In “The Achievement of the New Deal,” William E. Leuchtenburg defends FDR against left-wing academics, who deplore the president’s long reign as insufficiently revolutionary and anti-capitalist:
Before 1933 the government had paid heed primarily to a single group — white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males. The Roosevelt administration, however, recruited from a more ethnically diverse medley, symbolized by Ben Cohen and Tommy Corcoran, the Jew and the Irish Catholic… though, in the entire history of the republic of nearly a century and a half before 1933 only four Catholics had ever served in a cabinet, FDR, in choosing his first cabinet, named two.
That is what Franklin Roosevelt accomplished, Arnold Kling reminds us:
I think that if you want to understand why Roosevelt won such a landslide in 1936 and why the “Roosevelt coalition” was a significant force in American politics at least until the 1970′s, the Masonomics concept of group status is key. The biggest surge in population in the 1920′s had been among non-Protestants — the “hyphenated Americans” from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe. Roosevelt gave them unprecedented status recognition. On rights for African-Americans, he moved forward just enough to earn the gratitude and loyalty of blacks in the North (where they could vote), while not moving forward fast enough to lose the racists of the Solid South. (The racists stuck with Roosevelt in part because they had nowhere else to go. Even as late as the 1960′s, Republicans were not willing to be as racially regressive as southern Democrats. In 1948, for example, when Strom Thurmond ran against Truman, instead of joining the Republicans Thurmond formed the Dixiecrats.)