Professor Thomas Sugrue of the University of Pennsylvania really seems to like the new deal.  He only wishes that communities never had the chance to spend those federal dollars.  He seems to like complete control from the top.  The following is extracted from thenation.com and albany.edu:

• I don’t believe that historians should become propagandists. (read below and see the irony in this remark)

• I was one of the steering committee members, one of the people who helped to plan a teach-in with the labor movement at Columbia. This happened a couple of years ago. And out of that has grown a group called Scholars, Artists, and Writers for Social Justice which is really a group of academics who are trying to reforge broken links between the trade union movement and the academy, using our stature in the academy, our voice as potential public intellectuals to speak out and advocate on behalf of the labor movement.

• My book is really an attempt to intervene in debates about poverty and social policy by making an argument that we can’t lay the blame for the persistence of urban poverty on the social programs of the 1960s. The conservative argument being that the Great Society unleashed welfare dependency and exacerbated the problem of poverty.

• I think the implication of my story for folks who are thinking about anti-poverty policy is that by focusing on the individual behavior and culture of poor people, which is say what welfare reform has as its fundamental premise today, that is, we need to modify and instill a work ethic and modify the behavior of poor folks to make them more responsible misses the boat.

• The New Deal did not centralize governmental power as its critics had feared it would; it left the administration of the most important relief efforts–unemployment insurance, old age assistance, aid to dependent children and job-creation programs (the Public Works Administration excepted)–in the hands of state and local officials who used federal funds as a form of local patronage and who often shunted aside politically marginal groups like African-Americans.

• To note the limitations of the New Deal should not diminish its accomplishments. The legacy of the New Deal is inescapable: think of our post offices, bridges, highways and national parks, many of which began falling into decrepitude in the late twentieth century when Republicans axed domestic spending.

Sugrue seems to like the New Deal don’t you think?  I wonder if he ever tells his students that more government spending is the best way to solve all our problems?

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