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The Crisis of the Old Order: 1919-1933, The Age of Roosevelt, Volume I

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This book won the Francis Parkman Prize by the Society of American Historians for excellence in historical writing and the Bancroft Prize for historical excellence at the same time. The three-volume "Age of Roosevelt" is an important history of the Great Depression era, written by a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author. The research of the period in this history is so good that it is considered practically a primary source itself.

This also is renowned book for its look at American politics and, in general, political science. If you are student of American history or politics, this book is essential reading.

At the same time, most general readers interested in President Franklin Roosevelt should read a good FDR biography first before reading this history of the Great Depression era second.

"The Crisis of the Old Order," the first volume, brilliantly covers the years leading up to the Great Depression and then the three long years of Depression under the Republican Congress and Herbert Hoover. The facts are reported as if you were there. Hoover callously said that unemployed people desperately selling apples in the streets were actually doing so because selling apples paid more than their regular jobs. His image was made worse by the Hoovervilles where unemployed people lived in small shacks.

By the way, during the economic contraction, Hoover's Secretary of Treasury, Mellon, deliberately sought a policy of contraction and liquidation, waging war on workers, when he should have been providing liquidity to the system. Hoover's treasury secretary was the worst.

In the second volume of this history, Schlesinger details the bold actions that FDR and the new Democratic Congress took to confront the crisis during FDR's legendary first 100 days. That book is outstanding. It also describes the radicals who found receptive audiences during the Depression, like Long/Coughlin/Townsend, and how FDR outmaneuvered them to avoid radicalism.

FDR won reelection in 1936 with the biggest electoral landslide in modern history, a triumphant endorsement. He won another landslide reeclection in 1940.

Beware of misleading attack books disguised as history that smear Roosevelt without telling the full history and without even including the most important facts, such as the GDP numbers, industrial production numbers, and the stock market numbers in FDR's first term.

"Crisis of the Old Order" is the outstanding first volume of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s trilogy, the "Age of Roosevelt." Unlike some biographies, this volume provides the reader with the background to understand the world into which FDR strode. After a Prologue of Inauguration Day in 1933, Schlesinger takes the reader back to the Age of Wilson as the world tried to emerge from the horror of World War I. Following that, he follows the nation into the Age of Normalcy presided over by Harding and Coolidge.

While narrating the events of the U.S., Schlesinger skillfully weaves the story of the rising Franklin D. Roosevelt. Part biography, he primarily follows the political career of FDR as he rises from the State Senate to Assistant Secretary of the Navy to Governor of New York. While Roosevelt is rising, Herbert Hoover is shown as losing touch with the nation and the demands of the presidency. The evolving relationship between Roosevelt and Al Smith is revealed layer by layer. This book ends where it began, on Inauguration Day, 1933.

I appreciate a book which helps me to see things differently than I had before. This one meets that test. I had long viewed Roosevelt's unwillingness to support Hoover's initiatives to meet the crisis as a petty politician's use of the nation's misery for personal gain. Schlesinger explains Hoover's messianic belief that only he and his policies can change America and shows his post- election proposals for action to be in the nature of a last attempt to snatch policy victories from the ashes of political defeat. It gives me a greater respect for FDR than I had before this reading. This book gleans the political meanings from seemingly innocuous events, such as pointing out that it was the need to mend political fences which brought Chicago mayor Anton Cermak into the president-elect's car when Zangara's shots rang out in Miami. Schlesinger raised the question of how history would have been different if Zangara's aim had been true and if the car which struck Winston Churchill in New York the year before had ended his life.

Another test which I apply to a book is whether it interests me to read more. This one does. I finished it with a real zest to continue into the second volume. Look for my review on it in a few weeks.

I have read a lot of U.S. history covering the New Deal and World War II, so I am quite familiar with Franklin D. Roosevelt and his presidency. This very well written history of the period between World War I and Roosevelt coming to power in 1933 filled in an important gap for me, and I found some very interesting parallels between Hoover and G.W. Bush, which has helped me further understand why our current president acts as he does. The events leading up to, and immediately following, the Great Depression impact today's politics and issues in ways I did not understand prior to reading this book. I find the author, Arthur M. Schlesinger, to be very readable and a very fine writer. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and it has helped me to further understand and appreciate the first half of the 20th Century in America.

Schlesinger is a wonderful writer as well as historian. What makes his books so compelling is his ability to build a world around his central characters that draws you into the time. He did this with his much praised The Age of Jackson and does so again in his even more ambitious 3-volume Age of Roosevelt.

The Crisis of the Old Order is as apt today as it was when it was first published in 1957. Schlesinger illustrates in piercing detail how the financial meltdown occurred after WWI as successive Republican administrations sought to reduce the scope of government after Woodrow Wilson. The US once again became an isolationist government, more concerned with its own self-interests than playing a strong role in the newly developed League of Nations. This led to a boom time on Wall Street, with record highs and what appeared on the surface to be a time of plenty. Schlesinger ironically notes how this was reflected in the stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, as it did seem the diamond was as big as the Ritz. But, all that came to screeching halt in 1929 when the stock market collapsed and Americans found themselves scrambling to keep jobs, maintain their homes and feed themselves.

Schlesinger spends a lot of time on Hoover, who had the opportunity to pull the nation out of this financial depression, but instead defiantly stuck to the policies of the Republican old order, which only exacerbated matters over the long four years he served as president. Hoover was a technocrat and believed in the strength of the market place to ultimately pull itself together, but even with all the tax breaks Mellon was handing out as Secretary of the Treasury, the banks and big businesses only continued to flounder and real unemployment rose to a staggering 25% by the end of Hoover's term.

The new order, reflected in such books like that of Stuart Chase's A New Deal, went largely ignored by the industrial establishment. Henry Ford was one of the few industrialists aware that demand was more important than supply when it came to production, but the Republicans maintained their supply-side views throughout the crisis, refusing to admit until the Pecora Senate Investigations that they had no answers to the crisis, resulting in a total lack of confidence in business leaders and the infamous run on the banks in 1933.

Schlesinger sets the stage beautifully for the rise of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who doesn't become a central figure in the first volume until the second half of the book. The historian shows how Roosevelt had that remarkable gift of bringing rival factions together, not much unlike Lincoln many years before, and forming a consensus Democratic Party that was finally able to defeat the Republicans in the 1932 elections. Of course, Hoover's entrenched views on the crisis didn't help the Republicans either, as they accepted their fate, with the progressives in the party who had once allied themselves with Teddy Roosevelt moving over to the Democratic Party.

Of course, Schlesinger doesn't miss a detail, spending time on the socialist and communist movements in the country at the time, the crisis of the farm workers and their rebellious stand against foreclosures, the literary currents that reflected the growing unease in the nation, and the relationship between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, which from the beginning was based on a mutual respect for each other's intellect. This is great history!

What I really enjoyed about this book is the smoke-filled rooms the author brings to life to help illuminate the world in which Roosevelt assumed power. This is enjoyable history and a very good political narrative of the time.

Arthur M. Schlesinger's three-volume work THE AGE OF ROOSEVELT has never been more relevant than today. The parallels between the economic and political situation of today and the events leading up to and embracing the Great Depression are eerily similar. The economic situation is not a dire today as it was in the early thirties, if only because of the safeguards put into place by Roosevelt.

Still, the parallels between then and today are so extensive as to be creepy. In both the past couple of decades and in the twenties there was a near deification of business and the free market, and a blind, unquestioning assumption that there really was an invisible hand that would make everything OK if only government would not get involved. There was a belief in trickle down, that none of us should worry about the engorgement of the very wealth, because the wealth would eventually trickle down to all (though there are no historical examples of this ever happening -- as Will Rogers commented, some people think gold is like water, that if you put it at the top it will flow downwards; but, he said, gold isn't like water at all and if you put it at the top it will just stay there). Both eras were passionate about deregulation. Both disregarded the middle class in favor of the investor class. Both experiences crises brought about in large part by market bubbles and by dicey and crackpot investment products. Both eras had a pro-business press that was staunchly conservative and corporate controlled (despite our own age's ironic and wildly untrue myth of the Liberal Media). The crises in both instances took place under presidents who surrounded themselves with yes-men who would only tell them what they wanted to hear. In 1932 the Republicans ran a candidate who insisted that the greatest need was to reign in and reduce government spending and to balance the government, and in 2008 John McCain ran on the same position. In 1932 the Democratic candidate -- though he sometimes fudged on the issue -- felt that government spending would play a major role in alleviating the social and economic woes of the country; in 2008 the Democratic winner of the election has already put forward an ambitious public works spending program that will definitely improve the national infrastructure and should produce genuine stimulus (since the money will actually be spent, whereas tax cuts in difficult times leads to hording). And my adopted city of Chicago played an interesting role in both the elections of 1932, with both parties holding their conventions here, and 2008, with the winner being a resident of the city.

It is too soon to know whether Barack Obama will be anywhere near as good a president as Roosevelt. Even FDR's detractors acknowledge that he is one of the two or three greatest presidents in U.S. history. In fact, on president ratings polls by presidential scholars, it is pretty clear that if only Roosevelt had never met Lucy Mercer he would easily be considered our greatest president (he beats Lincoln in nearly every category in such polls except moral leadership). Obama certainly seems capable of presidential greatness. He has almost surreal leadership abilities and like Roosevelt loves to surround himself with strong, challenging personalities, in contrast with George W. Bush, who preferred intensely loyal people who would not question him. Even Republican political commentators acknowledge that Obama is assembling one of the strongest cabinets in memory. And like Roosevelt, Obama seem to possess no fear whatsoever and no capacity to panic. My own belief is that one of the main reasons Obama defeated McCain was that despite McCain's military background, it was Obama who was most capable of grace under fire, that of the two Obama was the least likely to panic in a crisis. Hopefully Obama will avail himself of the mood of the time to bring about some of the same kind of transformation of American life that Roosevelt achieved.

Properly speaking, this first of three volumes does not deal with the New Deal. It is an introductory volume that delves into the history of the twenties, showing how the dominance of business in the decade partnered with three amazingly pro-business presidential administrations to produce the greatest economic crisis in American history. Much of the volume deals with the ongoing debate about how to deal with the crisis. It is a debate about political philosophy. Should government be passive in the face of a crisis, waiting for market and social forces to solve the problems, or should government take an activist role in solving the problem? Though Hoover frequently engaged in activist policies, he insisted that government should largely stay out of such matters. Roosevelt felt that government had a primal responsibility to confront pressing crises and work for their solution.

What is astonishing is that after the remarkable achievements of successive presidential administrations, in which many wonderful things were achieved on behalf of the vast majority of the American people (including the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations), we saw Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush espouse a lessened role for government. My belief is that one reason the quality of life of most Americans has suffered in the past thirty years is because both political parties have come to believe that Reagan was right when he said that government wasn't the solution to the problem, that it was the problem. Reagan was wrong. And the previous decades should have been a powerful refutation.

The climax of this first volume is the election of Roosevelt in 1932. Schlesinger excels in the depiction of the variety of powerful personalities making up the political landscape of the time. He is a tad coy at times. For instance, he mentions Lucy Mercer at one point, but if you don't know much about Roosevelt and don't know who she was, you could be at a loss as to why she was mentioned at all. Of course, Schlesinger knew Eleanor Roosevelt, who was still alive when the book was published, so he may have left Roosevelt's affair with Mercer unelaborated upon for her sake. Not all affairs are pivotal or life-changing, but it was for Franklin and Eleanor. Later biographers, like Doris Kearns Goodwin in her great NO ORDINARY TIME -- FRANKLIN AND ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: THE HOME FRONT IN WORLD WAR II, explain the many ways that affair deeply changed the dynamics and nature of their marriage. My lone concern with the book was whether there were other subjects that Schlesinger felt constrained not to delve into. But even if so, he does a magnificent job of explaining the many forces and individuals comprising the political landscape of the time.

I cannot recommend this book too highly. Much has been made lately of the two books on FDR that Obama acknowledged on 60 MINUTES that he was reading in preparation for becoming president -- Jonathan Alter's THE DEFINING MOMENT: FDR'S HUNDRED DAYS AND THE TRIUMPH OF HOPE and Jean Edward Smith's FDR (and I'll confess that while I had been eyeing both books I only ordered them upon hearing that Obama was reading them, so hopeful am I that after 40 miserable years we might actually have a president who can bring positive change once again). But Schlesinger's great three-volume work is likely to remain the major if not definitive work on the era. There are many important books on Roosevelt, like Goodwin's great biography of the war years, John MacGregor Burns's huge multi-volume biography, Frank Freidel's important single-volume biography, and William E Leuchtenburg's famous single-volume FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT AND THE NEW DEAL, but Schlesinger's will long remain one of the most crucial works on FDR and the New Deal.

I purchased this out of an interest in the parallel between the current situation in america with that in the 1920s/30s. The Age of Roosevelt was a good read, but for a casual reader it was a little dense. There are a lot of players in the political game that the author discusses, and that was where my attention waned. Also, the other reviews are correct that the author LOVES Roosevelt, and doesn't really try to hide it. He equally does not hide his distaste for Hoover. But overall it was a well-written and interesting account of the period leading up to Roosevelt's election.

In 1957 the first volume of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s trilogy "The Age of Roosevelt" was published. Titled "The Crisis of the Old Order" the first volume is an impressive achievement. It is far more than a mere biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Schlesinger captures the intellectual and politics currents of an era. It is an economic, political, social, and intellectual history of the first half of the twentieth century. It makes for exciting reading and provides depth to understanding a moment in U.S. history.

Schlesinger is a well known defender of the New Deal. But his "Age of Roosevelt" is in no way a partisan apology. Critics of the New Deal will find many inroads to New Deal error and blunder in Schlesinger's narrative.

Schlesinger narrates the history from the documents of the period. The primary source narrative does not make for a slow moving book. Schlesinger's writing style is lucid, personal, and exciting.

Schlesinger further constructs his narrative from individual personalities, politics, and intellectual ideas. He demonstrates that legislation, policy, institutions, and ideas that became dubbed the "New Deal" were generated from diverse sources and distinct personalities. Readers of this book will learn the key personalities involved in the Roosevelt era, along with the legislation and institutions. In "The Crisis of the Old Order" the reader will come to understand the political and economic dilemmas which came to define the first three decades of the twentieth century and the solutions that were fashioned.

From Schlesinger I draw the conclusion that Roosevelt's greatest talent was delegating authority to experts and making decisions based upon the expert's arguments and persuasiveness (in this sense both politics and personality mattered in the Roosevelt administration. The politics of the advisors did not have to match Roosevelt's, but their reasons, arguments, and theories had to be sound and persuasive).

Schlesinger's "The Crisis of the Old Order" suggests that "New Deal" politics summarize, legislate and institutionalize sentiments of an era. Roosevelt was personally a highly conventional thinker. The circumstances he confronted and the leadership style he brought to office allowed for widespread reform, while resisting the currents of revolutionary transformation. Although written more than 50 years ago, Schlesinger's book captures this better then any other book or author I know.

The New Deal was a patch work of legislation and institutions in reaction to the injustices, inequalities, and instability of the pervious five or six decades, with a vision of hope for the future. It was an era and generation which believed government could make things better and is a source of social justice. The personalities involved embodied these sentiments. Now whether the New Deal accomplished social justice, solved political and economic problems, or was a failure is for the judgment of history. There is no better historical guide than Arthur M. Schlesinger and his "Age of Roosevelt."

It is unfortunate that a one-eyed view of the twenties is still so prevalent among historians, that it has resulted in the unfortunate effect of inculcating a dogmatic attitude toward the 1920's in the minds of high school and college students. It is also unfortunate that Schlesinger is among those who has not offered in this book, any serious account of the policies of men like Presidents Coolidge and Hoover, while instead, offered up stereotypes and caricatures; thus putting his hero, FDR, in the best possible light.

For instance, Schlesinger gives short shrift to Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover early on in this book. He debunks the record of Coolidge and has only his own opinion as the basis for calling his reputation accidental. Schlesinger is the type of historian who, when writing, likes to get his character witnesses into the witness box and out again with dispatch....omitting quotations from sources, and preferring to paraphrase.

Schlesinger splices quotations, changes words, quotes out of context, and offers up irrelevant bits and pieces...all with the idea of condemning Coolidge out of Coolidge's own mouth. But Coolidge is not the president we see after being filtered through Schlesinger's imagination.

Throughout his career, Arthur Schlesinger inveighed against the intrusion of ideology into the political consciousness. Ideology, he contends, is unfaithful to the richness and diversity of the political phenomena. But what is Schlesinger himself, if not the incarnation of ideology?

Doing research recently on Calvin Coolidge and Warren Harding, I came across Dr. Thomas B. Silver's, "Coolidge and the Historians," which was, to say the least, an eye-opener. I had, probably like many, put Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. on an academic pedestal.

I regret not having done a more thorough examination of his many pronouncements on various political figures. He is, of course, a devotee of FDR, which in itself, is fine. But, not at the expense of other presidents, who deserve a full and accurate accounting.

See the book "Coolidge and the Historians" by Thomas Silver which shows Schlesinger to be a highly partisan and unreliable historian. Schlesinger uses omission, false statements and unexamined reliance on partisans and extensive quotes out of context to portray Calvin Coolidge in a false light.