The Reform Not Traveled: Reconsidering Alan Brinkley's The End of Reform

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• The Reform Not Traveled: Reconsidering Alan Brinkley’s The End of Reform
• Aaron Freedman (bio)

Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. New York: Vintage, 1996. x + 384 pp. Bibliographical references and index. $17.95.

In 1985, Alan Brinkley, then still a relatively young scholar whose first book had only been published two years earlier, took to the pages of this journal to assess a giant: Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform. Thirty years after its original publication, Brinkley wrote, Hofstadter’s treatise loomed over the field of American political history as “something of a relic.” More recent scholarship had pilloried Hofstadter’s often condescending portrayal of the late-nineteenth-century agrarian populists as left-behind reactionaries, and his “consensus school” approach to American history seemed woefully out of date in the wake of the Reagan Revolution’s toppling of the postwar liberal order. The Age of Reform, Brinkley pronounced, had come to “embody something of a scholarly paradox…It is a book whose central interpretations few historians any longer accept, but one whose influence few historians can escape.”¹

Yet despite this tough judgement, now akin to conventional wisdom for generations of students of American history, Brinkley found that something quite useful remained in The Age of Reform, an observation that had in fact improved with age: its understanding of the New Deal not as the completion of a decades-long arc of reform, but as a break from it. As Brinkley noted, Hofstadter had touched on what was still an uncomfortable truth in the 1950s: that the old driving forces of reform—antimonopoly and state planning—had, by the end of Roosevelt’s life, given way to something else entirely. Whereas earlier generations of reformers looked to fundamentally restructure the capitalist system itself, the liberalism ascendent after World War II aspired to a more modest shift: a big business-approved form of Keynesian demand management with a side of social welfare and individual rights protection. Though Brinkley was left dissatisfied with Hofstadter’s treatment of how and why “the language of liberalism, and the substantive direction of liberalism” [End Page 289] had changed, he recognized that question as core to understanding America in the twentieth century.²

It is now nearly thirty years since the publication of The End of Reform, the book in which Brinkley first worked through his own answer to Hofstadter’s question. It is difficult to avoid a comparison of the two scholars. While never reaching quite the stature of Hofstadter at his prime, Brinkley nonetheless became a towering figure in American political history, his influence felt both in the academy and the public sphere. While his 1994 article “The Problem of American Conservatism” in the American Historical Review kickstarted a generation of scholarship on the American right, his best-selling textbooks became some of the most common gateways into American history for high school and college students. And like Hofstadter, Brinkley passed away at a tragically young age, denying him the opportunity to publish scholarship that engaged with new historical trends. Given that, looking back at Brinkley’s work now, it is all too easy to see a relic like Hofstadter’s: a focus on the traditional white, male, elite subjects of political history that largely ignores the role of grassroots political actors and the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality inform politics and the state.

But to end an appraisal of Brinkley here is to miss the enduring relevance of his career-long project of interrogating liberalism. It is an effort that could not be more urgent in the present moment, and one that deserves the same careful consideration that Brinkley himself once afforded to Hofstadter. While many scholars have taken up the history of the New Deal before and since, The End of Reform remains an invaluable examination of one of the great pivot points in American history: the narrowing of the expansive reform project of the populists, progressives, and early New Dealers into the ideology and practice we now know as postwar liberalism. Even more so than Brinkley, the benefit of hindsight allows us to appreciate this liberalism not as some endpoint...