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Retrenchment in a Period of Defensive Opposition to the New Deal: The Business Community and the Public Schools, 1932–1934

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Extract

In the political ferment which followed economic collapse in 1929, many hallowed business symbols lost their luster. Politicians mocked openly at “rugged individualism” and “natural economic law.” In President Roosevelt's speeches the major domestic enemies appeared as the “unscrupulous money changers” and the “resplendent economic autocracy,” who sought “to carry the property and interest entrusted to them into the arena of partisan politics.” A proliferation of unorthodox political ideas and movements threatened the status quo. “Technocracy,” for example, was widely discussed as a method of bringing about a planned Utopia under the direction of the engineers. New concepts potentially dangerous to the status quo emerged from the “Keynesian Revolution.” The shock of economic collapse, followed by uncertainty and New Deal attacks, marked the beginning of the most formidable challenge to the business community in American history.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1962, University of Pittsburgh Press 

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References

Notes

1. Annual Message to Congress, 3 January 1936,” in Mason, Alpheus T., ed., Free Government in the Making: Readings in American Political Thought (New York, 1949), 776–79.Google Scholar

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3. Klein, Robert L., The Keynesian Revolution (New York, 1947), 165–87.Google Scholar

4. New York Times, May 27, 1932.Google Scholar

5. Ibid. See also ibid., Jan. 1, 1932.Google Scholar

6. Chamber of Commerce of the U. S., Local Fiscal Problems (Washington, 1928), 25.Google Scholar

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