New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920–1935

by Colin Gordon

• ISBN13: 9780521457552
• ISBN10: 0521457556
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-07-29
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book is the first major reinterpretation of the New Deal in thirty years. Employing archival research and insights from history, political sociology, and economics, the author reassesses the origins and premises of the industrial, labour, and welfare policies of the 1920s and 1930s. Gordon argues that the labour and welfare law of the latter New Deal - indeed the origins of the modern welfare state - grew from a piecemeal private response to the competitive instability of the 1920s. This study is both an economic history of the interwar era, and an examination of the relationship between political and economic power in the United States.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations used in text and notes

Introduction

1. Rethinking the New Deal: the logic and limits of the American political economy

2. Competition and collective action: business condition and business strategies, 1920-1932

3. Workers organising capitalists: regulatory unionism in American industry, 1920-1932

4. The limits of associationalism: business organisation and disorganisation, 1920-1932

5. The National Recovery Act: the political economy of business organisation, 1933-1935

6. The Wagner Act: the political economy of labour relations, 1933-1937

7. The Social Security Act: the political economy of welfare capitalism, 1920-1935

8. New Deal, old deck: business, labour, and politics after 1935

Notes

Bibliographical essay

Manuscript collections.