Martin Meenagh blog

  What can be called the domestic presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, between 1933 and 1940, was highly controversial. Taking office in the midst of the crisis caused by the Great Depression, Roosevelt had no set plan bar to ‘try what worked.’ This led to swathes of dynamic policymaking at odds with the more conservative impression that Roosevelt had conveyed on the campaign trail, when those who were supporters of gold-backed stability might have sought reassurance from his words. It is also clearly the case that multiple members of Roosevelt’s ‘own class’ of monied and socially well- connected Americans based largely in New England cities might also have assumed that he would, as a person known to them, not fundamentally threaten their interests. In fact, Roosevelt embarked upon a policy of economic stimulation, demand management, and industrial regulation, which quickly created reactive criticism, both in the Supreme Court and outside. Thus, criticism ‘on the right’ can be dis...

Federalism is a complex term in American history and politics. The first Federalist Party, for instance, which broadly held sway for the first twenty five years after 1787, was based on Hamiltonian ideas of a powerful centre, and of a state funded in part by national debt. This was at odds with Jefferson’s vision of local ‘ward democracies’, populism, and the principle of open elections. Most people who call themselves federalist in the twenty first century would probably identify more with Jefferson than with Hamilton’s party. This is in part because the term federal has become consonant with ‘confederate’. The latter word is unusable, however. This is firstly because of the existence between 1861 and 1865 of the Confederate States of America, and secondly because the Constitution was meant to replace what were perceived as failed ‘Articles of Confederation’. Nevertheless, the word ‘Confederation’ is a better one to sum up what modern federalists seem to want. It implies a we...

There have been at least three distinct versions of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in American history. The first, as described by the republican congress of the 1870s, was established by the former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest in Tennessee in 1866. It was a collection of night-riders, lawbreakers and terrorists whose structure might well have been unsystematised but whose purpose throughout the Deep South was to undermine African-American votes, rights, and equality by legal and extralegal means. This Klan was effectively suppressed by the Grant Administration, which turned federal troops against it, though ballot intimidation, lynching, and the exclusion of black people from civil society continued via other means. The Second Klan arose in the years before World War One, and was heavily influenced by nativist suspicion of Catholics, Jews and Hispanic minorities as well as African-Americans. The Klan’s third existence was as a congeries of putative ‘white rights’ groups that ...

Historians of the 1920s and economists have been apt to disagree on the development of 1920s prosperity. This has been because economists have focussed on the monetary policies and implications of the period whereas historians have looked to the supply-side, or to Keynesian analyses based around employment and demand. The two professions have therefore, until recently, formed radically different perspectives on the period. To an historian, the 1920s were a period when Gross National Product rose by some $25 billion; the number of ‘radio-owning households’ rose over sixteen times, from 60000 to ten million; income tax millionaires rose eightfold, and the number of people who used airlines rose twentyfold. This speaks to a massive increase in demand, which can be associated with the growth of jobs in motor manufacturing, and in the associated industries such as tyre-making and steelworks. The automobile industry alone was by 1929 responsible for 7 % of all United States industrial...