Episode notes: The New Deal shows us what is possible

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. “Chicago, IL – Acceptance Speech on Receiving Nomination,” July 2, 1932. http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/_resources/images/msf/msf00493.

Tansey, Eira. A Green New Deal for Archives. Pocket Burgundy. Council on Library and Information Resources, 2023. https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/a-green-new-deal-for-archives/.

Taylor, Nick. American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA : When FDR Put the Nation to Work. Trade pbk. ed. New York, N.Y.: Bantam Books, 2009.

Hello, my name is Eira and this is the first episode of the New Deal podcast. Now, I am recording this on Tuesday, November 5th in the afternoon. And if you recall, Tuesday, November 5th is election day. So we are having this massive election happening and I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know what’s going to happen in eight hours, in 24 hours, in 48 hours, in a week, in a month. I don’t know.

And I didn’t think I would try recording this podcast episode today. You know, I tried to script this out a few months ago and I wrote a script and I did a few takes and it just, it felt too formal. It felt way too formal. And so earlier today, rather than doom scrolling, because I already voted a couple of weeks ago, I thought, what would happen if I just connected up the mic? And rather than doing this really formal intro to a podcast that I’ve been trying to make for about a year now, what if I just talk from the heart and talk about what I’m doing, or at least what I’m trying to do? So here we are.

Who am I? I am an archivist. I am based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I am in my late thirties. And I think all of these things are pretty relevant to the perspective that I bring to why I’m making a New Deal podcast.

So let’s talk about why I got interested in the New Deal in the first place. How does a late thirties woman get interested in the New Deal? Well, I think it probably began during the Obama administration. I was living in New Orleans at the time, and I was starting to read a lot of books about history that I wasn’t totally aware of. When you’re an archivist, you become familiar with the history of wherever you are working or whatever your archive has. And so I was doing a lot of reading about Southern history. I was reading about Huey Long, who is a very interesting 1930s figure. But I was also reading about the WPA, which was one of the signature programs of the New Deal. And a book that really stands out in my mind from that time period was Nick Taylor’s American Made.

So I’m reading about the New Deal, and this is also around the time that the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, is making its way through Congress. And what I was noticing was that a lot of what I was learning about the history of Social Security was totally in parallel to the rhetoric I was hearing around Obamacare, especially the fear-mongering, right? This rhetoric of death panels that we were hearing during the Affordable Care Act, total parallels with some of the things you would hear from critics of Social Security. But of course, now we can’t imagine life without Social Security.

And listen, by the time this podcast airs a couple months from today’s Election Day, I hope that nothing terrible has happened to Social Security or the Affordable Care Act. But the seed that was starting to be planted in me was this idea that the government is capable of doing incredibly ambitious projects. We don’t see it often. And as a millennial who grew up in the shadow of Reagan, who ushered in this period of destroying much of the legacy of the New Deal, but didn’t quite succeed, right? It’s such a foreign idea for me to experience what it must be like to have a government that tries to do really ambitious projects, right? Because I’ve only seen it a couple times in my lifetime, like the Affordable Care Act, like some of the infrastructure bills we’ve seen in the last few years. But it’s still such a far cry from the 1930s.

So I get interested in the New Deal, probably, what are we talking about, 15, 20 years ago? I’m losing track of time. And a few years ago, I had been doing a lot of work on how climate change is impacting archives. That’s actually still one of the major things I concentrate on in my work, but I was starting to focus on it about 10 years ago. And a few years ago, I was at a conference, and this was when people were starting to talk about a Green New Deal. And I said, you know what? Archivists and archives, we need a Green New Deal for Archives. And I initially delivered it as kind of a joke, but not really. And that idea, again, a little seed got planted in me and I couldn’t let it go.

So then early in the pandemic, a friend of mine, who I also know happens to be very interested in the history of the New Deal, he asked me to give a talk to one of his classes he was teaching. And it was a class for people training to become archivists and librarians. And I thought, well, let me kick the tires of this Green New Deal for Archives joke I made a few years ago. Let me see if there’s anything to that. Let me start sketching out what public policy for that might look like. And so that’s when I really started looking into the history of the New Deal and its intersection with archives. And I was like, whoa, there were some really cool things that happened during the New Deal.

There was this thing called the Historical Records Survey where people would go out who had been unemployed, but they were hired by the government. So then they had a little bit of money coming in to sustain them and their families. And they would go out to 90% of American counties and survey the historical records. What a fascinating project. And yet, even though I had been an archivist for many years at that point, I had never really known anything about this.

So I do this talk for my friend’s class called a Green New Deal for archives. But again, another seed’s been planted and I can’t quite let it go. And I think I got to do something else with this. So then I see an organization in my field put out a call for short publications that they might be interested in publishing. And I pitched them on the idea of writing a publication called a Green New Deal for archives. And I did. And I write this publication called a Green New Deal for Archives. I got to do a lot of research on the history of the New Deal.

And as I was doing this research, the New Deal has been this period of great study from many academics, but I couldn’t find a lot of material for a general audience. I couldn’t find a podcast that was a general history about the New Deal. There’s a couple of podcasts out there that focus on some very specific parts of the New Deal. There were some podcasts that were started that didn’t last very long. But I could not find a comprehensive general history of the New Deal podcast.

And at the same time that I was doing all this research for the publication, a Green New Deal for Archives, I couldn’t stop talking about what I was learning to my friends. So I would be like, hey, did you know in the, you know, in 1934, they started this amazing project that you’ve never heard of, but that totally changed the way we regulate or approach or fund this type of project. And they would say, no, how have I never heard of that? Why have I never learned about that? And it’s because the legacy of the New Deal is so massive that it’s almost hard to appreciate.

And it really became clear to me that, oh, there is a gap here, right? This incredibly productive period of ambitious government policy. And yet, unless you are like a historian of the 1930s, you probably don’t know that much about it, right? So there’s a gap here. So this is why, you know, the latest seed that was planted after I write a Green New Deal for archives is I think, oh, how do I keep nerding out about the history of the New Deal? Because I don’t want to stop reading about this. The characters from this time period, they’re incredible. There’s so many parallels to our political life today with what Americans are facing in the early 1930s.

And so many of the similar issues of environmental degradation, of massive profound inequality, of the role of the government. Who should the government serve? Should it serve the wealthy and powerful or should it serve everyday people who are just trying to get by? So all of these questions that were animating our country in the 1930s are just as relevant today. And yet, many of us don’t have the historical memory of what happened during the New Deal. So that’s where the New Deal podcast comes in.

So as a brief, brief, brief, brief overview of what we’re talking about when we say the New Deal, this is the broad array of programs, regulations, all sorts of things that came into being after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in 1932. So Roosevelt is elected in 1932, he takes office in 1933, and immediately, like literally, this is the phrase, you know, the first hundred days, this is where it comes from. First hundred days, he and his cabinet and Congress just pass an unbelievable amount of legislation. And of course, Roosevelt is elected for four terms. And so the first part of his presidency before World War II is really characterized by this large, large group of programs that has collectively become known as the New Deal.

And so that legacy of the New Deal really animated much of the American political establishment for decades until Reagan comes along. And we see in the 1980s, we see a turn towards neoliberalism, a turn towards the idea that government is the problem and it’s not a problem solver, right? This is the phrase that Reagan is very famous for. And we are living with the aftermath of that today, right? We are living with the aftermath of a anemic political imagination where it is so difficult for us to imagine a better future because of how dysfunctional our political system is, right? But it doesn’t have to be that way because we have precedent that shows us otherwise.

So this brings me to why should we even have a New Deal podcast? What do I think I’m doing here? That’s a good question. I’m not totally sure I have answered it myself, but here’s what I have for you. So I think there are three reasons why it’s worth having a New Deal podcast and why I am attempting this:

1. The New Deal and the legacy of the New Deal is hiding in plain sight. So the New Deal is all around us. If you are a salaried worker, you get a paycheck in the United States, there is very likely part of it that is taken out on your paycheck that goes to social security. That is part of the legacy of the New Deal. If you are one of the lucky people in our country who still belong to a union, that union exists and is often able to exist because of many of the labor issues that were passed during the 1930s, not the least of which is the continued existence of the National Labor Relations Board, which depending on the results of today’s election, I guess we’ll find out soon what’s gonna happen to the NLRB because lots of people want to destroy that. And then so much of our infrastructure is still part of the New Deal. So people who were unable to find work were able to find work through these government programs where they would build post offices, they would build bridges, they would build roads, they would build parks. So there’s probably a lot of your built environment that you navigate every day that is this legacy of the New Deal. So the New Deal is all around us and sort of because it’s all around us, because Reagan didn’t manage to destroy it all, because so much of it is still around us, I think it can be hard to see it and therefore easy to take it for granted, okay?
2. The legacy of the New Deal is still a matter of significant debate and historical arguments. So there are some people that think the New Deal was a failure because FDR was too friendly to capitalism. And there are also people who think the New Deal was a failure because FDR was too hostile to capitalism. So these are two sets of opposing beliefs around the history of the New Deal that were in play during the 1930s and still are debated today. And anything that we are still debating nearly a century later probably means that people feel very invested in the stakes that people feel very invested in the stakes, right? So what can those debates teach us about how we tried to solve complex problems nearly a hundred years ago and how we might solve them today?
3. The New Deal shows us what is possible. And this is where I, as someone who is on the left, I have been on the left since I showed up protesting against the Iraq war in 2003. I’ve always been a leftist my entire adult life. The New Deal shows us what is possible. It is so easy when you are on the left to feel like nothing in this country will ever get better. I think this is the understandable feeling that many of us have been going into today’s election with. Just this feeling that we are constantly fighting rear guard actions. We are living in the dumbest timeline possible. It just, I understand, I understand the despair.

And the reason why I find so much fascination in The New Deal was because so much of what people were experiencing in the early 1930s is not unlike what we are experiencing today. The threat of fascism, environmental devastation, massive wealth inequality, shocking amounts of oppression. If people who were living in the early 1930s were able to get through that and were also able to collectively achieve a better political platform than what they had before. And by all means, it was not perfect. There were a lot of things The New Deal did not get right. But it was so much better than what most people had experienced prior to the election of FDR. So if people went through that in the early 1930s, what can we nearly 100 years later learn from this time period? I think there is a lot we can learn and a lot we can improve upon, right?

And so when I wrote A Green New Deal for Archives, one of the things that I talked about when I was doing some interviews about it afterwards was I said, we have things like speculative fiction, right? That helps us imagine what a better world could be. But we also need speculative public policy where even if we cannot achieve this right now in our lifetime, we need a blueprint for what we want. We need a blueprint for the world that we deserve to live in. Because I look at the system we have now, I look at the choices we have, and I think we can do a lot better than this. We can make a world that is much, much, much better than what is currently on offer.

And so this is why I keep returning over and over and over to the New Deal, because certainly getting to something like a New Deal today is an incredibly challenging prospect. I don’t wanna deny that, right? But it’s also not unprecedented. And we have examples of doing very hard things to benefit many, many people in this country. So that’s why I think that we have to keep alive this memory of this time period so that we can think about what’s possible, okay?

So that’s sort of the overview of why I think a New Deal podcast might be an interesting endeavor. Pull this back a little bit towards what you can expect from this podcast. The New Deal did a lot in a very short period of time, and it’s kind of hard to figure out where do you start? So what I am planning to do with this podcast is to do seasons that dive deep into a very specific area of the New Deal that has a unifying theme.

So the first season is going to be titled Power, which is on the surface about the electrification projects of the New Deal. Totally fascinating stuff, y’all. But also about the power of the federal government to do things when there’s the political will to do so. So that’s what you can expect is we’re not gonna go chronologically, day by day through the New Deal. We’re gonna take some thematic seasons approach to this.

And I also am going to take a moment to get a little transparent here, which is that doing this project is really challenging because as an archivist, you are always aware that there is some other source out there that you could be looking at, right? that there is some other source out there that you could be looking at, right? So there’s some other book you could pull. There’s some other archive you could consult. There’s some other person you could interview. And so I have, in some ways, I don’t wanna say perfectionist tendencies because I think women are often told that they’re perfectionists and they’re not. They just have high standards of excellence. But what I’m also trying to get comfortable with is feeling comfortable putting out episodes about these pivotal moments in history that may not be perfect, right? And as I keep saying over and over and over, the New Deal itself was not perfect. So I perhaps also shouldn’t hold my podcast episodes to the same standard, but I am an archivist. And so that sense of feeling like I need to look at every single source is real and something I’m working on in order to get out this podcast. Because if I try to chase down every source, whoo, this podcast will never see the light of day and I have been trying to work on it for a year now. So it’s time to get moving.

I’m so glad you’re here. And in bringing this first episode to a close, I want to share this brief reflection, which is that the New Deal changed everything about modern life in America. And we still benefit from its successes and experience enduring challenges from its failures. But despite this unprecedented period of historical change, too few people appreciate the full legacy of the New Deal. So since you’re here, I hope that means that you’re one of those people that’s interested in this conversation. And if you like what you hear, I hope that you keep listening.