The jobs programs were widely criticized as "boondoggles" and "leaf-raking." Allegations of political favoritism and corruption were widespread. In the 1938 off-year elections, Democrats lost 81 House seats, 51 of them in the industrial belt from Pennsylvania and Upstate New York west to the Upper Midwest. The Democratic governors of Michigan and Ohio were defeated for re-election. The congressional district that included Flint, Mich., site of the first sit-in strike, went from Democratic to Republican; so did most congressional districts in Ohio.

As pro-New Deal historians have conceded, New Deal policies no longer had congressional majorities, given the opposition of many Southern Democrats. Nor was the outlook for Democrats rosy as the 1940 elections approached. Polling, then in its rudimentary stages, suggested that Republicans would win if the election were decided on domestic issues.

But in September 1939, World War II broke out in Europe. In June 1940, France fell; Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, then allies, seemed to have most of Europe under their sway. Just days later, the Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie, an attractive candidate with no experience in foreign policy. The Democrats met in July, and Roosevelt sent a letter saying that he did not want to be a candidate. But, with help from the Chicago commissioner of sewers piping over a loudspeaker, "We want Roosevelt!" the president was renominated. He won his third term in November not, as he put it later, as "Dr. New Deal," but as an experienced leader when the nation was facing grave peril.

"The American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory," Roosevelt declared in his Pearl Harbor speech, and so they did by September 1945. In my view, it was the war effort, the mobilization of big government, big business and big labor, that much more than the New Deal enhanced the prestige of the state. It got Americans proud of thinking of themselves as small cogs in very large machines. It made them amenable to statist policies that they would never have accepted in the 1920s and at which many of them were bridling in the late 1930s.

No two political times are ever the same. But as we watch the stimulus package moving to passage, we get the whiff of bailout favoritism and crony capitalism that was also present in the New Deal. The forced unionization envisaged by the card-check bill may prove to be no more popular than the unionization forced by the sit-ins was in Michigan and Ohio in 1938. Today's Democratic programs may get as mixed a political reaction as the New Deal did in the years before World War II.