How World War II saved the New Deal.

• Author: Willson, John

World war II was a godsend to American liberals. The New Deal had been dead in the water since 1937, torpedoed by its fundamental failure to effect an end to the Depression and its increasingly annoying meddling with traditional patterns of American life. A conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats blocked almost all of Pres. Franklin a Roosevelt's initiatives until the foreign policy crisis of 1939-41.

That crisis renewed the President's vigor and allowed him gradually to maneuver the U.S. into a position that made entering the war in Europe and the Pacific inevitable. He was aided immeasurably by the recklessness of the Japanese and Germans. Nothing unites people like a common enemy. Since foreign policy always reflects domestic policy (and that goes for military policy, too), it should surprise nobody that the New Dealers geared up for war in New Deal ways. What happened between 1941 and 1945 was an expansion of the national state so vast as to be virtually irreversible.

Conservative Americans were pretty sure this would happen. Sen. Robert A. Taft (R.-Ohio), son of Pres. William Howard Taft, a patrician educated for leadership, and a traditional American from the heartland, is a case in point. "The basic foreign policy of the United States," he said in 1939, should be strength, independence, and to "preserve peace with other nations, and enter into no treaties which may obligate us to go to war." He argued that Americans have little business trying to affect the outcomes of conflicts that are not their own and that war would "almost certainly destroy democracy in the United States."

Taft was especially suspicious of the notion that the U.S. should "undertake to defend the ideals of democracy in foreign countries." He added that no "single nation should range over the world, like a knight-errant, protect democracy and ideals of good faith, and tilt, like Don Quixote, against the windmills of fascism." The national interest of the U.S., he believed, was to protect liberty at home, not extend it abroad. "We have moved far toward totalitarian government already," he warned in 1939. "The additional powers [already] sought by the President in case of war, the nationalization of all industry and all capital and all labor ... would create a socialist dictatorship which it would be impossible to dissolve once the war is over."

He opposed every Roosevelt war initiative, the draft and Lend-Lease particularly (although he supported a strong defense, especially an air force). He even refused a deal that might have given him the 1940 presidential nomination. Once the bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor, however, Taft knew which side he was on and rallied others to the Allied cause. Nevertheless, as he confessed in private to his wife, he still feared that the war would harm the nation, dragging it towards "war and bankruptcy and socialism all at once. Let's hope I'm wrong."

Ironically, the New Dealers shared Taft's pessimism, but for different reasons. They did not realize that the war finally had helped them to achieve what they could not in peacetime. In December, 1943, FDR told the...