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Where does the New Deal fit in the big picture of American history? What does it mean for us today? What happened to the economic equality it once engendered? In The Great Exception, Jefferson Cowie provides new answers to these important questions. In the period between the Great Depression and the 1970s, he argues, the United States government achieved a unique level of equality, using its considerable resources on behalf of working Americans in ways that it had not before and has not since. If there is to be a comparable battle for collective economic rights today, Cowie argues, it needs to build on an understanding of the unique political foundation for the New Deal. Anyone who wants to come to terms with the politics of inequality in the United States will need to read The Great Exception.
PROLOGUE Philadelphia, 1936 1
INTRODUCTION Rethinking the New Deal in American History 9
CHAPTER 1 The Question of Democracy in the Age of Incorporation 35
CHAPTER 2 Kaleidoscope of Reform 63
CHAPTER 3 Working-Class Interregnum 91
CHAPTER 4 Constraints and Fractures in the New Liberalism 123
CHAPTER 5 The Great Exception in Action 153
CHAPTER 6 Toward a New Gilded Age 179
CHAPTER 7 The Era of Big Government Is Not Over (But the New Deal Probably Is) 209
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 231
NOTES 235
INDEX 263
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Where does the New Deal fit in the big picture of American history? What does it mean for us today? What happened to the economic equality it once engendered? In The Great Exception, Jefferson Cowie provides new answers to these important questions. In the period between the Great Depression and the 1970s, he argues, the United States government achieved a unique level of equality, using its considerable resources on behalf of working Americans in ways that it had not before and has not since. If there is to be a comparable battle for collective economic rights today, Cowie argues, it needs to build on an understanding of the unique political foundation for the New Deal. Anyone who wants to come to terms with the politics of inequality in the United States will need to read The Great Exception.
