f reedom of a ction 165annoyances of increased wartime bureaucracy and rising prices, voters
vented their frustrations on the party in power in the 1942 elections.
Democrats took it on the chin—a loss of forty-seven seats in the House
of Representatives and seven in the Senate, along with several governor-
ships that included the president’s home state of New York (to Th omas
E. Dewey, the Republican candidate for president in 1944 and 1948).
The incoming Congress had a pronounced rightward tilt, with a
majority consisting of anti-Roosevelt, anti–New Deal members,
including southern Democrats and conservative Republicans. As con-
servative business leaders became central players in wartime economic
mobilization, so, too, did conservative political leaders now assume a
dominant role in the legislative process. Th ey used their position to
begin undoing the reform structure the president and his political allies
had put in place over the previous decade.
The New Dealers, though, refused to admit that their day had
passed. In their view, the war confi rmed that government spending
could achieve full employment, but they worried that the end of
massive defense outlays when peace returned would plunge the
economy into a new depression. Social spending, they suggested, might
serve as a substitute, providing the necessary economic stimulus. Th eir
analysis missed the transformative economic eff ects of the war—how
the explosive economic resurgence laid a foundation for sustained
postwar consumer demand and how the dominant international eco-
nomic position of the United States would give it a trade advantage that
would last for decades. Instead, the New Dealers looked back to the
severe downturn that had followed the hasty demobilization after
World War I. (Evidently generals are not alone in fi ghting the last war.)
The reform impulse found its fullest expression in the National
Resources Planning Board (NRPB), which issued reports that urged
comprehensive postwar planning to secure full employment. Still
wedded to a Depression-era sensibility, the NRPB assumed a perma-
nent need for government stimulus.
Conservatives, including southerners in the president’s own party,
saw the domestic political future very diff erently. With the New Deal
eff ectively blocked even before the war—no major domestic legislation
passed after 1938—conservatives set out, in David Kennedy’s apt phrase,
“to drive a stake through its heart.” Th e 73rd Congress by the end of