the feminist librarian reads

In an important sense, the intersection of the progressive legislation of the 1930s and 1940s and the economic trends of the postwar decades created the American middle class as we once knew it. But that’s not the end of the story. As the gap between rich and poor shrank under Roosevelt and his successors, racial inequality grew. One segment of the American working class was permitted to lift itself into middle-class status while another was not. This peculiar phenomenon—the mainsprings of modern American racial inequality—had its roots in the deeply discriminatory nature of the New Deal state. Black workers were systematically excluded from the key social insurance and regulatory programs; they found it difficult to access the G.I. Bill’s benefits, when those benefits were administered locally; the red-lining of residential neighborhoods and government support for Jim Crow suburbanization cut them out of the greatest wealth-building exercise in American history. Franklin Roosevelt was at least complicit in all these policies. Yet if “The Roosevelts”is good evidence, we have not yet truly incorporated this history into our collective memory of FDR’s career.