How World War II forged a liberal (Keynesian) view of government in the United States - Alan Brinkley’s classic account

Source: Adam Tooze's Substack

Alvin hansen had been one of the principal economic advisers to the New Deal for nearly three years when he traveled to Cincinnati in March 1940 to speak to a group of businessmen. After his address, someone in the audience asked him what must have seemed a perfectly reasonable question: “In your opinion is the basic principle of the New Deal economically sound?” Hansen could not answer it. “I really do not know what the basic principle of the New Deal is,” he replied. “I know from my experience in the government that there are as many conflicting opinions among the people in Washington under this administration as we have in the country at large.”

Hansen’s confusion was not uncommon in the cluttered, at times incoherent, political atmosphere of the late New Deal. The Roosevelt administration had moved in so many directions at once that no one could make sense of it all. Everyone was aware, of course, of what the New Deal had done—of the laws it had helped pass, of the programs it had created, of the institutions it had launched or reshaped. But as Hansen suggested, few could discern in all this any “basic principle,” any clear prescription for the future. Only a few years later, however, most American liberals had come to view the New Deal as something more than an eclectic group of policies and programs.