Mayor de Blasio’s invocation of historical precedent in Sunday morning’s speech on the recovery from the novel coronavirus pandemic – the Great Depression and the New Deal, the 1975 fiscal crisis in New York City – was striking for its inclusion but also for its absence of detail. Everyone right now is invoking “history” in a broad sense to capture the nature of the crisis and our hopes and needs for the world after. But few of our political leaders invoke history in anything but the vaguest, most moralistic terms. The mayor and others would be wise turn to historians for specific examples of how Americans have used crises to imagine new futures, to envision policies for recovery that might lead to deeper transformations of American society.
A new weekly prize jointly administered by the Stanton Association and the Applied History Project at Harvard’s Belfer Center calls for historians to provide both context and potential solutions to the major problems we face today. The first winner was an article that suggested that Congress expand the definition of a “small business” to allow more businesses to reorganize their debts through bankruptcy. To do so would help prevent what Herbert Hoover called the “futile and destructive” liquidation of companies. Those companies would thus find it easier to reopen when social distancing measures are relaxed. We are fortunate that the American Historical Association and other organizations have new initiatives to support the application of history to the present. But it would be even better if City Hall and other government entities proactively engaged historians as advisers not only to illuminate the context of the pandemic but to look for ways to use history to help form policy and enrich culture.
A complex understanding of our past that encompasses successful examples of cooperation and innovative thought is crucial to the creation of an emancipatory vision of the future. Myriad responses to the Great Depression, for example, reveal the political and cultural resources history has to offer. The fear of the collapse of capitalism led to creative solutions in the 1930s. Among other examples of concerted political action, collective bargaining became a powerful safeguard for workers and a limit to corporate dominance over labor policy. The Fair Employment Practices Committee banned discrimination against Blacks in government and defense jobs. Southern states and pro-business groups limited the extent of federal control over welfare, development, and regulatory programs. But even though interest groups and racism weakened the possibility of more radical thinking, systemic calls for change led to the expansion of important benefits, such as healthcare and social security, not just for organized labor but for society writ large.
Historians can also help policymakers remember ideas that could have made a difference but did not. Conservatives persuaded Richard Nixon to veto congressional legislation for a national childcare system in 1971. Welfare-rights advocates like Shirley Chisholm nonetheless tenaciously fought “institutional violence and poverty” in their drive for universal basic income, so that housework and childcare were given real economic value. In a counter-example, the military welfare state extended benefits of education, childcare, housing assistance, and medical care to enlisted men and women after Vietnam. Attempts to defend those social welfare programs against political attack from the right, privatization, and outsourcing offer a lesson in how to protect traditional benefits.
Several scholars have spearheaded a Change.org campaign calling on the federal government to strengthen funding for the humanities in the wake of the crisis. As higher education leaders announce drastic budget cuts, current legislation is insufficient to prevent damage to the universities that number among our most important institutions. Funding cuts by state legislatures and a host of other decisions has raised tuition by 260 percent over the past 40 years at the same time as $1.6 trillion in student debt has limited the possibilities of a generation. To meet the challenges of this new era, the government should consider expanding its funds in ways that allow for the cancelling student debt, the growth of financial aid, and the conversion of contingent positions into full-time employment. Without financial infusions similar to the GI Bill after World War II, we may “lose the most vital economic and intellectual engines of our nation.”
Large-scale programs like the GI Bill provide good examples of the beneficial use of government power for all sorts of different groups. Funding for initiatives like that support literature, music, and art are of special importance for New York City. During the Great Depression, the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration and other programs employed artists and writers. The Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture was responsible for making art “accessible to all people” by funding murals at post offices in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens that still exist today. Historical attempts to weave social safety nets with or without government support are reminders to today’s policymakers to think creatively about how the city, state, and federal government can provide for family security, which will allow people to return to work and care for the most vulnerable in our nation. The experience of women radicals in the Black Panther Party, like Kathleen Cleaver, offers lessons why and how to ensure gender equality in local leadership training for survival programs like the Free Breakfast for Children Program.
Historians of immigration have turned a spotlight on groups that are often ignored but are a large percentage of those who perform what have been reclassified as essential jobs. Anti-Asian prejudice has a long existed in U.S. public health policies that have used distorted images of Asians as disease carrying threats to justify exclusionary immigration policies and the indefinite detention of immigrants. Anti-immigrant bias is not only unfounded but counterproductive. Immigrants are more crucial than ever to the food supply chain. Understanding labor and civil rights activism in immigration history can help us understand ways government at different levels can support immigrants’ rights. Farmworkers in more rural areas, warehouse workers in distribution centers, and grocery store employees and delivery drivers in New York City deserve government oversight over their working conditions and protection of their socio-economic rights.
History is also full of examples of successful cooperation and innovative thought, models to emulate as we look not only to recover but to transform our society into a better one. Just as they should at home, governments at different levels should create opportunities for citizen diplomacy, which can encourage cross-cultural and international understanding. Programs for youth orchestras, journalists, or doctors in the 1980s shattered some of the enmity of the Cold War. Such programs, which are easily applicable on a city-to-city scale, emphasize shared challenges and the transfer of useful technology and information. More importantly, they can remind us that the civic virtues of kindness and humanity move across borders as easily as weapons or disease.
History is also replete with failures that are teachable moments for the present. During the New Deal and in the 1970s, entrenched interests pushed back against calls for economic redistribution to create a more equitable society. Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and the Business Roundtable and politicians like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney attacked social spending as irresponsible during the 1975 New York City fiscal crisis. “Government is a menace,” Treasury Secretary William Simon famously said, blaming economic crisis on generosity. Austerity and sacrifice for the vulnerable in the name of liberated markets has been an ugly bargain, marked by the mammoth increase in inequality in wealth and power. Even a cursory look at recent history reminds us that privatization is not a morally superior way to organize the recovery, and that notions of “market freedom” have created many of the systemic problems we face today.
Many people in history have seen the interconnections between inequality at home and the practice of U.S. power abroad. The feverish triumphalism of the 1990s, during which government acceded power to the market at the same time as it vastly increased police power at home and military spending abroad, does not provide an adequate blueprint for today. On the international scale, military adventurism and the obsession with national security have not achieved the stated aims of promoting peace. Instead, U.S. military power more often serves as an instrument of intimidation or repression. The massive waste of national resources used for war and policing in the second half of the twentieth century remind us to actively contest the waves of nationalism, militarism, and anti-intellectualism that threaten our future.
It will be useful for policymakers to remember Martin Luther King, Jr.’s reminder that poverty, racism, and militarism are all linked in American history. We must also remember that the denigration in the past of Cadillac Sheikhs, Cadillac Queens, and other stereotypical villains were harmful to the cause of constructive social, economic, or foreign policies.
In times of uncertainty, history is not a shackle that binds us. Rather, history offers the necessary mooring to overcome today’s vertigo. Whether it involves policies relating to labor, finance, welfare, or international relations, knowledge about our past will help us spring into the future with wisdom and imagination. City Hall and other local governments should consult historians frequently if they want successful outcomes. Even better, historical task forces will help them fulfill their duty of protecting the economic and social rights of individuals, finding potential bases for successful cooperation, and reflecting on the equitable distribution of resources and material wealth.
Christopher Dietrich is a historian of U.S. foreign relations and Director of American Studies at Fordham University and Chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Twentieth Century Politics and Society.
