THE NEW DEAL “DEMOCRACY OF OPPORTUNITY”

When the great New Deal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. defined the subject of his classic trilogy, The Age of Roosevelt, as “the crisis of the old order,” the “old order” he had in mind was the constitutional political economy of Lochnerism.¹ The stock market crash, the financial breakdown, and the Great Depression brought mass economic suffering and dread for the future. By election eve 1932, it was plain to a majority of Americans that the country’s business and financial elites were quite unable to repair the nation’s broken economy. Yet, Lochnerism’s classical liberal precepts limited the scope of government’s authority