James E. Cronin
170 foreign affairs
noted, New Deal programs were crafted
and carried out within racist structures
and traditions, which prevented African
Americans from enjoying their full
benefits. Truman’s Fair Deal aimed to do
better, but that effort was derailed by
the same coalition of Republicans and
southern Democrats that had limited the
New Deal.AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
These three cases raise two big questions:
Why the common pattern of advances,
and why the uneven results? Woloch’s
answers are mostly implicit and need to
be teased out of his rich narrative. The
answer to the first question seems to be
that the Depression and World War II
discredited old elites, their faith in free
markets, and their not-infrequent sympa-
thy for the extreme right. At the same
time, the center-left earned respect for
its role in the struggle against fascism
and its skepticism of unbridled capitalism.
The mobilization for war reinforced
these effects and also favored the growth
of trade unions.
The answer to the second question is
less clear cut. Woloch occasionally sug-
gests that some degree of backlash against
progressive advances was inevitable and
therefore requires little explanation. As he
argues, “In mature democracies, after all,
swings of opinion were likely sooner or
later to bring stalemate or reversals that
made a steady course of long duration
problematic.” This seems reasonable but
does not explain the variation across
countries, which was presumably rooted
in the three countries’ differing political
cultures and institutions.
In the United Kingdom, for example,
the rejection of old ideas and of the elites
who held on to them was extremelyunions not to use their newfound clout to
demand higher wages immediately after
the war, a wave of strikes broke out in the
United States in 1945 and 1946. The
Democrats, who had held the presidency
since 1933 and whose most impressive
domestic achievements were by that
point a decade old, lost the congressional
elections of 1946 to a resurgent and still
quite reactionary Republican Party. This
defeat paved the way for the passage of
the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which
severely restricted the power of the
unions by limiting their ability to strike.
If the long-term effect of Taft-Hartley
was to tip the scales in favor of corpo-
rate power, in the short term it moti-
vated progressives to rally behind
Truman, delivering him a surprise win in
the election of 1948, which also saw
Democrats retake control of both houses
of Congress. The victory halted a major
rollback of progressive legislation, but the
coalition between the Republicans and
southern Democrats did not leave much
room for advancement. Truman suc-
ceeded in passing the Housing Act of
1949, which provided federal assistance
for mortgage insurance and increased
funding for public housing. Democrats
also enjoyed some success in raising the
minimum wage and making Social
Security more generous and inclusive.
They were thwarted, however, in their
efforts to create a national health insur-
ance program. Progress on civil rights
was also mixed: Truman issued executive
orders to integrate the armed forces
and to ban discrimination in federal
employment, but his administration failed
to outlaw poll taxes, strengthen the Fair
Employment Practices Committee, or
establish a permanent civil rights com-
mission. And as Woloch and others have