Review of: "A Commonwealth of Hope: The New Deal Response to Crisis," by Alan Lawson

Hawley, Ellis W.

English

Review of:  A Commonwealth of Hope: The New Deal Response to Crisis,  by Alan Lawson

Iowa Research Online

The Annals of Iowa 
Volume 66 Number 2 (Spring 2007) pps. 216-217 
A Commonwealth of Hope: The New Deal Response to Crisis 
Ellis W. Hawley 
University of Iowa 
ISSN 0003-4827 
Copyright © 2007 State Historical Society of Iowa. This article is posted here for personal use, 
not for redistribution. 
Recommended Citation 
Hawley, Ellis W. "A Commonwealth of Hope: The New Deal Response to Crisis." The 
Annals of Iowa 66 (2007), 216-217. 
Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0003-4827.1129 
Hosted by Iowa Research Online 
216      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
A Commonwealth of Hope: The New Deal Response to Crisis, by Alan Law-
son. The American Moment series. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 2006. xv, 280 pp. Bibliographical essay, index. $45.00 
cloth, $19.95 paper. 
Reviewer Ellis W. Hawley is professor of history emeritus at the University of 
Iowa. One of his many books and articles is The New Deal and the Problem of 
Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence (1966 and 1995). 
In this elegantly written contribution to the American Moment series, 
Professor Alan Lawson provides an authoritative review of the New 
Deal’s history and a thought-provoking reinterpretation of its origins 
and significance. The New Deal, he argues, emerged from the conjunc-
ture of a crisis-induced opportunity for reform with the vision of a 
cooperative commonwealth developed between 1890 and 1916 and 
carried forward by incipient New Dealers. This vision called for a 
compassionate society moving toward a cooperative order of inter-
dependent and increasingly efficient social units and in the process 
fusing national purpose with local experience, integrating central guid-
ance with local and individual initiative, and generating an equitably 
shared and harmonious abundance. As it turned out, the realization of 
the vision was largely thwarted. But in Lawson’s view, it shaped the 
main outlines of New Deal effort, left important legacies, and may still 
have a future as new reform opportunities arise. 
 In telling this story, Lawson begins with introductory material on 
the emergence of the commonwealth vision, its attractiveness for 
Franklin D. Roosevelt, the crisis produced by a failed “American Sys-
tem,” and the responses foreshadowed by Roosevelt’s campaign in 
1932. He then focuses on the 1933–1935 efforts to fashion a cooperative 
commonwealth, looking in turn at financial reform, industrial policy, 
agricultural adjustment, welfare provision, and cultural promotion. 
He next examines how the New Deal “renewed its lease” in 1935 and 
1936, and how it subsequently consolidated earlier reforms, overcame 
constitutional limitations, established a new political coalition, and 
laid the basis for an effective war administration yet did so at the cost 
of allowing its communal vision to fade and be thwarted. Finally, in a 
short but engrossing epilogue, Lawson comments on the fate of post-
1939 liberalism and suggests that the unrealized but deeply rooted 
vision of 1933 might still guide American responses to a comparable 
crisis. 
 Interpretively, Lawson’s book strengthens arguments that have 
stressed continuities between Progressivism and the New Deal. It also 
seeks, less successfully, to weaken delineations portraying multiple 
and clashing New Deals having different goals and succeeding each 
Book Reviews and Notices      217 
other as the political picture changed. In this regard, Lawson dis-
misses the idea of a Third New Deal as “dubious.” And while he rec-
ognizes policy shifts in 1935 and 1938, he portrays the Second Hun-
dred Days and the Keynesian-informed New Economics as variations 
on his theme of efforts to fashion a cooperative commonwealth. In 
arguments that come through as slightly strained and a bit murky, he 
insists that they shared earlier goals and were still trying to balance 
individualism and collectivism, that the shift from planning to regula-
tion and fiscal management was mostly a shift in methods and tactics, 
and that what needs emphasizing is the complementary nature of 
these various approaches, not their differences.  
 Students of Iowa history will be interested in Lawson’s analysis of 
a farm program professing Jeffersonian ideals yet ending up with a 
subsidized agribusiness system in which yeoman farmers became a 
vanishing breed. Also likely to be of interest are his insightful portray-
als of prominent Iowans in the New Deal, most notably Henry A. Wal-
lace, Harry Hopkins, and Hallie Flanagan. But generally speaking, he 
has little to say about state-level reform efforts, either in terms of gen-
eral patterns or as localized illustrations of national actions and devel-
opments. Nor is anything said about recent arguments, particularly by 
political scientists, attributing the limited achievements and liberal-
ism’s subsequent setbacks to the New Deal’s failure to liberalize gov-
ernmental institutions, structures, and cultures at the state level. Law-
son’s explanation of such shortcomings runs more in terms of crisis 
abeyance, conservative resurgence, and the political and policy mis-
takes of national officials.  
 Also largely ignored is the recent conservative revisionism view-
ing the New Deal as an aberrational departure from American tradi-
tions, which prolonged the depression and deserves study as an error 
to be avoided rather than something to revive and complete. Lawson’s 
underlying assumptions and concluding comments make it clear that 
he views such contentions negatively. But he never confronts them 
directly or takes note of them in a lengthy bibliographical essay re-
flecting his thorough and up-to-date mastery of mainstream New Deal 
historiography. Still, his book might well become a contribution to the 
debates over such revisionism. And as a contribution to the scholarly 
mainstream, it stands out both as a useful and trustworthy synthesis 
and as a stimulating reexamination of ongoing interpretive debates. 
Specialists in the period and in American political development will 
want to read and ponder it, and teachers in those fields might well 
consider it for class adoption. 
 


A Commonwealth of Hope: The New Deal Response to Crisis

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