Making sense of this crazy world

I’m calling these next few episodes “A Revolution from Below” when it’s not a revolution, it didn’t even bring about revolutionary change, certainly not when we look at America today, but it did bring about significant change and the genie hasn’t been put completely back in the bottle. And I call it “A Revolution from Below” because I want to look at what “ordinary” African Americans did to bring about a change. In this episode, as the titles tells you, I'm looking at the desegregation of American schools.

In this episode we are on the cusp of the Civil Rights Movement  and we are going to look at the immediate context: war in Europe and independence in Africa, and we are going to look at the early impact of Dr Martin Luther King and a speech he made in Montgomery, Alabama: "The Birth of a New Nation".

The thing we really have to bear in mind in this episode is that the laws we are going to look at were state laws, enacted with little interference from the Federal Government or from the Supreme Court. So, this is racism of the educated, not the ignorant; racism of the cultured, not the uncivilised; and it was institutional racism, embedded in organisations and institutions; and structural racism, written into policies and even laws.

In this episode and the next, I want to make clear the degree of racism in America in the 1950s and into the 1960s. It will not only help us not only understand the civil rights movement, but it will help us better understand America today. Because as I’ve said on a number of occasions, racism is embedded in American society, Trump and the white supremacists haven’t come out of nowhere.

What we are going to look at in this episode is the response of classical liberals as they faced up to their first experience of social liberalism or what Americans call progressivism. 

Whereas the measures we have looked at that help to make up Roosevelt’s New Deal could be seen as emergency measures, necessary in a crisis, now we turn to more fundamental measures in that they introduce controls on capitalism that were intended to be permanent, and were intended to place controls on capitalism’s excesses, in effect to tame it.

Last week I focused on the impact of the Wall Street Crash on the American economy and what Roosevelt’s New Deal did to, in effect, save capitalism from itself. This week, I’m going to focus on people and what Roosevelt’s New Deal did to help them through the crisis. We would regard Roosevelt’s New Deal as a healthy dose of social liberalism, Americans, however, would regard it as an example of progressivism.

With the Wall Street Crash, American capitalism and the American people were in an absolute mess. And this week, I’m going to focus on the economy and what Roosevelt’s New Deal did to save capitalism; from itself.

With our eyes firmly fixed on classical liberalism, laissez faire, minimal government; for the second time on this Podcast, I want to look again at the Wall Street Crash.

Having looked at the People’s Budget of 1909 in Britain, I’m turning our attention to America and Roosevelt’s New Deal, his response to the catastrophic Great Depression, his attempt, in his own words, to ‘save capitalism’, I’ll add: to save capitalism from itself. Now, if you’ve been following my podcast over the years, we’ve explored the New Deal over some twelve episodes in my series on Industrialisation and Capitalism. I’m not going to repeat all that, the focus here is going to be on how classic liberalism led to the crisis and how Roosevelt’s New Deal applied social liberalism to ease the situation and ensure there would be no repeat.