New Deal Themes

Elizabeth Cohen presents five themes in Making a New Deal: “the significance of mass consumption, the nature of ethnic and racial identity, the social underpinnings of civic engagement, the fate of welfare capitalism, and the gendering of unions and the welfare state.” She attempts to contribute to the social and cultural study of Chicago’s industrial working-class. Cohen described the transitional period of maintaining ethnic identity in the 1920s to eliminating racial and ethnic divisions to become a “culture of unity” in politics under the new Democratic Party and the uniting of workers in the national Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) union in the 1930s. Cohen argument centers on a multitude of ethnic groups in Southern

She contends that welfare capitalism was an effort by employers to insert a kind of industrial paternalism by sponsoring social welfare policies. These policies took the form of sports teams, social clubs, educational and cultural activities, providing company insurance policies, and in some cases housing. Cohen claims these ethnic groups avoided the welfare capitalism by socializing within their individual ethnic communities. These communities contained local banks and providing local insurance policies. Accomplishing daily shopping at local “mom and pop” stores, they attended neighborhood theaters while listing to local radio stations produced by “members of their own ethnic and religious communities.” These ethnic groups preferred to stay within their ethnic communities because they trusted those who spoke the same language and had the same religion. Cohen argues that these groups did not believe in the welfare state or receiving assistance from the state. Raised on Old world values, those in need received assistance from family, friends, neighbors, or the church, believing that it reflected poorly on their whole race if they accepted assistance from the

Cohen describes the effects of job elimination, layoffs, less working hours, and lower pay for these groups. How employers and ethnic supports groups could not support the mass relief efforts. She describes “how Chicago’s factory workers, who had been isolated from the federal government and unorganized on the eve of the depressions, came to hold the view that a strong state and strong unions could remedy the failure of capitalism so glaring in the Great Depression. She accomplishes this by “outlining how and why workers turned to the federal government” and “the way they (workers) became invested in a national union