Tugwell

“The kind of social philosophy I was developing under the tutelage of Nearing, reinforced by other instruction,” Tugwell later recalled in his autobiography, “is perhaps best defined in a little book called The Super Race: An American Problem, which Nearing published in 1912.”

A Renegade History of the United States Thaddeus Russell 2010

Rexford Tugwell, a professor in the economics department, occupied one of those offices.

A Renegade History of the United States Thaddeus Russell 2010

Tugwell had been shut off from the pleasures of the body as a child, when asthma and persistent illnesses kept him confined to bed in his rural and isolated hometown in far-western New York State.

A Renegade History of the United States Thaddeus Russell 2010

While Tugwell came to his love for regimentation through the life of the rationalistic mind, General Hugh Johnson came to his through another major source of New Deal culture: the military.

A Renegade History of the United States Thaddeus Russell 2010

Like Tugwell and many future New Dealers, Johnson saw the Great War not as the worthless horror that most Americans considered it to be but as a long-awaited opportunity to militarize all of society.

A Renegade History of the United States Thaddeus Russell 2010

In the early years of the Great Depression, Tugwell wrote a book that he thought America, now in its most desperate hour, could finally take seriously.

A Renegade History of the United States Thaddeus Russell 2010

“He taught me the importance of looking for uniformities, laws, explanations of the inner forces moving behind the façade of events,” Tugwell remembered.

A Renegade History of the United States Thaddeus Russell 2010

On a frigid winter day in 1932, while walking down the street near his office, huddled in his tweed jacket and overcoat, Tugwell encountered a colleague from the political science department named Raymond Moley.

A Renegade History of the United States Thaddeus Russell 2010

Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts, The Tugwell, 249–50

A Renegade History of the United States Thaddeus Russell 2010

Through the 1920s, Tugwell looked wistfully out the window of his Columbia office and wrote a series of articles calling for a return to a wartime society, when “social control” and the “scientific management of human life” would be the order of the day.

A Renegade History of the United States Thaddeus Russell 2010