Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (eds.), The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (1989)

I read this with an eye to my upcoming course on capitalism(s) since 1945. I'd read Gerstle's book on The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, which was excellent and which I'll use extensively in the class. The book under review here is a different beast. By no means do I mean that it's bad, only that it's an edited volume, so the chapters don't fit together seamlessly. And in many cases, they're written for an academic audience, which means they just won't work in my classes. My main impressions about the New Deal were the following: 1) the experimentation and lack of coherent plan, at least in the first few years of the ND, was something I knew about, but several chapters drive this home. 2) the ascendance of the labor movement - how much influence and prominence it enjoyed - was something I hadn't fully appreciated. That influence waxed from the late 19th century and probably peaked in the war years. 3) I had been unaware of the widespread sense, even before the Depression, that American capitalism had "matured" and hence lost its vitality. This sense helped to sustain the idea that planning - of some kind - was necessary to manage the sluggish economy. The booming war economy put paid to the belief in stasis and, along with other factors, took the wind out of the sails of labor's most ambitious hopes.