Roosevelt as Reluctant Reformer
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
Roosevelt as Reluctant Reformer America 1929-1941: The Great Depression By Robert S. McElvaine Times Books. 402 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Robert Lekachman This exceptionally well-written...
...Had he been so minded, in 1933, FDR could have reorganized, even nationalized, the banking system...
...It was pressure from the Left—much of it demagogic but no less dangerous for that reason—from popular figures like Huey Long that induced the President to sponsor the Social Security Act in 1935...
...Certainly he could have drifted to public job creation less grudgingly and more massively...
...McElvaine, transparently a man of the Democratic left, reminds his readers that Roosevelt served capitalism all too well...
...the National Labor Relations Act was a testimonial to the skill and pertinacity of Senator Robert Wagner of New York, whose name is properly attached to it...
...The core of McElvaine's criticism of the New Deal, however, is that as a program it conspicuously failed to cure mass unemployment...
...Much of McElvaine's own analysis further reveals that radicalism in farm communities was akin to the repeated surges of populist rage against railroads, bankers and Wall Street...
...I wonder...
...The letters impart an immediacy to the daily suffering of people, the majority of whom no longer are alive...
...McElvaine here engages in the reassessment of our Presidents that seems to be occupying the energies of a good many of his colleagues...
...FDR's political magic was never more powerful than in its evocation of hope and trust in constituents whose lives had been shattered by forces entirely beyond their control...
...All the initiative was Congressional, and FDR reluctantly went along...
...On the eve of Pearl Harbor, unemployment still hung high at over 14 per cent...
...Thus, McElvaine argues, the time was right even in a country as unideological as this one, for a national leader effectively to move the nation Left...
...If FDR had been the traitor to his class that his critics imagined he was, ours might be a more enlightened and compassionate society...
...The story is similar on the labor front...
...The business community very quickly recovered its morale and soon turned against Roosevelt...
...In short, the distinction between the middle class and the working class in the United States—never very precise anyway—became extremely blurred in the Great Depression...
...Dwight Eisenhower is emerging from these inquiries as a far more astute, politically skillful and hard-working White House operator than the familiar caricature of him as an amiable addict of golf, bridge and fractured syntax...
...If I have a reservation of any consequence to utter, it is occasioned by this passage: "The Depression brought forth among middle-class Americans egalitarian and humanitarian values that they came to share with working-class people...
...It did not take long, once farm incomes started to rise, for farmers to revert to their habitual conservatism...
...There was no need to allow the industry codes sponsored by the National Recovery Administration to be written by large corporations to the detriment of their smaller rivals...
...Probably Roosevelt could have taken much bolder action in 1933 than he did, but as glimmerings of recovery became visible in 1934 and continued in 1935 and 1936 the momentary coincidence of middle-class and working-class interests began to dissolve...
...It is the author's vigorously argued thesis that the country was in a more radical mood than Roosevelt...
...When Roosevelt prematurely slashed WPA payrolls and moved toward a dafarccetf Federal budget in 1937, the economy slid into a steep decline...
...As with Social Security, so also with the Federal Deposit Insurance statute, possibly one of the New Deal's major legacies to personal security and financial stability...
...As in his earlier Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man, Robert McElvaine has drawn upon the tens of thousands of letters written almost as frequently to Eleanor as to Franklin Roosevelt...
...A splendid book...
...McElvaine marshals substantial evidence for this position...
...But he missed an opportunity to include comprehensive national health care that has not since repeated itself...
...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman This exceptionally well-written reconsideration of the New Deal rates as one of the best entries in a field crowded by eminent historians like William Leuchtenberg, Arthur Schlesinger Jr...
...As an infant radical during the New Deal, I railed against the man as an impediment to needed radical change and a savior of capitalism...
...McElvaine combines admiration of Roosevelt's mastery of public opinion and—until the Court-packing fiasco in 1937—his capacity to elicit from Congress support for most of the measures he sought, with sharp criticism of FDR's delight in deception, occasional cruelty and infidelity to Eleanor...
...I share McElvaine's frustration with Roosevelt...
...The Wagner Act did more to promote union organization than any other event in our political history...
...Roosevelt was not especially keen about unions...
...and Frank Friedel...
...Harry Truman, rehabilitated recently by Robert Donovan, reappears in Charles Mee's new book, The Marshall Plan, as an unsophisticated provincial, addicted to quick action and speedy decisions without adequate consultation or reflection, and excessively eager to confront the Russians anywhere around the enormous perimeter of the Soviet Union...
...These poignant documents, many of them semi-literate, attest to the desperation and bewilderment of ordinary Americans endlessly unemployed, dispossessed from their homes, and all too often unable to feed their children and themselves...
...it recovered only after FDR in some disarray sought emergency job-creating appropriations from Congress...
Vol. 67 • May 1984 • No. 9
