by forces beyond their control and were forced to deal with limits.
Proponents of ambitious climate initiatives have long been fond of historical allusions. The Manhattan Project, the Apollo Program, the Interstate Highway System, the New Deal, and World War II all have been cited as precedents. For our purposes, we can safely set aside purely technical feats such as the bomb, the moon shot, and the interstates. But the New Deal, the wartime mobilization of the 1940s, and other crucial junctures in the decades that followed, offer insights that can be useful to us in responsibly addressing the climate crisis.
Various Green New Deal visions have been explicit in emulating the 1930s New Deal example of using public policy to put society to work and solve big problems. Those and other strategies for a green makeover of the nation’s energy systems and infrastructure often hark back to the lightning-speed buildup of productive forces in the 1940s. But that wartime industrial surge was only half the story. The other half was that for a brief four years, the U.S. civilian economy went into emergency mode, becoming almost the opposite of itself, with carefully planned production and strictly limited but equitable civilian consumption. The postwar economic boom of the 1950s and ’60s, surfing on a wave of cheap oil and military spending, created the false impression that limits of all kinds had been suspended. But when the energy crisis landed hard in the 1970s, Americans were shocked back into reality, and the decade came to be defined by limits. Restoring and increasing the flows of both fossil energy and wealth became a central mission of the federal government in the 1980s. Finally, through the climate-aware 1990s and 2000s, the need to reduce and eventually eliminate the use of fossil fuels was dismissed time after time on the grounds that economic growth always takes priority.
The 1930s and ’40s saw a desperate need to burst through limits imposed by the economic system. Now, we need desperately to pull the economy back within limits set by the Earth’s ecosystems. Whether or not our society—or human civilization—can survive the current emergency intact will depend in large measure on whether we take ecological limits seriously.
“COOPERATIVE CAPITALISM”
Crisis was far too mild a word; emergency came closer to capturing most Americans’ predicament in the early 1930s. The U.S. unemployment rate had vaulted from 3 percent at the time of the 1929 financial crash to 24 percent during the 1932 presidential campaign. Given those numbers, prospects appeared excellent for Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic Party nominee, as he set out to unseat incumbent Republican Herbert Hoover, whose weak free-market tonics had only worsened the downward spiral.
In a campaign speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Roosevelt called for a sharp break from long-standing economic orthodoxy. He had come to the conclusion that in America, growth had not just faltered; it had come to an end. The free-market policies of the nineteenth century, he said, were inadequate to address the human catastrophe they had created. Sounding more like a twenty-first-century steady-state economist than a wealthy politician of the 1930s, he declared, “Our task now is not discovery or exploitation of natural resources, or necessarily producing more goods. It is the soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already in hand, . . . of distributing wealth and products more equitably, of adapting existing economic organization to the service of the people.”14
In reality, Roosevelt had no intention of knocking out the pillars of capitalism in such a fashion, and once he took office, his actions were not as radical as he had implied in the San Francisco address. But those actions did include a flood of economic legislation that served as inspiration for today’s vision of a Green New Deal. In the Roosevelt administration’s first hundred days, Congress passed a breathtaking stack of stimulus initiatives that, among other things, provided $3.3 billion for public works—more than the entire federal budget of three years earlier. This came four years before the publication of John Maynard Keynes’s epic The General Theory of Unemployment, Interest and Money, the book that showed the world why ending a depression or severe recession requires deep-pocketed government intervention in the economy. In a 1999 article, Patrick Renshaw, then of Sheffield University, discussed how the New Deal was built not on a theoretical foundation like the one laid out by Keynes but rather on the “chaos of improvisation.” He wrote, “As it struggled to end mass unemployment, the federal government stumbled on this policy, whereby it was forced to act as compensating agent during an economic downturn, spending public money to fill troughs in the trade cycle in order to stimulate revival.”15
One of the headline initiatives of those first hundred days was the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933. Declaring a national emergency, the NIRA created the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and gave it the mission of steering private industry toward prosperity. The Recovery Administration was not a mere dispenser of stimulus funds. Rather, its goal was no less than the planning of the entire industrial economy. It aimed its biggest guns at the cutthroat competition that New Dealers saw as driving down wages and prices and deepening the Depression. The Recovery Administration relaxed antitrust enforcement and worked with private industry, through hundreds of business and trade associations, to develop voluntary “codes of fair practices” that would limit production and set wages and prices. The Recovery Administration also guaranteed the right of workers to unionize, even giving union members a voice in the development of the fair-practice codes. Summing up the Recovery Administration’s goals, Ira Katznelson, the author of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, wrote that it “sought to refloat capitalism and sustain a balanced private economy.” This was to be accomplished through economic planning and “corporatism” aimed at eliminating class conflict and curbing what Roosevelt lieutenant Rexford Tugwell called “the anarchy of the competitive system.”16
As a grand experiment in industrial planning, the Recovery Administration flopped badly. The Southern Democratic members of Congress who had voted for the underlying legislation turned against the Recovery Administration when they saw that Black workers might have to be paid as much as whites. And the voluntary codes ended up being written and edited largely by the trade associations and powerful corporations, with labor having little say in the matter. It was Katznelson’s nicely understated conclusion that “uneven class power made planning for cooperative capitalism difficult.”17 In 1935, the Supreme Court delivered the death blow, declaring the Recovery Act unconstitutional. But 1935 also saw the creation of one of the New Deal’s most highly visible recovery programs, the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA pumped enormous stimulus into the economy by hiring more than 8 million unemployed Americans to construct countless public works. Meanwhile, the Recovery Act’s failed attempt to foster voluntary reform of private industry was eventually succeeded by toothier regulation under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which mandated the national minimum wage, the eight-hour workday, overtime pay, and the end of child labor.
KIND OF GREEN
With the climate emergency, the Green New Deal is sharply focused on solving the headline issue of our time. The New Deal had its own, less conspicuous green side, one that sought to resolve the headline environmental problem of its day: the Dust Bowl.
Every state but Vermont and Maine experienced at least one period of severe drought between 1930 and 1936. At times, fine brown dust fell like snow across the eastern half of the country; it had flown all the way from the plowed-up wheat lands of the High Plains two thousand miles to the west. Exposed, desiccated soil was being eroded by the region’s characteristic high winds, filling the sky and drifting in roadside ditches. In 1932, there were fourteen major dust storms, each covering vast portions of the region; that annual total rose to sixty-eight in 1936 and seventy-two in 1938. According to the historian Donald Worster, it took a monster record-breaking dust storm in May 1934, to finally “make the plains visible to Washington.” He wrote, “As dust sifted down on the Mall and the White House, Roosevelt was in a press conference promising that the Cabinet was at work on a new Great Plains relief program.”18
In general, the Dust Bowl and the economic devastation of Depression-era rural America sprang from the same roots: The drive for maximum production resulted in maximum exploitation of the soil, at the same time creating a massive glut of grain that an impoverished populace couldn’t afford to buy. Worster put in this way:
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