of liberalism in the 1990s. This book will receive wide attention among historians and beyond and should be an automatic purchase for all academic and most public libraries.-Robert F. Nardini, North Chichester, N.H.
Interesting textbook: Mental Health Outcome Evaluation or Measuring and Improving Organizational Productivity
A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis
Author: David Rieff
Timely and controversial, A Bed for the Night reveals how humanitarian organizations are often betrayed and misused, and have increasingly lost sight of their purpose. Drawing on firsthand reporting from war zones around the world, David Rieff shows us what aid workers do in the field and the growing gap between their noble ambitions and their actual capabilities for alleviating suffering. He describes how many humanitarian organizations have moved from their founding principle of neutrality, which gave them access to victims, to encouraging the international community to take action to stop civil wars and ethnic cleansing. By calling for intervention, humanitarian organizations risk being seen as taking sides in a conflict and thus jeopardizing their access to victims. And by overreaching, the humanitarian movement has allowed itself to be hijacked by the major powers. Rieff concludes that if humanitarian organizations are to do what they do best -- alleviate suffering -- they must reclaim their independence.
Publishers Weekly
Noted journalist Rieff (Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West) presents a painful, urgent and penetrating discussion of a crisis most of us didn't even know existed and yet which cuts to the heart of the West's role in some of the most violent world events of the past decade. He will shake readers' complacency about the relief work done by organizations like Oxfam, CARE and Doctors without Borders, crushing the belief that humanitarian aid is a panacea for all the world's ills. Rieff rejects "the false morality play" that, in any given conflict, there are victimizers and innocent victims, and that it is always clear who is who. In Rwanda, for instance, he reports that aid workers went into refugee camps threatened with cholera-but the "victims" they helped, the Hutu refugees, were in fact the killers who had committed, and were planning to resume, the genocide of the Tutsis. Rieff's despair over such incidents is palpable, but his rage is reserved for the Western governments that fund, and exploit, the aid organizations. In his most potent chapters, Rieff excoriates the U.S. and its European allies for hiding behind a "fig leaf" in Bosnia and Rwanda, offering humanitarian aid in lieu of taking effective, i.e., military, action, to end genocide. Rieff shows how humanitarian organizations have colluded in their own exploitation by Western donor governments, as they have become confused about their mission and purpose. Originally, he explains, these groups were independent, politically neutral agents, with the limited goal of bringing relief in famine or war. But simply bringing relief-and making no change in the political and economic realities that create need-can be frustrating work. Hoping to increase their effectiveness, some aid organizations have espoused larger goals, such as human rights or even opposing oppressive governments-as in the war in Afghanistan, in which aid groups took orders from the U.S. and in effect became part of the military effort that brought down the Taliban. Much of what Rieff says will be unpalatable particularly to some on the left-for instance, his assertion that development aid creates dependency in recipient countries and that humanitarian aid is a latter-day version of the "white man's burden"; and his conviction that wars-including the war in Afghanistan-can be necessary and just. None of his criticism of humanitarian groups diminishes his admiration for those he calls "the last of the just" for their dedication and courage in aiding the needy. Still, he writes of the current state of the world, "I see little if any empirical basis for optimism." Readers may share his despair, but they will come away from this passionate, eloquent argument with a distinctly clearer understanding of the complex moral issues facing humanitarian aid in a world filled with brutality and suffering. (Oct. 10) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Rieff, a veteran journalist and author of several books (Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West), has been a "witness" to several world human disasters (e.g., AIDS and the civil wars in Africa; ethnic cleansing in Bosnia) and has many doubts that the world can become an international community, such as Woodrow Wilson envisioned. His criticism of "independent humanitarianism" is that the movement is both politically na ve and too vulnerable to political power. Humanitarian organizations respond to human rights concerns by applying the doctrine of political neutrality and ignoring the political context of world crises, which, Rieff argues, has often resulted in greater losses of life. He cites the Red Cross's efforts in World War II to save the lives of Allied and Axis POWs while ignoring the Nazi mass murder of Jews and other minorities. He also discusses in great detail the more recent genocidal campaigns in Somalia and Rwanda, demonstrating how efforts by the United States, the United Nations, and humanitarian organizations to lessen suffering ignored the cause of the killing "a government whose raison d'etre was the infliction of suffering." In addition, he analyzes the Serbian ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and implies that were it not for NATO military action and U.S. support of this, the results would have mirrored the fiascos in Africa. Finally, he discusses the U.S. war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and the humanitarian effort accompanying it, and he concludes that without eliminating the Taliban, attempts to diminish human suffering would be at best irrelevant. An opinionated, provocative dissent from consensus views. For most academic and larger public libraries. Jack Forman, San Diego Mesa Coll. Lib Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
The Third World is a heap of severed limbs, the aid the First World offers but the smallest of Band-Aids: so argues journalist Rieff in this lucid polemic. "Any adult who does not understand that the world is an unjust place, even in its treatment of catastrophe, is a fool or a dreamer." Thus Rieff (Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, 1995) establishes the tone of his emphatically unstarry-eyed look at relief efforts in places such as Rwanda and Kosovo. Rieff's argument follows provocative lines: humanitarian relief organizations working in such places are in crisis, as even its most committed proponents recognize, in part because they have been co-opted by the major powers, which in turn have made human rights central to foreign policy. In the theater of aid-as-realpolitik, relief too often plays into the wrong hands, propping up corrupt governments and creating a pattern of infantilizing dependency; as one aid worker observes, "aid too often does nothing to alter-and very often reinforces-the fundamental circumstances that produced the needs it temporarily meets." Rieff urges, among other things, that we shed fairy-tale views of a world of tyrants and oppressed; as he observes, many of the Hutu refugees who fled Rwanda in 1994 had merrily slaughtered their Tutsi compatriots before packing their bags, which does not lessen their need-only their supposed status as innocent victims. Just so, he argues, the UN's insistence that all sides were villains in the Balkans, "while false in the instance"-the Serbs, in his view, having been the clear aggressors-"was right about any number of conflicts in the world, from Tajikistan to Burundi." All of which is not to say that the Westshould stop trying to ease the world's suffering. But, Rieff urges, humanitarian NGOs can do their stated jobs only if they act independently, not as arms of the new world order, and the major powers would do better to remove tyrants at gunpoint than deliver powdered milk to faraway places. A sober treatise, burning with righteous indignation. Rieff makes a solid if impious case for humanitarian reform, one that ought to generate much discussion.
Table of Contents:
| Introduction | 1 | |
| Sect. 1 | Designated Consciences | |
| 1 | The Humanitarian Paradox | 31 |
| 2 | The Hazards of Charity | 57 |
| 3 | A Saving Idea | 91 |
| Sect. 2 | Dreams and Realities | |
| 4 | Bosnia | 123 |
| 5 | Rwanda | 155 |
| Sect. 3 | The Death of a Good Idea | |
| 6 | Kosovo | 197 |
| 7 | Afghanistan | 231 |
| 8 | Endgame or Rebirth? | 267 |
| Conclusion | 303 | |
| A Note on Sources | 337 | |
| A Note on Major Humanitarian Organizations | 343 | |
| Humanitarian and International Organizations | 347 | |
| Acknowledgments | 349 | |
| Index | 353 |
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