The Revolution of the New Deal
JR., ADOLF A. BERLE
The Revolution of the New Deal The Age of Roosevelt: The Coming of the New Deal. By Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Houghton Mifflin, 669 pp. $6.75. Reviewed by Adolf A. Berle Jr. RFC counsel, 1933;...
...Here is history to some purpose...
...Unity was maintained through his passionate addiction to and affirmation of the values of life, action and the future...
...The latter part of the book, and lo this reviewer the most exciting, deals with the companion development of political forces and how they were handled...
...But in doing so, history gives frame and point to the moving present...
...Assistant Secretary of State, 1938-44...
...By grouping the measures and recording the political background and pressures in the five fields, Schlesinger makes his point that the New Deal was not a shakeup but a system...
...My own position was and still is that the U.S., since it does not intend to go socialist, must find a way of living with business and means of planning...
...The temptation is great to examine some of the contrasts reviewed in this volume...
...The struggles within the New Deal were violent...
...His prologue on the "Hundred Days" introduces the fact that the New Deal victory comprised all shades of divergent thought, from the conservatism of Lewis Douglas and Raymond Moley to Rexford Tugwell's desire to change the economic system...
...The task exacted by the second part is far more difficult, Narrative can no longer be centered primarily on the career of Franklin Roosevelt...
...To do that required infinite labor and infinite justice...
...Parts of the book become great literature...
...government was there to keep it a perpetual underdog in a perpetual conflict...
...At his best, he was the ablest, most intelligent, and most disinterested public servant the United States ever had...
...Socially葉hrough Federal relief, public works employment and the Social Security Acts...
...These forces set up the chief currents observable in American political life today...
...In a closing discussion of the dynamics of decision and the anatomy of leadership, Schlesinger evokes the poignant and pulsing tide of faith in Roosevelt as a sympathetic human being葉his sustained the man...
...There are two sorts of greatness," Schlesinger writes, "the foursquare, all-of-a-piece, unitary, monolithic kind, possessed by Washington" and "the glittering, elusive, pluralistic, implacable kind," Roosevelt clearly belonging in the second category...
...It has been recent fashion to say that the New Deal blundered its way pragmatically through a set of situations without intention or concept, Though I can not write with detachment (having been part of the era), it seems to me Schlesinger has disproved the "chapter of accidents" diagnosis...
...it must deal with problems involved in the vast economic and social reorganization of a great nation...
...Industrial planning葉hrough the National Recovery Administration (driven by the desperate situation of industry...
...the Columbia River exploitation and rural electrification work (in these the dreams of old Senator George Norris were brought to fruition through men like David Lilienthal and Harold Ickes...
...Biography of an era, in which Roosevelt as its central figure evoked and liberated forces and continuously brought them into balance to achieve rational results, is incomparably more complex...
...Having laid out a titanic task for himself, Schlesinger accomplishes it...
...There was the rise of the bitter, conservative opposition...
...Schlesinger has collected documentation from all sides, has honorably put them in well-ordered focus, and has suggested generous judgment...
...The revolutionary achievements of the New Deal were founded in this period...
...Finance用ositively, through reorganization of banking and the Federal Reserve, through direct action by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and therapeutically, through the Securities and Exchange Acts...
...As matters turned out, I think my picture of the U.S...
...Resource development預s in the TVA...
...The Federal Government for the first time and forever squarely assumed responsibility for economic and social conditions...
...I do not think it can be rebutted...
...But that would involve this reviewer in autobiography or reminiscence, and is not important...
...Biography of a man is comparatively simple...
...From then out, the Federal Government simultaneously and consistently attacked American problems on five fronts: Agricultural葉hrough the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (sparked by Tugwell and Henry Wallace...
...His second volume maintains, and in some ways excels, the standard set by his "Crisis of the Old Order...
...is the one which emerged...
...Professor of Law, Columbia University PROFESSOR Schlesinger's first-volume chronicle of the Roosevelt age established a peak in the ranges of 20th century history...
...the nurturing of a powerful choate labor movement...
...His verdict is just: "At his worst, the New Dealer became an arrant sentimentalist or a cynical operator...
...As a force, he was a constant...
...The chapter on "The Anatomy of Leadership" will rank as a superlative text of American politics...
...Remnants of them still exist...
...It is a little masterpiece...
...It was this which won him confidence and loyalty in a frightened age when the air was filled with the sound of certitudes cracking on every side葉his and the conviction of plain people that he had given them head and heart and would not cease fighting in their cause...
...the formation of what Schlesinger (in quite different context) once called "the vital center"預 public opinion which discarded extreme reaction on the one side and leftextremism on the other...
...Because of this, the chronologic form must be abandoned in favor of grouping and analyzing the measures worked out葉he grouping collectively known as the "New Deal," In doing so, Schlesinger gives form as well as substance to the period...
...Tactically, Roosevelt was an enigma...
...some of my then-colleagues insisted on the doctrine that baseness was always bad, and an enemy...
...Certainly it chronicles the past...
Vol. 42 • March 1959 • No. 9
