Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal had two legacies – a welfare state and a warfare state.
Admirers of FDR focus on the legacy of the 1930s – the creation of Social Security and strengthening of the social safety net, the massive public works programs and job programs, the guarantee of the right to collective bargaining and the growth of a powerful administrative and regulatory state.
But just as important – maybe even more important – is the legacy of the 1940s. The New Deal programs mitigated the Great Depression, but they did not end it. That only happened with the coming of World War Two and an economic boom based on war production.
The war economy made possible the re-industrialization of the United States. Wartime investment in manufacturing capacity produced seeming miracles in production that carried over into peacetime for decades.
The New Dealers established military bases in Europe and Asia, the beginning of the empire of bases that exists to this day. They built the Pentagon. They created the OSS and then the CIA. They created the atomic bomb and incorporated the A-bomb into American military strategy.
If not for FDR and the New Deal, the atomic bomb would not have come into existence when it did.
It is not just that Roosevelt personally authorized the research program that produced the atomic bomb. Without the New Deal’s great hydroelectric projects on the Tennessee and Colombia rivers, the U.S. would not have had the industrial capacity to create a uranium bomb (at Oak Ridge, TN) and a plutonium bomb (at Hanford, WA).
Under Harry Truman, FDR’s chosen successor, the U.S. government chose to continue its wartime alliances, maintain its overseas bases, incorporate atomic weapons into the nation’s war strategy and maintain full employment through war spending.
Two important positive things about the wartime New Deal, from the progressive standpoint, are that it gave the labor union leadership a place at the table in war planning, and that it at least gave lip service to the need for civil rights and equal employment opportunity for African Americans. Both these things were needed for full war mobilization, and also for Democratic electoral victory.
I don’t deny the idealistic and reforming impulses behind the New Deal. They were an important part of its legacy, but they weren’t the only part. Idealism seldom wins without being allied to someone’s interests.