ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I F NOT FOR TWO PERSONS, it is unlikely that I would have written this book. First is Frima Rosenbaum, my maternal grandmother. She is the source of my first political memory. It dates to a Sunday family visit to her Washington Heights apartment in northern Manhattan shortly before the presidential election of 1952. I was eight years old, too young to quite understand why my father and mother, who worshipped Adlai Stevenson, were so visibly stunned to learn that she did not plan to vote. Striking her dining room table with a copy of the Yiddish-language Daily Forward , Bubbeh Frima explained, “Since Roosevelt, they are all pygmies.”
Sometimes it feels as if I have been considering her historical claim ever since. In truth, it was not until the late 1980s when I was teaching at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research that I began to think about the New Deal in a scholarly way. Well before that, however, during my decade at the University of Chicago, J. David Greenstone persistently challenged me to think harder and more broadly about the American experience. When I took up a post there in 1974, he quickly became my fast friend and mentor. Since I had earned a Ph.D. in history, David served as a surrogate for the graduate school political science teachers in American politics I never had. More than anyone before or since, he prodded me to integrate questions drawn from the stock of political theory with systematic empirical methods. David died in 1990, just fifty-two. I fervently wish he had been able to critique earlier drafts of this book, and assess its concerns with race and labor, both being subjects about which he wrote with great acuity.
At the New School, with support from the Ford Foundation, I constituted a research group that first sought to compare the ambitious conservative program of the Reagan administration with the liberal initiatives of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. As it turned out, the articles I wrote with Kim Geiger, Daniel Kryder, and Bruce Pietrykowski, the primary graduate student participants in that project, focused almost exclusively on the 1930s and 1940s. With their help, I had begun to find my subject. Concurrently, my commitment to write analytical history deepened. I spent countless hours talking about historical analysis in the social sciences with the consummate practitioners who constituted the Committee on Historical Studies, including Richard Bensel, Eric Hobsbawm, Elizabeth Sanders, Charles Tilly, and Louise Tilly. My closest colleague in this group was Aristide Zolberg, with whom I taught a proseminar on politics, theory, and policy, and convened a MacArthur Foundation workshop on national security, democracy, and postwar American liberalism, the very themes that later came to animate this book.
Since I moved to Columbia University in 1994, it proceeded in fits and starts. For a long span, I pursued mostly other projects but continued to wrestle with the New Deal. At Columbia, my work has been nourished by colleagues and students in an outstanding political science department in the tradition of Franz Neumann and David Truman that places the study of institutions front and center, and an exceptional history department in the tradition of Richard Hofstadter and Fritz Stern that seeks to deepen the long-term study of political affairs. I have profited especially from interactions in the cross-disciplinary workshop on American politics and society that Alan Brinkley and I have been convening for more than a decade and a half. Working relationship, joint teaching, hearty discussions, and shared endeavors at Columbia—with Karen Barkey, Volker Berghahn, Akeel Bilgrami, Charles Cameron, Partha Chatterjee, Eric Foner, Alice Kessler-Harris, Sudipta Kaviraj, Robert Lieberman, Mark Mazower, Nolan McCarty, Justin Phillips (with whom I enjoyed a period as a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation), Alfred Stepan, Nadia Urbinati, Gregory Wawro,
I F NOT FOR TWO PERSONS, it is unlikely that I would have written this book. First is Frima Rosenbaum, my maternal grandmother. She is the source of my first political memory. It dates to a Sunday family visit to her Washington Heights apartment in northern Manhattan shortly before the presidential election of 1952. I was eight years old, too young to quite understand why my father and mother, who worshipped Adlai Stevenson, were so visibly stunned to learn that she did not plan to vote. Striking her dining room table with a copy of the Yiddish-language Daily Forward , Bubbeh Frima explained, “Since Roosevelt, they are all pygmies.”
Sometimes it feels as if I have been considering her historical claim ever since. In truth, it was not until the late 1980s when I was teaching at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research that I began to think about the New Deal in a scholarly way. Well before that, however, during my decade at the University of Chicago, J. David Greenstone persistently challenged me to think harder and more broadly about the American experience. When I took up a post there in 1974, he quickly became my fast friend and mentor. Since I had earned a Ph.D. in history, David served as a surrogate for the graduate school political science teachers in American politics I never had. More than anyone before or since, he prodded me to integrate questions drawn from the stock of political theory with systematic empirical methods. David died in 1990, just fifty-two. I fervently wish he had been able to critique earlier drafts of this book, and assess its concerns with race and labor, both being subjects about which he wrote with great acuity.
At the New School, with support from the Ford Foundation, I constituted a research group that first sought to compare the ambitious conservative program of the Reagan administration with the liberal initiatives of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. As it turned out, the articles I wrote with Kim Geiger, Daniel Kryder, and Bruce Pietrykowski, the primary graduate student participants in that project, focused almost exclusively on the 1930s and 1940s. With their help, I had begun to find my subject. Concurrently, my commitment to write analytical history deepened. I spent countless hours talking about historical analysis in the social sciences with the consummate practitioners who constituted the Committee on Historical Studies, including Richard Bensel, Eric Hobsbawm, Elizabeth Sanders, Charles Tilly, and Louise Tilly. My closest colleague in this group was Aristide Zolberg, with whom I taught a proseminar on politics, theory, and policy, and convened a MacArthur Foundation workshop on national security, democracy, and postwar American liberalism, the very themes that later came to animate this book.
Since I moved to Columbia University in 1994, it proceeded in fits and starts. For a long span, I pursued mostly other projects but continued to wrestle with the New Deal. At Columbia, my work has been nourished by colleagues and students in an outstanding political science department in the tradition of Franz Neumann and David Truman that places the study of institutions front and center, and an exceptional history department in the tradition of Richard Hofstadter and Fritz Stern that seeks to deepen the long-term study of political affairs. I have profited especially from interactions in the cross-disciplinary workshop on American politics and society that Alan Brinkley and I have been convening for more than a decade and a half. Working relationship, joint teaching, hearty discussions, and shared endeavors at Columbia—with Karen Barkey, Volker Berghahn, Akeel Bilgrami, Charles Cameron, Partha Chatterjee, Eric Foner, Alice Kessler-Harris, Sudipta Kaviraj, Robert Lieberman, Mark Mazower, Nolan McCarty, Justin Phillips (with whom I enjoyed a period as a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation), Alfred Stepan, Nadia Urbinati, Gregory Wawro,
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