A Word of Introduction

Over a decade ago, I defended a PhD dissertation that explored the reaction of several small communities in the Trans-Mississippi West to one of the greatest expansions of the federal power in the United States in the course of the twentieth century.

The era of the New Deal (1933-1939) remains one of the most fascinating in modern American history and left its imprint in physical structures across the nation (our local post office in Pittsburgh boasted its obligatory New Deal mural), but in many ways it was less a movement or a program than a phenomenon, with considerable local and regional divergence. What the New Deal meant for New York City was very different from what it meant for upstate New York and what it meant for Mississippi was very different from what it meant for Minnesota.

Such differences extended not just to the kind of federal programs on offer in a particular locality, but also to the ways in which different economic, ethnic and religious groups internalized and interpreted the philosophy - such as it was - of the New Deal. The myth of the New Deal - to which even we historians are susceptible - is that there was one program to which Americans subscribed (or which they rejected). Yet the reality is one of overlapping and contradictory agendas, of political coalitions of convenience and of a reform program whose ultimate results few of its progenitors fully perceived.

This present blog is intended to serve as a testament to the enduring power of an idea often more powerful than the actual legislative changes that it produced. What lessons today's reformers - on both sides of the political aisle - can derive from it is another matter.