Over the past few decades Alonzo Hamby has gotten a reputation as one of America�s leading political historians. This book shows this reputation is quite undeserved. The book�s theme is simple. Hamby looks at the Depression years, mostly in the United States but with comparisons to Nazi Germany and Conservative Britain, and presents what might be described as the �Goldilocks� thesis. The United States had bold, vigorous and democratic leadership under FDR, but failed to end the depression. Germany ended the depression under leadership that was bold, vigorous and dictatorial, but was, of course, also evil and nihilistic. Great Britain, under the stolid leadership of Baldwin and Chamberlain, gets economic recovery just right�until Munich.
Since most histories of the New Deal are far more sympathetic to Roosevelt and since popular opinion of Baldwin and Chamberlain is generally much less sympathetic, this book may appear to be bold and original. Nothing could be further from the truth. It would be more accurately described as Bill Clinton history, since it consists of splitting the difference between Roosevelt and his Republican critics. But it is not based on any substantially new research. This book could have been written three or four decades ago without changing its basic argument. His account of Britain depends on the apologetic approach towards Baldwin and Chamberlain in British historiography that developed through the seventies and eighties. Although Hamby quotes a few more recent works on the Third Reich, he is still inspired most by William Shirer�s four decade old book, notwithstanding the strong dislike of it by most historians of modern Germany. His discussion of the New Deal period is based on readily available sources like Roosevelt�s published papers, classics by Leuchtenberg and Dallek, and a number of centrist journals like The New York Times, The Times, The Economist, Walter Lippmann and likeminded people. The result is a book that is derivative at best, and with a shallow, undistinguished style. It is absurd to say that Hindenburg was the George Washington of his country and unthinkingly deferential to say George V �had shown himself to be a quintessential Englishman.� It is also morally shallow to say Goering was one of the most loathsome Nazis and start off with the fact that he was fat. At times it is unforgivably sloppy: a competent historian should know that Hitler was not born out of wedlock and that Goebbels was not born �to humble working-class origins.�
Other historians have tried looking at the New Deal in more complex ways, looking at who supported the New Deal and why, the basis of political support and opposition, the relationships between the state and the larger society. One thinks of recent research by authors such as Anthony Badger, Theda Skocpol, Steve Fraser and Colin Gordon. There is nothing like that in this book. Nor is there any sustained economic analysis. Hamby mostly ignores three and a half decades of labour history and simply recapitulates the fear and condescension of �moderate� journalists at the time. Instead, Fraser focuses on individuals. Every chapter starts off with a little profile of an important player, whether it is Eleanor Roosevelt, Herman Goering, David Lilienthal or Henry Wallace. None of these profiles, it should be said, includes anything that is particularly original or informative or lively. We hear unoriginal accounts of such well-known events as the presidential elections, the bank crisis, the rise of Huey Long and so on, but the result is basically conformist. Whether it is the possibility that FDR was too harsh on businessmen, or society�s outrage over Edward VIII�s marriage to a divorced woman, Hamby does little but agree with �moderate� and �respectable� opinion.
This reaches its nadir with Hamby�s amazingly indulgent portrait of pre-1938 appeasement. He portrays opposition to Mussolini as foolish moralism, which helped push him into Hitler�s arms. (He also omits Mussolini�s use of chemical weapons, rather ironic given the outrage Hamby�s fellow moderate conservatives have made over Saddam Hussein.) There is similar obtuseness over the Spanish Civil War, where Hamby is inclined to think that Britain�s �malevolent neutrality� was a good move. It clearly wasn�t: it undercut France, it worsened relations with the Soviet Union, it emboldened Germany and Italy to continue their aggression, it condemned Spain to four decades of cruel dictatorship, it disheartened anti-fascists world-wide and encouraged complacency among appeasers. His indulgent picture of Baldwin and Chamberlain ignore Anthony Adamthwaite�s views on Ethiopia, and the research of Douglas Little and Enrique Moradiellos on Britain�s bad faith towards Spain. Overall, much of the discussion of Germany and Britain does not get beyond broad generalizations and stereotypes. The Germans have been dominated for centuries by authoritarian politics. Much of the discussion of Britain consists of journalistic anecdotes of charming plucky little upper-class Brits. What Hamby has done is basically middlebrow journalism, a master�s thesis played out to gargantuan length.
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