also because, as all revolutions do, it split dramatically from what had come before it.
We read, for example, from Hacker, that "the New Deal had parted completely with the nineteenth century conception of the laissez-faire, or passive, state; Americans were fully launched on the experiment of state capitalism . . . Capitalism's progress . . . had slowed down, if it had not ceased altogether. Now the state had to assume positive functions . . . (Rozwenc, 1959, p. 18).
Hacker notes that the government not only "magnified and extended . . . its role as umpire," it also greatly expanded its social powers and responsibilities and, very significantly, "began to initiate projects and undertakings of a distinctly economic character. The national state . . . was beginning to take on . . . the essential color of private enterprise" Rozwenc, 1959, p. 18).
This New Deal-as-Revolution standpoint is supported by Beschloss, who writes that Roosevelt's own thinking and general political vision were themselves revolutionary rather than evolutionary: "The New Deal embodied Roosevelt's vision of government . . . Its role was not only to provide immediate relief and recovery but to implement justice, equality, liberty, and other higher principles through collective action . . . This overarching national purpose was implicit in domestic policy; the coming of war compelled the President to codify it in declarations such as the Four Freedoms and the economic Bill of Rights" (Beschloss, 1980, pp. 272-273).
In his biography of Lyndon Johnson, Eric Goldman argues that Johnson's major socioeconomic legislative program was merely a continuation of the Roosevelt revolution via the New Deal: "Nations change not at a steady pace but in slow swings or in rampant ru
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