"The New Deal thereby shifted leverage from employers to employees and facilitated the growth of in the labor movement from fewer than 3 million members in 1932 to more than 15 million in 1945" (Ibid., p.24). One breakthrough result was the so-called 1950 Treaty of Detroit, in which automobile manufacturers gave union workers not only a 20 percent raise, but also defined benefit pensions and comprehensive health care coverage -- all in return for labor peace. (Ibid.). Other industries would negotiate similar deals.
New Dealers also created a large welfare state to benefit the poor. They did so by raising the marginal tax rate on the wealthiest Americans to 75 percent in 1935, and raised it further, during World War II, to 91 percent. "To the poor, the federal government offered a range of welfare programs, from social security to pensions, on the one hand, to aid to dependent children, on the other, that it had not made available before" (Ibid., p. 25).
Although the New Deal substantially shifted wealth from the rich to the middle class, working class, and the poor, it did comparatively little to improve the lives of Black Americans. Why? Because southern white supremacists in Congress crafted New Deal legislation to insure that it would be distributed locally, which in the South meant distribution by local white supremacists only to applicants possessing white skin. FDR needed their votes, so he went along with the racist scheme. Ira Katznelson exposed this wealth-debilitating racial discrimination against Blacks in his book, When Affirmative Action Was White.
Nevertheless, insofar as the Soviet Union competed with the United States for the hearts and minds of people in the so-called Third World, its propaganda about widespread American racism -- including such matters as "black accident victims dying because no white hospital in the South would admit them, and African diplomats being refused access to white restaurants and washrooms while traveling south of the Mason-Dixon line" (p. 50) -- provoked the American foreign policy establishment "to demonstrate through deeds a commitment to dismantling segregation to achieve racial equality. The Cold War was helping to make civil rights a paramount issue in America" (Ibid).
Although persistent and heroic actions taken by civil rights activists were always the driving force behind the country's civil rights successes, Professor Gerstle gives some credit to such Soviet propaganda. For example, he believes that the Supreme Court's decision to strike down segregation, in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, was motivated, in part, by Soviet propaganda. (Ibid., p. 51).
With the Cold War having helped thrust America's race problem into sharp relief, it was President Lyndon Baines Johnson who, after expanding upon FDR's New Deal with his Great Society programs, took on the pressing social issue of racial discrimination. One need not diminish the indispensable impetus provided by America's civil rights activists to credit the Johnson administration with pushing for and signing both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Equally important, however, was Johnson's signature on executive order 11246, described by Professor Gerstle as "a vast project of social engineering: the elimination of racial, religious, and sexual bias from all institutions, public and private, that received significant amounts of federal funds. This program came to be known as affirmative action" (Ibid., p. 54).
Professor Gerstle's interpretation of events in the United States for the century spanning from 1920 to 2020 is shaped by a concept that he calls the "political order." According to Gerstle, a political order emerges when the ideas propagated by one political party are retained by the opposition party. Thus, the first political order, the order of FDR's New Deal, was established when the Republicans refused to repudiate it after they took control of congress in 1946 and after Dwight D. Eisenhower became president in 1952.
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