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Franklin D Roosevelt And The New Deal

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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.

In just 350 pages, Leuchtenburg somehow manages to tell the story of the New Deal. That he was able do this in such an entertaining and informative way should be studied by future authors of history of all sorts. There are many New Deal books, and several are well written (I like Kennedy and Schlesinger), but you won't get the maximum benefit out of them without previous reading - this is the place to start!

I first read this book in 1980, when it was probably the best available introduction to the New Deal era. Leuchtenburg is such a stylish writer that the book remains well worth reading. However, some of his arguments, particularly on the economic side, need a little updating. In addition, there are more thorough works these days on Roosevelt's battles with the Supreme Court and the complexities of the court's judgements. Leuchtenburg's real achievement, though, is to bring across the sense of hope and creativity and energy that Roosevelt infused into so many Americans. It is the spirit of the times, as much as any supposed lessons about government activism and demand management, that makes the New Deal era so special. Leuchtenburg captures that spirit extremely well.

As the USA contemplates taking on an $800 billion stimulus package to jump start its moribund economy, many are asking if there has ever been a comparable investment that has triggered a recovery. The usual answer is Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" and how it wrested the USA from the Great Depression.

But some, mostly conservative, revisionist scholarship has questioned that answer. This scholarship points to the recession of 1937 as evidence that the New Deal spurred little or no recovery at all. These scholars further claim it was the onset of War World 2 with all its attendant war manufacturing that wrested the USA's economy from the throes of the Great Depression, apparently oblivious to the irony that the rearmament campaign was a massive government spending spree.

Fortunately, we have William E. Leuchtenburg's Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940 to set us straight. Reading Leuchtenburg's work, it's clear that the revisionists use quite selective evidence. They are especially suspect for what they don't tell us. For example, by 1936 the New Deal had

* created at least 6 million jobs

* increased the national income by half in 1936 from what it was in 1933

* doubled industrial output

* spurred Detroit to manufacture more cars than any year since 1929

* energized utility companies to sell more electricity than any time in the past

* quadrupled the net income of farm operators

* caused corporation profit sheets, which ran a $2 billion deficit in 1933, to run ran $5 billion in the black (p. 194)

To be sure, there was a recession in 1937, but it was not because of the New Deal policies. Rather, it was precisely because they were being abandoned:

"The more successful the New Deal was, the more it undid itself. The more prosperous the country became, the more the people returned to the only values they knew, those associated with an individualistic, success-oriented society. ... During the upturn of 1935 - 37, conservative argued that, since the crisis had passed, reforms were no longer appropriate. When the recession struck, this plea had even greater force; as the nerve of business opposition revived, the old convictions that business could run the economy with greater efficiency than bureaucrats reappeared." (p.273)

Roosevelt took a more moderate line during the recession, partly because of the intransigence of Congress. Consequently, the economy didn't recover until the massive government spending that occurred during the run up and onset of the second world war. Even so there is a lesson in the recovery that the conservative revisionists would never want to admit:

"Although it was the war that freed the government from the taboos of a balanced budget and revealed the potentialities of spending, it is conceivable that New Deal measures would have led the country into a new cycle of prosperity even if there had been no war. Marked gains had been made before the war spending had any appreciable effect. When recovery did come, it was much more soundly based because of the adoption of the New Deal program." (p.347)

Both the New Deal spending and the rearmament spending were budget busting stimulus programs. In terms of the impact they had on the economy, they both had the same effect: viz., they spurred a recovery. And both effectively questioned and refuted the conservative assumptions that balanced budgets and a private sector largely free from the targeted economic stimuli of the public sector are the sine qua non of a recovering economy.

William Leuchtenburg is, without doubt, the greatest historian of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. His impact has been enormous, both in the field of history (he has trained most of the other New Deal historians) and in the larger world (if you've been to the FDR memorial in D.C., you've seen the quotations carved in stone, which he selected).

Though Leuchtenburg's body of work is impressive, this text stands as his single best work. Though it's nearly forty years old, the text is surprisingly lively and the interpretations quite lucid. This is, without doubt, the single best text on FDR or the New Deal. Simply outstanding.

This book captures the politics of the Depression and the political genius of FDR. In recent years,it has become fashionable to trash big government for all of its failings. One can point to a conclusion that the New Deal did not, as was intended, lift the country out of economic depression. This book points, and correctly so, to the fact that the New Deal,while not a complete economic success, did indeed lift society from its depression in the first years. Later (1936 Election), the New Deal provided Americans with an alternative to more radical alternatives, thus preserving the nation. This is a very worthwhile read.

I heard a lot about another book on this subject, "The Forgotten Man" by journalist and former WSJ editorialist Amity Shlaes, but decided to read this one instead. The few scholarly people whose reviews of the Shlae's book I found online weren't impressed with it as the author clearly used selected statistics to try to make an ideological point. I wanted to read something by a historian who was a respected scholar in the field so I picked this book. This book is jammed full of facts as to the political, economic and social environment and as a result it is somewhat slow reading. However, it is an excellent and thorough book. The author clearly doesn't idolize or villify FDR - which makes him more credible than many other authors who have written about this period.

William E. Leuchtenburg's "Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal" is a shrewd appraisal of the legacy of one of the most controversial efforts ever undertaken by the federal government. It is hard to read Leuchtenburg's history without drawing parallels to the perils now facing the United States in late 2011. It may be fairly said that an American's views on FDR and the New Deal serve as accurate predictors of his politics--liberals applaud the New Deal and its effect on improving the lives of millions crushed by the depression, while conservatives criticize it as ineffectual and the primary cause of the massive federal deficits which vex us today. Although an avowed admirer of Roosevelt, Leuchtenburg has studiously avoided producing a mere homage to liberalism. Through a dispassionate observation of what actually took place during the tumultuous years of 1932-1940, he paints a picture that is nearly as often at odds with cherished liberal principles as it is with common caricatures of FDR and the New Deal which abound on the right.

Many Americans today cannot appreciate the magnitude of the crisis which followed the stock market crash of 1929. National income had been halved. Over 5,000 banks had crashed, wiping out nine million savings accounts. Millions suffered the effects of hunger and malnutrition. "We are like the drounding [sic] man, grabbing at every thing that flotes by, trying to save what little we have," reported a North Carolinian. Fifty hungry men in Chicago fought over a barrel of garbage left outside the back of a restaurant. Men in Stockton, California waded through the city dump in search of rotted vegetables. Hundreds of children were kept out of school nationwide due to a lack of clothes. Hundreds of World War I veterans occupied buildings outside of Washington D.C to protest their dire economic conditions. Only after President Herbert Hoover called in four troops of cavalry to clear them out with tanks and infantry did they flee, along with their wives and children.

And the proximate cause of this misery?

The banks.

Stop me when this sounds familiar--

"Frustrated by the failure of the economy to respond to his nostrums, Hoover encouraged a Senate investigation into Wall Street in the spring of 1932 to make an example of the "bears," who he believed had been organizing "raids" on the stock market.

Under the persistent probing of Ferdinand Pecora, the committee shattered the image of the investment banker as a man of probity whose first concern was the welfare of his customers and who operated in an institution that was a model of fair play. Pecora revealed that the most respected men on Wall Street had rigged pools, had profited by pegging bond prices artificially high, and had lined their pockets with fantastic bonuses. The leading financial houses, the committee learned, invited insiders to purchase securities at a price much below that paid by the public. When officers of Charles Mitchell's National City Bank faced ruin because they could not cover their investments, the bank gave them interest-free loans while ruthlessly selling out their own customers. The bankers seemed bereft of a sense of obligation even to their own institutions. Albert Wiggin, president of the Chase National Bank, had even sold short the stock of his own bank.

Yet it was less their financial transgressions than their social irresponsibility which caused the loss of faith in America's business leaders. At a time when millions lived close to starvation, and some even had to scavenge for food, bankers like Wiggin and corporation executives like George Washington Hill of American Tobacco drew astronomical salaries and bonuses. Yet many of these men, including Wiggin, manipulated their investments so that they paid no income tax at all. In Chicago, where teachers, unpaid for months, fainted in classrooms for want of food, wealthy citizens of national reputation brazenly refused to pay taxes or submitted falsified statements. In Detroit, the hardest hit of any large city, Henry Ford set the standard for businessmen by shrugging off all responsibility for the welfare of the jobless. Detroit bankers, in fact, insisted that before the city would be granted a loan to maintain relief, it would have to cut relief pittances still further.

The real responsibility for their poverty, insisted John Edgerton in his presidential address to the National Association of Manufacturers in October, 1930, lay with the jobless themselves. If, he asked, "they do not...practice the habits of thrift and conservation, or if they gamble away their savings in the stock market or elsewhere, is our economic system, or government, or industry to blame?" The tone of lament in Edgerton's remarks was common. One of the most popular themes of business literature of the period was that they wealthy businessmen had suffered more than the worker.
By the time Roosevelt took office, the country had been whipped to a fury at the performance of bankers and businessmen. The New York bankers especially were the target of popular wrath."

The charismatic senator Huey P. Long called for capping all annual income at $1 million to provide a higher standard of living for all as part of his "Share the Wealth" campaign. The American Communist party pronounced that Americans were witnessing the end of capitalism and an inevitable historic turn towards a collectivist society in which personal wealth would be outlawed.

"I come home from the hill every night filled with gloom," one Washington correspondent noted. "I see on streets filthy, ragged, desperate-looking men, such as I have never seen before." By the end of Hoover's reign, more than fifteen million workers had lost their jobs... In Seattle, jobless families whose lights had been cut off spent every evening in darkness, some even without candles to light the blackened room. In December, 1932, a New York couple moved to a cave in Central Park, where they lived for the next year. That same month, Rexford Tugwell wrote in his diary: "No one can live and work in New York this winter without a profound sense of uneasiness. Never, in modern times, I should think, has there been so widespread unemployment and such moving distress from sheer hunger and cold." (p.19)

One-quarter of all farmers in Mississippi saw their farms go up in foreclosure. Other farmers in Sioux City rampaged through the streets, committing acts of vandalism. Telegraph poles and railway cars were spiked with explosives. Unemployed coal miners looted over $100,000 worth of coal each day from their former mine in Pennsylvania, confident in the knowledge that a jury of their peers--fellow miners--would not convict. Trotskyites and a business-sponsored "citizen's army" clashed in the streets of Minneapolis in 1934, leaving two dead amid a throng of 20,000 protesters. Popular sentiment questioned whether the crash demonstrated the incapacity of democracies to resolve economic crises. Hanging over all was the specter of communism: the Bolshevik revolution had take place a mere 13 years earlier.

The Congress responded to this national tumult with halfhearted measures and gridlock. "Both political parties," wrote William Dodd, "have been bankrupted." Faced with an unparalleled national crisis, Congress failed to produce a single piece of meaningful legislation. Many observers remarked that a shift to totalitarianism might be just what the country required to break the paralysis--

"Of course, we all realize that dictatorships and even semi-dictatorships in peace time are quite contrary to the spirit of American institutions and all that," remarked Barron's. "And yet--well, a genial and lighthearted dictator might be a relief from the pompous futility of such a Congress as we have recently had." A popular topic of the day was whether the country was about to experience a violent revolution.

It is in this context that FDR and the New Deal took place. The oft-repeated observation that FDR did not seek to replace capitalism, but to rescue it makes sense in light of the rapidly-deteriorating environment in which he took the helm of the nation. Modern skeptics err in dismissing this as subterfuge, as if Roosevelt secretly harbored communistic tendencies. The reason we are so quick to dismiss Roosevelt's rescue of capitalism is because we cannot imagine its tenuous condition in the early 1930's, given our contemporary experience of capitalism as the undefeated victor over communism following the end of the Cold War.

Leuchtenburg navigates the glossary of new programs and departments formed by Roosevelt, Frankfurter, and Tugwell over the course of four administrations. It is not my intention to provide a comprehensive review of these agencies, but a few highlights should be recognized--

* The Home Owner's Loan Corporation (HOLC) refinanced 1 in every 5 private dwellings in America, saving a generation from foreclosure.
* The Civil Works Administration (CWA) invented jobs for over 4.2 million unemployed Americans in the span of 30 days.
* The National Youth Association (NYA) put over 2.6 million unemployed young people to work in a novel combination of vocational training and public service.
* The Works Progress Administration (WPA) employed 3 million people.
* Social Security ended senior poverty within a single generation.
* The Public Works Administration (PWA) constructed 70% of America's new schools, 65% of its courthouses, city halls, and sewage plants, and 35% of its hospitals.
* The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) effectively ended poverty in the Tennessee Valley--a region beset with malaria, soil depletion, deforestation, and persistently low incomes. It developed cheap electricity, modern home appliances, fertilizers to improve crop regeneration, rotation training to help farmers increase yield, improved fish and wildlife habitats, and lifted the entire region out of poverty.
* The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) brought electricity to the nation. Prior to its founding, 9 out of 10 farms had no electricity; by 1950, only 1 out of 10 lacked power.
* The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) provided price supports and foreclosure relief for farmers, causing farm income to increase 50%.
* The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reduced the ability to companies and financiers to manipulate the stock market for their private gain. It forced companies to subject their financial statements to the government for review and approval prior to listing on a public exchange, and placed shadowy financial transactions under federal regulation.
* Glass-Steagall separated commercial and investment banking, ensuring that banks would be prevented from using depositors' savings as collateral in high-risk ventures (a law that did an admirable job preventing financial meltdown until Bill Clinton and Barack Obama's financial chiefs eliminated it in the late 1990's.)
* The National Recovery Administration (NRA) ended industrial child labor and protected workers' rights to collective bargaining. It eliminated sweatshops, created minimum wages, and created an estimated 2 million jobs in the process.
* The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) guaranteed bank deposits and effectively put an end to the dissolution of financial institutions across the nation.

As a result of these and a host of other programs, Roosevelt infused the nation with a new sense of optimism it had not felt since before the crash. Although unemployment did not return to pre-crisis levels until World War II, people began to believe once more that good times would return. Far from seeming aloof and far-off, government showed that it could fulfill a direct role in the lives of Americans by creating economic opportunities for them to participate in the life of the nation--whether by teaching in rural schools, opening up a textile mill in the Tennessee Valley, or opening a bank protected by federal deposit insurance. So great was the sense of renewal that the Republican party got trounced in Roosevelt's first mid-term elections--an unheard-of phenomenon for the opposition party mid-way through a new president's first term.

And what of Roosevelt, himself? Was he a closet socialist who believed in the power of government to mandate the nuances of citizens' lives from a central planning agency in Washington? Hardly. Above all else, Roosevelt was a pragmatist. Although the dire state of the nation at the time of his inauguration may have necessitated bold action, FDR was under no illusions as to the need for trial-and-error in solving the nation's woes--

"All of this is perfectly terrible because it is all pure theory, when you come down to it... We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings."

And, in another instance--

"Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference."

Henry Hopkins, the head of the Works Progress Administration echoed such sentiments when he observed--

"I am for experimenting... in various parts of the country, trying out schemes which are supported by reasonable people and see if they work. If they do not work, the world will not come to an end."

Even First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt remarked upon the limits of government in 1939--

"[The programs of the New Deal] helped but they did not solve the fundamental programs... I never believed the Federal government could solve the whole problem. It bought us time to think."

Another misconception concerns the degree to which the Roosevelt administration was enamored by the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes. Certainly, at the present moment (2011), Keynesian economics have become an acid test of one's fiscal purity. Either one is for balanced budgets, we are told, or else one is for wasteful spending in the name of priming the economic pump. It should come as little surprise that the architects of the New Deal experimented with the concepts of both fiscal stimulus as well as austerity measures in their attempts to reboot the economy.

Hopkins, Eccles, and Ickes argued that when private investment fell, government had to spend more. Doing so would lessen the severity of boom-bust cycles which characterized advanced capitalist economies. "The Government," intoned Marriner Eccles, "must be the compensatory agent in this economy; it must unbalance its budget during deflation and create surpluses in periods of great business activity." (p.245) Despite this, Eccles was largely unfamiliar with Keynesian theory. Fiscal stimulus and fiscal austerity were but levers which could be tried and discarded as necessary. Indeed, when Roosevelt made sharp reductions in public spending projects in his second term to address the deficit question, it plunged the economic back into a tailspin--and he once more turned on the spigot of federal spending. This is but another example of how the administration elevated the pragmatic over the dogmatic. Roosevelt had a deep aversion to subscribing whole-heartedly to any economic theory--

"Total commitment was required, and total commitment he would not give. The Keynesian formula for gaining prosperity by deliberately creating huge deficits year after year seemed to defy common sense. Roosevelt was willing to countenance limited, emergency spending..." (p. 264)

Even when Roosevelt sanctioned huge fiscal expenditures during such emergency measures, he nearly always did so in a limited manner.

Consider the creation of the Civil Works Administration (CWA), a federal operation designed as an emergency rescue for unemployed Americans about to enter the winter of 1933. CWA paid minimum wages to Americans culled from the ranks of the unemployed. It invented jobs for over 4 million people within the span of about 30 days. It built or improved 500,000 miles of roads, 40,000 schools, 3,500 playgrounds and athletic fields, and 1,000 airports. Workmen renovated Montana's State Capitol Building, and built Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning. It put 50,000 teachers to work keeping rural schools open, hired 3,000 artists and writers, and, all told, pumped a billion dollars of new purchasing power into the economy by giving Americans the work they so desperately needed.

But Roosevelt was alarmed at the sheer cost of maintaining such a program, and ended it as quickly as possible. Leuchtenburg writes--

"[Roosevelt] feared he was creating a permanent class of reliefers whom he might never get off the government payroll. If CWA were continued... it would `become a habit with the country... We must not take the position that we are going to have permanent depression in this country.'" By early April, the CWA had all but disbanded, and had fired over 4 million workers.

Indeed, such concerns over the long-term effect of providing what was meant as temporary relief were shared by many New Deal architects, contrary to the thinking by modern conservatives that FDR cynically engineered a generation that would be forever dependent upon Democratic administrations. Roosevelt and his lieutenant, Harry Hopkins believed that charity sapped worker morale. "What I seek is the abolition of relief altogether," Roosevelt wrote to Colonel House in 1934. "I cannot say so out loud yet but I hope to be able to substitute work for relief." In January, 1935, Roosevelt proposed a large emergency public employment program. Those who enrolled would receive less than prevailing private wages so as not to "encourage the rejection of opportunities for private employment." Charity, Roosevelt warned Congress, was "a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit... The Federal Government must and shall quit this business of relief." Vice-President Garner warned Hopkins that he did not like the implications of WPA officials referring to reliefers as "clients."

Roosevelt's focus on working-class America, his subjection of financial markets to federal regulation, and his redistributive tax reforms made him the target of deep resentment among the upper classes--

"Many of the nation's wealthy were almost incoherent with rage at President Roosevelt. They refused to say his name, but referred to him as "that man" or "he". One of Roosevelt's wealthy neighbors, Howland Spencer, hated the President so much that he exiled himself in the Bahamas and returned only after the Republicans won the congressional elections in 1946.Terrified by the prospect of confiscatory taxation, the wealthy viewed Roosevelt as a reckless leveler. Accustomed to having their authority unchallenged, businessmen resented the rising empires of government and labor. Many businessmen were openly defiant." (p. 176-177)

Not all members of the upper classes were united in their opposition to the emerging social order. Edward Filene, a prosperous Boston businessman, observed: "Why shouldn't the American people take half my money from me? I took all of it from them." Others, like Russell Leffingwell of JP Morgan, called upon Roosevelt to complain: ""It hurts our feelings to have you go on calling us money changers and economic royalists."

On the opposite end of the spectrum, working-class Americans increasingly viewed Roosevelt as an ally. One worker put it: "Mr. Roosevelt is the only man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is a sonofabitch." And it wasn't only working-class whites who flocked beneath the banner of the administration. By 1932, Republicans began observing that African-Americans were abandoning them in favor of the Democratic party. "They're getting tired of Lincoln," remarked one observer. Prior to the New Deal, black wards predominantly voted Republican; by 1938, nearly 90% of them were pro-Roosevelt.

Leuchtenburg weaves a solid narrative of the causes and effects of the New Deal. The account suffers in places from an excessive examination of the aforementioned alphabet-soup of agencies. In the process, the reader is momentarily unsure of the actual effects of these agencies, and it is only by careful cross-referencing that their impact upon the economic health of the nation may be understood.

Leuchtenburg also allows the pace of the work to get bogged-down in the foreign policies minutia. Although no record of Roosevelt's administrations would be complete without an account of Japanese hostility or the resurgence of German militarism, these events detract from the focus of the New Deal, and too much attention is given to these external events.

As mentioned earlier, it is hard to immerse one's self in an account of the New Deal without feeling that the present Obama administration has missed a unique opportunity to meet a similar challenge. Where Roosevelt grappled with the challenge of history forcefully, Obama makes speeches against fat-cat bankers while delegating the real decisions to financial Rasputins like Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner. Where Roosevelt made full use of the bully pulpit of the presidency, Obama assiduously sticks to the teleprompter and allows the radical right to frame the national discussion.

And the banks have only grown more powerful during the eighty years since the New Deal was framed. This issue, more than any other, defines the heightened challenge we face today in solving our own economic crisis--will Wall Street continue to drive public policy in the United States, or will we find a new FDR in our midst to forcibly align high finance with the public good?

The challenges we face today as a nation, while severe, are comparable with those faced by the generation of Franklin Roosevelt. They faced them. Whether we prove capable of doing the same remains to be seen.