The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War.

Alan Brinkley Alfred A. Knopf, $27.50 By John Morton Blum 

In The End of Reform, Alan Brinkley defines his focus in his subtitle: "New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War," and he maintains that focus throughout the book. Other historians have employed structures similar to his to enclose the terrain of New Deal political economy, Brinkley's chosen turf, and to reach conclusions congruent with his. The archival resources and the contemporary literature of the period command the general organization, as well as the major emphases and interpretations, common to historical treatments since Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s influential Age of Roosevelt. But while Brinkley does not break new ground, his analysis of the changing agenda of liberalism is both persuasive and important, a product of his thorough and scrupulous research, enhanced by crisp and economical prose.

In the first half of his book, Brinkley examines the impact of the political and economic developments in 1937-38 on the outlook of New Deal liberals. The recession of that period moved them to re-examine policies they had favored since 1933. New Dealers continued to center their concerns on wealth, class, and economic power, on erasing or ameliorating the injustices of corporate capitalism. They also continued, Brinkley observes, to disagree among themselves about social and economic programs, as they had from the beginning. One school (including Rex Tugwell and Donald Richberg) remained wedded to the associational or corporatist ideas that had led to the creation of the failed National Recovery Administration. In contrast, another camp (that of Tommy Corcoran, Robert Jackson, and James Landis) championed anti-monopoly efforts.

Brinkley describes the varied origins and objectives of both kinds of programs. He goes on to discuss the advocates of countercyclical spending (Marriner Eccles and Leon Henderson, among others), many also anti-monopolists, whose arguments gained coherence and strength from the publication in 1936 of J.M. Keynes's General Theory, and gained relevance from the serious downturn of the economy.

It was the Keynesians, of course, who caught the president's ear in 1938, to the distress of budget balancers in the Treasury Department. But, as Brinkley notes, Roosevelt embraced Keynes's countercyclical measures only as an expedient, not out of informed commitment. So, too, the ventures in anti-monopoly studies of the Temporary National Economic Council (TNEC) and the anti-trust actions of Thurman Arnold in the Justice Department, Consequently, the battles over policy had to be fought again in the war years.

The second half of the book recounts the same policies against the backdrop of mobilization, wartime production and procurement, and planning for reconversion and postwar domestic policy. Here too, he is covering familiar terrain, but he does it with learning and insight. In the face of Republican gains in Congress and of increasing public infatuation with consumer spending, Roosevelt made only rhetorical efforts to protect or advance the agenda of "liberals embattled." It is clear that Brinkley's sympathies lie with these liberals.

But rather more than Brinkley chooses to stress, the president was governed by other priorities: the winning of the war, the preservation of national unity, and the imperative need for nurturing the armed services.

In these circumstances, the task of formulating policy fell to the lawyers, financiers, and business executives who Roosevelt recruited to guide the war effort. Lingering liberal hopes for a commonwealth of government and enterprise became impracticable fantasies. So did liberal hopes for strengthening small business. Concurrently, wartime labor policies, the arrival of full employment after a decade of depression, and growing anti-unionism in Congress and out, all operated against what remained of labor militancy and of the always-slim prospect of labor as an independent, postwar political force. Still, as Brinkley allows, "the wartime economy was a spectacular success." This explained the victories of the emerging military-industrial complex in a succession of battles over policy and turf.

Further, the nature of the governments of America's enemies--Germany, Italy, and Japan--made liberals apprehensive about the dangers of statism. Increasingly dubious of possible Postwar federal Programs to micromanage the economy, liberals found their preferred alternative in the social and macroeconomic recommendations of the National Resources Planning Board.

Countercyclical federal spending, intended to spur private consumption and achieve full employment, along with government outlays tied to expanded programs for social welfare, became the liberal grail. Brinkley is at his best describing the process through which liberals reached this conclusion. In effect, liberals accepted corporate capitalism as it had become.

The book ends with an account of the Employment Act of 1946, which had been introduced as the Full Employment bill. In its earlier version, it was an essential vessel of postwar liberal political economy. But the bill suffered adverse amendments before its enactment and, as Brinkley says, was also decoupled from a "generous welfare state."

During the war, new issues had surfaced--for example, civil rights and the first stirrings of modern feminism. These became parts of what Brinkley calls the rights-based liberalism of postwar politics. In compromising on the Employment Act, liberals were settling for a pale version of their best hopes. This retreat from the issues of political economy which had once absorbed the New Dealers has had unhappy consequences in the "increased inequality and social instability" characteristic of today's "often stagnant economy."

This message, and the way Brinkley delivers it, gives his book its significance. To be sure, he has carefully examined the ideas of only about two dozen liberals in government, along with a few like-minded journalists. But during the New Deal and the war years, the ideas of this elite formed the core of the nation's conscience. Further, the liberals' retreat reflected broad public sentiments. As Brinkley suggests, political economy could now benefit from a return to the New Dealers' preoccupations--and a renaissance of their heroic mood.

John Morton Blum, Sterling professor emeritus of history at Yale University, has written several books about the New Deal, World War II, and American liberalism.