# Ideologies and Utopias: The Impact of the New Deal on American Thought By Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr. **URL:** **By** Scott Royce **Published:** August 1, 1974 --- “Arthur Ekirch’s Ideologies and Utopias is a fascinating and informative survey of American intellectual reactions to the Great Depression.” Arthur Ekirch’s _Ideologies and Utopias_ is a fascinating and informative survey of American intellectual reactions to the Great Depression. In a scholarly, objective fashion, Ekirch provides the reader with the depressing story of the thinking behind the repudiation of individualism by almost an entire intellectual generation. The economic collapse at the beginning of the Hoover administration led, Ekirch shows, to a period of pessimism and disillusionment coupled with a search for new solutions to the nation’s problems. The severity of the crash and the fact that all classes were hit by it led to a general acceptance of the need for radical approaches to recovery. As Ekirch points out: > Characteristic of all most levels of social and political thought was the conviction that drastic changes had to be made in the American economic and business system.... Significantly, no important economic interest group or social class appeared willing to let natural forces take their way. The author emphasizes the impact on New Deal thinking the U.S. experience with government regulation during World War I. In addition to this familiarity with federal mobilization of human and economic resources under Wilson, many liberal intellectuals of the 1930s still held a self-deceiving view of the Russian communist experiment and considered it worthy of at least partial emulation. Stuart Chase summed up this attitude in his remark: “Why should Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?” Another important influence on early New Deal policies, of course, was Herbert Hoover’s own meddling in the economy. In a work of this sort, the author obviously cannot present an in-depth analysis of each individual discussed, and Ekirch does not. But his commentary and the substantial number of direct quotations used throughout the book do give one a remarkable insight into the thinking of most of the intellectuals cited. Ekirch does examine in some detail such figures as FDR, Hoover, Charles Beard, John Dewey, Henry Wallace, Walter Lippmann, and Oswald Garrison Villard. The author’s perspective on Roosevelt is interesting and far more balance than, say, John T. Flynn’s in _The Roosevelt Myth_. One of the most informative chapters is devoted to the federal arts project and the Federal Theatre. The arts project, Ekirch explains, never really suited many artists since it steered clear of most radicals in the field and ignored specialists in abstract work. Its system of allocating contracts came under attack on the grounds that the feds had attempted to apply “grocer’s standards to painting,” with judgment of quality tending “toward the mean and mediocre.” A perfect example of how subsidies breed controls and how controls impose conformity. The chapter dealing with the response of New Deal-era intellectuals to war and foreign policy is the only really disappointing one in the book: Ekirch’s analysis of this subject seems somewhat hasty and superficial, although sections such as the one describing the flip-flop of Archibald MacLeish on the war question are quite amusing. One would also expect to find in a work of this sort a more thorough examination of why so many old progressives turned against FDR as the New Deal evolved. It must also be noted that Ekirch’s perspective is not strictly a libertarian one. “Whatever the final verdict of history,” Ekirch concludes in his preface, “it seems likely that the New Deal will rank, and be remembered, as a revolutionary era in American thinking.” The revolution he refers to constituted the abandonment of the old individualism and the substitution, in the Beards’ phrase, of “an interlaced system of exchange and mutuality correctly described as collectivism.” _Ideologies and Utopias_ provides valuable insight into the thinking of the “intellectuals” who helped bring about this change during the New Deal era, who helped create the policies of government which still afflict the United States. _Reviewed by Scott Royce / Intellectual History (307 Pages) / BFL Price $2.95_