A Critique of New Deal Social Planning as it Affects Negroes
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4049502 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ralph J Bunche (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1936 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 59 |
| Publication date | 1936-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Negro Education (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-2984 • E-ISSN: 2167-6437 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2292355 |
| OpenAlex | W2328622802 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
The New Deal, at its inception, confronting an economy of chaos, proclaimed its major purpose to be the application of planning to our entire social structure. In pursuance of this objective a whole series of complicated and contradictory mechanisms have been invented and set up with the purpose of effecting a regulated orderliness in the economic life of the nation. But after two years of frantic trial and error, the New Deal, and most of its elaborate machinery, remains suspended in mid-air, bewildered, and innocuous. Relief expenditures have continued to rise, and unemployment was greater at the end of the year 1934 than it was in December, 1933. Even the staunchest supporters of the New Deal, though still weakly professing optimism, are often compelled to admit that its ideology is illogical, inconsistent, vague, and confused; that its program is composed of a mass of selfcontradictory experimentation, and that, in its unblushing r6le of political coquette, it turns now to the left, now to the right. The explanations of the New Deal and of its apparent failure are not far to seek. The New Deal merely represents our domestic phase of the almost universal attempt in capialistic countries to establish a new equilibrium in the social structure; an attempt made necessary by the fact that the collapse of the economic structures under the world-wide depression brought out, in bold relief, the sharp class antagonisms which the developing capitalistic economies had nurtured. The history of the operation of social forces in the Western world since the World War is sharply outlined in at least two particulars: (1) Capitalists, i.e., Big Owners, have clearly indicated their inability and unwillingness to afford any leadership in the society which would promise even a meager measure of social justice to the masses of population, though the productive and organizational genius of capitalism is unchallenged; (2) on the other hand, the working classes of the countries of Western Europe,Russiaexcepted, though winning their way to a position of real power in the state, completely failed to take over the controls of the state, either through political channels or by force. The result has been a significant upsurge of the middle classes of the Western world, whose claim to national leadership is predicated on their assumed ability to reconcile these conflicting class interests in the society through the establishment of a new equilibrium;-a new society, in fact, in which conflicting group interests and inequalities will be merged in a higher national purpose
Political science · Sociology · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies
| Citations per year | 0.32 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2004 - 2024 (21) |
| Highly cited | No |