Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940 [Paperback]

The New Deal is a era of history which of which I frequently heard but really knew very little about. We knew that it was a very important period of our history in which the Roosevelt administration attacked the depression with an alphabet soup of agencies. The New Deal managed to alter the political balance of the United States for the balance of the century, but which was really unsuccessful in ending the depression until the advent of World War II. It was to learn more about what really went on during the New Deal that I opened William E. Leuchtenburg's "Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal". I was very pleased as I read this book.

At the start of the book I was expecting this to be a propaganda piece for FDR. While the author seems to view the New Deal with favor, I did find the book to seem to be a rather even handed account of this period of history.

Leuchtenburg begins the book with an analysis of the conditions existing at the beginning of the New Deal. The advancing gloom of 1932 provides the background for the beginning of the story. The progressively desperate measures of the Hoover administration are contrasted with the rising tide of the Roosevelt movement in the Democratic Party. The shadows of despair lengthened in the winter between the November elections and the March inauguration. This section of the book both reinforced and challenged my prior understandings. The fact that the economy deteriorated significantly over the winter was confirmed. My prior readings, presented from President Hoover's point of view, emphasized Roosevelt's unwillingness to endorse any attempts by the administration to deal with the worsening crisis. Rather than illustrating a shallow and indifferent character, Leuchtenburg presents the time as one in which Roosevelt resisted Hoover's attempts to commit the new administration to continue programs favored by the old.

The section on the first 100 days emphasizes the uncritical manner with which the Congress rushed to approve most measures sent to the Hill from the White House. The session of 1934 was another time of accomplishment for the Administration although the front of solidarity began to crack.

The High Tide of the New Deal came with the election of 1936 in which Roosevelt carried all states except Maine and Vermont. In the aftermath of the election, as occurs after so many landslides, Roosevelt over reached his grasp and suffered a major rebuff with the defeat of his court packing bill in 1937. Over this issue, Roosevelt alienated some of his most loyal supporters, including his own vice-president. With that battle, the New Deal had, for the most part, exhausted itself. While domestic challenges remained, the New Deal had run out of answers. The hope of 1933 had given way to a sense of hopelessness as the economy plunged again in 1938. The specter of permanent massive unemployment was seen by more and more as the New Deal initiatives failed to end the depression.

Toward the end of the thirties, the challenges rose on the overseas horizons. Leuchtenburg skillfully narrates the change of focus of the administration from moving the country out of the fear of the depression to one of moving the country to face the dangers looming abroad. Roosevelt's struggles against the strong strain of isolationism are skillfully presented.

There are several things which I learned from this book. The New Deal as a modification to preserve the social order, rather than as a revolution to upend that order is a point well made. The delineation between the steps which Roosevelt would take as opposed to those which he would not consider were interesting. The mention that the main concern of the New Deal was the plight of the farmer came as a surprise to me. I had always thought that it was mainly concerned with industry. The acknowledgment that full employment was not achieved until 1943 says much about the economic effectiveness of the New Deal. I finished the book with a much better understanding of what the New Deal was than I started out with.

As the title indicates, this book is primarily about Franklin Roosevelt. While many other actors in the drama, both within and without the administration, play important roles, the focus is always on Roosevelt. This is proper because, in truth, Roosevelt was the master of the New Deal. The book makes the point that if the gun of Zangara has struck down the Roosevelt, rather than Cermak in Miami, a Gardner administration would have directed history much differently. Truly this was a case in which a great personality did make a great difference.

The treatment of FDR is very good. Stressing his initiatives, which met with both success and failure, Leuchtenburg gives us a view of the influence of Franklin D. Roosevelt on history through his leadership of the New Deal. There is no place in this book for an inquiry into personal lives, so common in modern historical and biographical literature.

This book is an excellent choice for anyone interested in an overview of the New Deal. I would recommend it for teachers at the high school or collegiate level for class assignments, students looking for materials for book reports, or anyone wishing to acquaint himself with a fascinating and influential period in our history. It fulfilled all of the hopes with which I opened the book.

Historian William Leuchtenburg, one of the most prominent American scholars writing about America in the 1930s, wrote "Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940" as a response to other researchers who "tended to minimize the significance of the changes wrought by the thirties." According to the author, these historians "have stressed, quite properly, the continuity between the New Deal reforms and those of other periods, and especially the many debts the New Dealers owed the progressives." Unfortunately, they "have too often obscured the extraordinary developments of the decade." Leuchtenburg's book examines the savage effects of the depression and the wild experimentation in the arenas of politics and society that the Roosevelt administration undertook to alleviate America's economic woes. Far from indulging in panegyric, the author takes care to expose Roosevelt's weaknesses and failings alongside the president's triumphs. The book marshals an impressive array of manuscripts from Roosevelt intimates and political associates, congressional papers, and published works to construct an intricate examination of the New Deal years.

The Great Depression was a horror that improved little after Roosevelt's election. The year 1932 was an unmitigated disaster for millions of Americans as the economy continued its downward spiral. The national income dropped to half of what it had been in 1929. Nine million savings accounts evaporated when banks closed. In New York City, a couple lived in a cave in Central Park for more than a year. Teachers in Chicago fainted in the classrooms from hunger. Farmers lost lands held by their families for generations because they could not earn enough money to pay their debts. Milo Reno's Farm Holiday Association refused to ship food, Wisconsin dairymen dumped milk on the side of the road, and farmers blocked the sales of foreclosed property. Coal miners in Pennsylvania bootlegged nearly $100,000 of coal a day from company owned fields. Every aspect of society faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and the country looked with weary eyes to President-elect Franklin Roosevelt for answers when he assumed office in March 1933. Leuchtenburg's book does as excellent a job summarizing the plight faced by every sector of American society as it does describing the president's initiatives to battle the innumerable difficulties.

While elections, political battles, and economic recovery programs fill most of the pages of the book, the author's greatest contribution to the study of 1930s American political life is his analysis of the forces driving President Roosevelt. For example, the book discerns two distinct public philosophies that drove the formation of New Deal policy. Leuchtenburg believes that Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism-carried on by men like Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Rexford Tugwell-was the most influential. So was Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom, supported by Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter. Advocates of the former generally supported planned economies and were suspicious of free competition. The latter believed trust busting would return small businesses to prominence in America. The new nationalists largely presided over the early New Deal; the ideology of Brandeis and Frankfurter emerged later during the Second New Deal of 1935. Neither philosophy trumped the other, however, because Roosevelt never committed himself to either a planned economy or a return to small-scale business.

The president's assumption of the middle ground between the proponents of the New Nationalism and the New Freedom philosophies was, according to Leuchtenburg, typical Roosevelt. His personality played a large role in the direction the New Deal ultimately took. The chief executive often encouraged his subordinates to thrash out the details of a specific idea, allowed them to compete against each other, and then stepped in to shape the idea into final form. This aggressive competition led some to label the president a mediocre administrator who often procrastinated when faced with a serious challenge, a charge Leuchtenburg convincingly reputes. Rather, this "procrastination" was a way of "observing a trial by combat among rival theories" to see which idea was the best. For all of the dissension over economic proposals, Roosevelt's dynamic creativity and ability to attract scores of smart, talented men to Washington helped many New Deal ideas to succeed. While the president's personality led him to encourage a "combat of rival theories," the American public felt they knew a different Roosevelt; a warm, fatherly figure who tried to help each individual and who made the federal government accessible to the public.

A troubling omission is the wartime sedition trial of American far right figures. United States v. McWilliams, as the case was known, is relevant here because it evolved directly out of the far right's loathing of the president's New Deal policies. The government, at the president's insistence, charged the defendants with involvement in a worldwide Nazi conspiracy. When Attorney General Francis Biddle told Roosevelt that any charges filed against these individuals would violate first amendment protections, the chief executive was blithely unconcerned. He hounded Biddle constantly about the issue, and even kept a stack of far right publications in his desk drawer that he would pull out as "evidence" of the need for action. Historians Leo Ribuffo and Glen Jeansonne have rightly labeled the indictments and subsequent trial a sham, with Ribuffo going so far as to conclude that Roosevelt's prosecution set a precedent subsequently used to great effect against far left figures in the 1950s.

James Thomas Flexner, in his one volume biography of George Washington, claimed that America's first chief executive succeeded because he acted as a balance between the competing interests of Alexander Hamilton's Federalism and Thomas Jefferson's Republicanism. Leuchtenburg's book makes a similar claim for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In a time of great national stress a president arose who successfully put America on a path to stability by mediating between competing philosophies. Even though the book turned forty last year, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 is an erudite, single volume history that continues to stand as a definitive statement of the Roosevelt era.

I have very much enjoyed this book. It appears very objective - relatively speaking - and describes both the benefits and failures of the New Deal Economic policies and social advancement. It acknowledges the second crash of 1937 and the many problems incurred. And yet it does not deny the social progress that has helped millions of voices that were otherwise previously unheard in the political arena of American life.

The book takes on FDR and the New Deal Administration's efforts and set backs. It does however fail in the reasons of economics, the deeper structural reasons as to why many of the New Deal measures failed. The books does write of the Gold buying, the TVA, the higher taxes, the farm subsidies, relief efforts, the 100's of Acts, the Supreme Court decisions, the internal affairs and problems. What I especially enjoyed was the descriptions and political views of many of the other running mates as in Father Coughlin - a Yahoo, Huey Long and "Share the Wealth," Upton Sinclair, Merman, Wilkes - others and the political climate of socialism through out the country.

Immediately after reading this book, I began reading another book called "FDR's Folly," by Jim Powell, which is an anti-New Deal account with detailed analysis pertaining to the economic policies and their failures, written from a lazzaire-faire, Free Market, and Libertarian viewpoint - a bias account which supports the old two-class capitalism, and yet is also an excellent book. A good pro-New Deal on Social Security is Joe Cnason's "The Raw Deal." I recommend reading these books, as this one by William E. Leuchtenburg is more detailed in the social advancements as Powell's is more detailed on economics.