Customer Reviews

Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939

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Mr. Schivelbusch, in this remarkably well researched and startling book draws parallels between the programs and leadership styles of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Franklin Roosevelt. He shows how many similarities there were to be found between each of these very different men. His purpose is not to demonize FDR, excuse the Nazis and Fascists or even to mitigate the failure of the average German and Italian to stand up their leaders. It is, rather, to provide a warning to the future that populism can shift from the benign to the monstrous. It is must reading for the general reader.

Having been a fan of Mr Schivelbusch's varied work for many years, I recently had the opportunity to dine with him at the home of friends of mine. I was interested to learn that he was a man of the Left, whose views were very different from mine. It is a tribute to his ability as a scholar that I never would have guessed his affiliations. He follows the truth where he finds it and never lets his own biases seep into his work.

He is a careful and diligent researcher. By way of example, T. Harry Williams' Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Huey Long merely casts doubt on those who attribute to Long the most famous of his quotes to the effect that "when Fascism comes to America, it will come in the guise of anti-Fascism." Williams does not make any serious attempt to track down the origin of the attribution, something you would expect from the author of a nearly 1000 page biography. In this short work, in a learned and careful footnote, Schivelbusch offers a variety of possible sources for this quote. THAT is careful research!

I highly recommend Three New Deals.

This is a truly brilliant book. It highlights the fact that political and economic crises often produce similar results, specifically a centralization of state power. Some people may not like this book because it suggests similarities between Roosevelt's New Deal and Fascism. However, the point here is not to suggest Roosevelt was racist or antisemitic (a totally idiotic notion) but to focus on the much larger issue of the use of state power in a crisis. The book has important lessons for the future. The current world order is doing a very poor job is dealing with deadly threats like the global environmental crisis. In a new series of world crises there is likely to be a huge centralization of power. Albert Speer once observed that when fascism comes back, it will come back as anti-fascism. The larger issue here is totalitarianism and its potential role in the world future.

"Three New Deals" is an interesting book about the similarities and differences between FDR's New Deal, Mussolini's fascism, and Hitler's fascism. Certainly all three were different from one another. But it's quite an eye-opener to read about the mutual admiration across the three in the 1930s, particularly between some of FDR's advisors and the Mussolini camp. This is also a relatively short book; a quick read that doesn't belabor the point or wear out its welcome. Those with an interest in politics or WWII history will be interested in at least checking this out from the library.

Schivelbusch is an excellent analyst of political culture. He compares Roosevelt's new deal with Mussolini's Fascism and Hitler's National Socialism. The book is not a smear of Roosevelt, but rather an examination of how the prevailing political ideals of rationality and organization were implemented in the three countries. There is also thoughtful analysis of the use of media, radio in the US and rallies in Europe.

This book was obviously the predecessor to Jonah Goldman's best selling 'Liberal Fascism.' This is a quick study of reviewing governmental trends in the early 20th Century in response to post-WWI problems and the Depression.
My only criticism is the minimal coverage of Mussolini's corporate state that was actually the blueprint for Hitler's programs and Roosevelt's New Deal. Mainly the comparisons are between Germany and the United States.
This book could have also been longer with a more in depth review of these three societies. For a more in depth analogy albeit more politically-biased review, I would recommend 'Liberal Fascism.'

Wolfgang Schivelbusch presents an interesting argument over 189 pages plus an extensive index regarding the parallels of the governments of Franklin Roosevelt's America, Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. The author goes through great lengths to state that FDR was not the monster that Hitler and Mussolini were. Nevertheless, each dealt with the effects of the Great Depression in similar ways. Schivelbusch states that all three had great leadership skills to convey their messages to the masses. Hitler and Mussolini used mass rallies to stoke the people while FDR used the power of radio to assure his audience through the difficult times. Each leader effectively used propaganda to their benefit. Germany used its sources effectively through the efforts of Goebbels by stating that the state needed to diagnose the soul of the people and assess its needs. Both Germany and the America used symbols to convey their programs including America's use of the NRA's Blue Eagle campaign which used rallies and draconian codes to "psych" the populace into compliance.

Each country used a "back to the land" campaign whereby all of the countries thought that capitalism cause men to flock to the cities and lose their soul. An urging to return people to the country to farm the land and build mini-factories to encourage self-sufficiency on a small scale away from the large cities. America engaged in a failed experiment by building a model town of Arthurdale, West Virginia which illustrated its efforts of putting its"small is beautiful" philosophy into practice. Finally, the author compares each country's creation of public works to get the people back to work. Hitler's Autobahn, Mussolini's draining of the Pontine Marshes and FDR's TVA project are compared.

A truly enlightening book that states that government efforts to lead the economy could have disturbing side effects including a building of a military industrial complex and an unwarranted centralization of the state. A five star effort.

Schivelbusch puts together a fascinating argument about the commonalities between Roosevelt, Hitler, and Mussolini, but the Kindle edition has lots of awkward typographical and spacing errors. A more carefully edited Kindle edition would be appreciated.

As others have pointed out, this is a well-researched, thoughtful and provocative analysis of the similarities (as well as some of the differences) between the Three New Deals. Potential readers may benefit from first reading Folsom's new book: New Deal or Raw Deal to get a more filled out picture of the fascist aspects of the New Deal. On the whole the author's thesis is well argued and illustrated less with political and economic analysis than with cultural and architectural analysis.

The weakness of the book lies in some of the inferences the author jumps to at times. For instance, on page 106 the author makes the somewhat dubious point that "the end of liberal economy's foundation on gold triggered the search for the new "ground"....the search generated the myth of the land: from a literal point of view, the soil on which man lived."

I found this point unconvincing and there are many other examples of cultural and architectural 'psycho-analysis', some of which are more compelling than others.

In my eyes the book's aim in comparing the Three New Deals is important in understanding our governments' reactions to the current financial crises. Will democracies begin to move towards, socialism or fascism? The author concludes that the U.S. didn't make the total move towards either extreme during the New Deal because of the lack of class consciousness in America in the 30s. I'm not entirely convinced by this argument and certainly if you read some of FDR's speeches, he tried to stoke class warfare and take advantage of it. Similarly, there is a whiff of it in the air today in the U.S. This book serves as a guide of what to watch out for, that is some of the signposts along the way to either extreme.

In this regard he quotes one John T. Flynn who described the New Deal as follows:

"It is born in crisis, lives on crisis and cannot survive the era of crisis. By the very law of its nature it must create for itself if it is to continue, fresh crises from year to year. Mussolini came to power in the postwar crisis...Hitler's story is the same. And our future is all charted upon the same turbulent road of permanent crisis."

As we are confronted with one "crisis" after another (global warming, peak oil and now financial crises that "demand" government's involvement and expansion, that quote sounds very prescient.

Considering how many new releases and classics I've enjoyed over the last year, I guess it was to be expected that I'd run into a book that felt like a bit of a letdown. Unfortunately, I must label Three New Deals as just that.

The book bills itself as "reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939." The problem, in my mind, is that there aren't enough "reflections" from the people who were most directly affected by these governments. Most of the outside "reflections" come as opinions of period media in the form of critics and supporters, at times giving the book the feel of a 1930s debate between MSNBC and Fox News. Like those contemporary opinions, Three New Deals misses perspective from the most important voice: that of the people.

I was excited to begin this book, as I believed the author sought to compare the many similarities between these regimes and their greatly different outcomes. At points, he addressed the similarities successfully, particularly in chapters titled Leadership and Propaganda. My problem with the book is that not only does it lack virtually any reactions from ordinary citizens of these countries but, instead, it contains a lot of political science references with few definitions or explanations. The period quotations that are used are of an equally-dull and clinical perspective. It took me longer to read the 191 pages of true content (not including the Notes) in Three New Deals than it has taken me to read books three times as long. Every time I tried to get into a chapter, with few exceptions, I was driven to frustration by the tedium of trying to take a personal perspective from the torrential downpour of -isms (Communism, Socialism, Bolshevism, Fascism, Collectivism, Individualism, Progressivism, Liberalism, Capitalism, Regionalism, and Nomadism, to name just a few.) Throw in the fact that each of these terms must be reexamined by the reader, since they no longer mean what they did in 1935, and you're talking about anything but a leisurely read.

Instead of "reflections", the book should be referred to as a "brief, general overview" of similarities between three governments that shared a depressed global economy and a dispirited public. The similarities between these three governments don't stop at the five primary examples mentioned in this book and it was from the perspective of that initial shared experience between the people of America, Germany, and Italy that I wanted to hear from. It would lend insight to many on how truly similar we all were before the war ... a fact that is mostly lost in today's explanation of history.

THis is a difficult book to understand too much unnecessary information. Plus i think the author did a poor job explain most of the events .