Course Description

Instructor: David Slavin

Rethinking the Democratic Party, 1896-1966: white supremacy and the "New Deal Order"

Coalescing around a symbiotic relationship between the Southern, Dixiecrat ruling elite and the big-city party machines in the Northeast and Midwest, this tandem duopoly determined policies of the New Deal and Great Society and shaped how the Democrats responded to the two great mass upheavals of the era that challenged the power of capital: the labor organizing drives of the Great Depression and WW2 era and the Civil Rights revolution of 1955-1968.

Bio: PhD. in world and US history; 30 years teaching experience; prior to teaching I was a labor organizer in construction and communications industry in NYC metro area; 2015-2019 offered course at OLLI on race privilege, class, social control, the New Deal