In 2007 I began reading the over 1700 pages in Arthur Schlesinger's "Age of Roosevelt" series with volume 3, "The Politics of Upheaval." Ten years later I read volume 1, "The Crisis of the Old Order." This review is of the book I finally broke down and ordered last month, volume 2, "The Coming of the New Deal." The three books cover the Depression under Hoover and the first term of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Schlesinger relies upon picturesque descriptions of the personalities behind the New Deal combined with granular detail in describing what the New Deal did. The only flaw I see in his work is that he will usually break his chapters into eight to twelve subchapters, each of which gets only one endnote. I was prepared to deduct one star from this review for Schlesinger's hero-worship of FDR, but truth be told Schlesinger admits there were some mistakes. And FDR is genuinely a hero.
A recurring theme in "Coming of the New Deal" is the clash between two different types of reformers: the advocates of planning, who were against inefficiency and waste, and the neo-Brandeisians who were against centralized power and "bigness." To a very great extent (in part due to Brandeis' continuing presence on the Supreme Court) the latter group won the struggle in Roosevelt's first term, leading to the end of what later historians have called "the first New Deal." It is this New Deal which Schlesinger is covering with this book. I can't help but thinking that had the former group prevailed instead we would now be living in a European-style social democracy.
In a way it's too bad Schlesinger couldn't extend "The Age of Roosevelt" to cover all four of Roosevelt's terms, but he probably realized that if he did that, he would never write anything else again. Five stars.
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