I've been reading three books that form a solid foundation for the origins of the New Deal and discussions of the modern rise of big government. Elizabeth Sanders's "Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917" analyzes the roots of the reform movements around the turn of the century and tries to pull apart the regional variations. Following the Civil War, the West and South developed an almost colonial status of dependency on the industrialized and economically vibrant Northeast. Sanders charts how this discontent with dependency and lack of economic justice fueled many of the reform movements we associate with "populism." This American born agrarian radicalism was entirely distinct from the socialist attempts to reform the economy based within the Northeast and dependent on European intellectual thought.

Today, most attempts by political pundits to write the history of American politics focus on the rise of the labor movement and its struggles to find political relevancy until the New Deal. That may make sense for a Democratic Party now dependent on unions, but it makes little sense given the minor status of the labor movement for much of American history. There seems to be a consistent ignorance of the non-socialist inputs into American radicalism. Opposition to private property, including in land, killed off most socialist and communist appeals in the rural dependencies. And the problems they were facing seemed entirely alien to the plight of European workers in urbanized centers of production.

We often think of populism and Williams Jennings Bryan as just a rural deviation of the rising influence of socialism in American politics. But look at their political agenda and you'll find a distinctly American agenda with a more radical blend of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian ideas that are rooted within the American system. The emphasis on free trade and attacks on the protectionist tariff as the mother of all trusts were cornerstones of Democratic politics for over a century. Bimetallism and more radical currency scheme of the Populists called the "sub-treasury" system were attempts to build a more democratic monetary supply in contrast to a top-down approach that favored Northeastern interests. Is this so different than antebellum opposition to a National Banks? Direct election of Senators, while today usually attacked by libertarian and conservative pundits, is well within the realm of Jacksonian democracy.

I could go on (civil service reform, Union pensions, etc) but the point of Sander's research is that the dependencies, the South and West, were the main source of reform oriented politics during the end of the 19th Century. This goes well with David Sarasohn's "The Party of Reform: Democrats in the Progressive Era". As I've mentioned before, middle class progressive reformers within the Northeast represented a minority view of reform politics as the time. But they had a disproportional level of influence in academia, history, and journalism. Our view of the Progressive Era is biased against the Democrats for this reason. Insurgent Republicans like Theodore Roosevelt are treated as the true heroes of the Progressive Era with no fitting Democrat emerging on the stage until Princeton's Woodrow Wilson. The prejudice of these Northeast Progressives, with their disdain for the party of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion, diminishes the role that Democrats are allowed to play as reformers up until the arrival of Wilson as the great Progressive champion.

On the subject of Northeast Progressive disdain for the Populists of the West and South, I have also recently finished Jonathan Peter Spiro's "Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant". It was a good look at the scientific racism behind the American eugenics movement and its relationship to the leading conservationist Madison Grant. I do think there's an opening out there for a look at the relationship between Northeastern Progressives, the conservationist movement, eugenics, and nativism. This book focused mainly on the life of Madison Grant, but along the lines of Sanders's look at voting on economic reform proposals in Congress I'd like to see the patterns of voting in Congress on eugenics, nativism, and conservation. I wouldn't be surprised to see a consistent pattern that was rooted within the insurgent wing of the Republican Party.

Sarah Phillips's "This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal" brings the political reform movements within the Democratic dependencies of the West and South up to the New Deal era. And here we find more evidence against the standard history of the New Deal and the rise of big government as class warfare within the Northeast.

More specifically, the new programs [the AAA, CCC, FERA, NIRA, and TVA] rested on a particular set of assumptions about the American economy. Farm and conservation advocates, including many members of Congress, believed that the nation's prosperity rested on an agricultural base. As the farmers fared, so fared the country. They interpreted the Depression as an industrial emergency, to be sure, but they believed that the farm depression of the 1920s had foreshadowed the economic collapse and that insufficient rural income had prolonged and intensified it.

. . .

This underconsumptionist analysis often blended with a more pointed critique of the rural-urban relationship. Greatly influenced by the distinctive social and environmental history of the South, many New Dealers had concluded that industrial and metropolitan centers kept the resource-rich hinterlands in a colonial state of underdevelopment by drawing off their raw materials, rather than developing these resources for the permanent use of the area's inhabitants. This, they argued, resulted in two interlocked and impoverishing forms of exploitation: the monopolistic extraction of natural resources, and the unsustainable abuse of land, woods,and water. Eliminating the difference between farm and factory incomes therefore entailed that the agricultural regions retain the right to their own resources, and that they use those resources properly.

The link of the conservationist movement to the New Deal may have been triggered by the Dust Bowl and the belief that "science" could cure all of the woes facing agriculture. But it may also be linked to historical concerns dating back to even Colonial Virginia about soil quality and tobacco's impact on the land.

I don't really have a point to wrap this post up with. I simply wanted to highlight a few of the books I've been reading recently and provide information on how they can help contribute to the ongoing political discussions here. As we watch pundits talk about Obama's policies and the similarity to the New Deal, it feels like the pundits are only looking at FDR's impact on Northeastern cities. The bulk of the New Deal, and the Democratic Party at the time, was more interested in a regional redistribution of wealth. While some liberals want a greater emphasis on mass transit and urban areas, this hasn't been the focus of the political debates so far.