THREE ON F. D. R.
Dilliard, Irving
Three on F.D.R. Franklin D. Roosevelt: the triumph, by Frank Freidel. Little, Brown. 433 pp. $6. The Age of Roosevelt: the crisis of the old order, 1919-1933, by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr....
...Houghton-Mifflin...
...Had he succeeded by the Burns test a new party would have been built up "behind" the New Deal...
...he acquired administrative talent and political leadership...
...through his school days, his service in the New York legislature and his tenure as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in World War I, was followed in 1954 by The Ordeal...
...Harvard has made him one of its youngest full professors of history in Harvard's three centuries...
...Some readers will find that this makes a small book within the larger one without telling anything that is really new about F.D.R...
...IRVING DILLIARD is editor of the editorial page of the St...
...5.75...
...As for the scale of the Schlesinger Roosevelt, the first volume, by hurrying, takes the readers to where Frank Freidel gets his readers in three volumes, that is, to election to the Presidency...
...This is history of the first rank...
...DAVID C. WILLIAMS is editor of ADA World...
...But again the writing is of high order...
...If young Americans who were born in the depression years will read this account of the Hooverville era they will learn something which their parents seemingly have not been able to communicate to them...
...But it is a question how long Lincoln and the Civil War will continue to hold these laurels, now that the biographers and historians have gone to work in earnest on Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal...
...There will be little applause ot that sort on the right for Arthur M-Schlesinger, Jr.'s first volume of his projected four-volume The Age of Roosevelt...
...This second volume told the story of the Cox-Roosevelt ticket's crushing defeat in the Harding landslide and the young New Yorker's own heavy handicap in his crippling attack of polio...
...Reviewed by Irving Dilliard THE American figure most written about by biographers is Lincoln and the period most studied by historians is the Civil War, including the decade leading up to Fort Sumter and the Reconstruction that followed Lee's surrender at Appomattox...
...Critics have likened it to the multi-volume biographical works of Sandburg, Beveridge, Freeman, and Ray Stannard Baker...
...An invaluable part of the Burns book is a 50-page bibliography which is actually a most informative essay on source materials...
...At mid-point it is so fair and balanced that while Roosevelt admirers have warmly commended it, so has Raymond Moley been able to write: "F.D.R...
...tory in succession at the University of Illinois, Stanford, and Harvard, managed as long ago as 1952 to begin publication of his projected six-volume biography of Roosevelt...
...Roosevelt: the lion and the fox, by James MacGregor Burns...
...Har-court, Brace...
...The title comes from a line of the book, following an account of the destroyer deal in behalf of Britain in 1940: "After years of foxlike retreats and evasions, he took the lion's role...
...The second volume, which the publishers say is almost complete, will cover the New Deal first term...
...It has won, as indeed it has deserved to win, wide praise...
...The three titles listed here represent research and analysis of a high order...
...As the title of the first volume suggests, much of it is about the breakdown which occurred when the old order could not, at least did not, cope with its own economic handiwork...
...The new volume in the Freidel series, The Triumph, covers Roosevelt after his election as governor of New York and carries him through his legislative battles at Albany to the threshhold of the White House...
...The essence of the Burns analysis is that while Roosevelt was great in tactics and could be courageous, he fell short of reaching the top as a political leader inasmuch as he created no "new materials...
...Louis Post-Dispatch...
...Frank Freidel, who has taught hisDAVID FELLMAN is a professor of political science at the University of Wis-consin...
...With the appearance of this third volume, the Freidel project is presumably half completed...
...And all the while he was angling for the 1932 Democratic ; nomination for the Presidency, even to the point of appeasing William Randolph Hearst on foreign policy...
...The first volume, The Apprenticeship, which took F.D.R...
...Barely a dozen years have passed since F.D.R.'s death at Warm Springs, yet a vast literature on him and his tenure in the Presidency is taking form...
...was so good for some of us and so bad for some of us that I believed it impossible that the story could be told with objectivity in our time...
...He developed a plan for coming to grips with the depression...
...If the author of The Age of Roosevelt relies on "amusing anecdote and sentimental evocation," to quote one New Deal critic, the Pulitzer committee did not think so when it awarded a prize for Schlesinger's The Age of Jackson ten years ago...
...BERNARD BAILYN is an assistant professor of history at Harvard...
...The third book listed above is characterized by the publisher as "the first political biography of F.D.R.' Written by a professor of political* science at Williams College, The Lion and the Fox undertakes to review and evaluate Roosevelt as a leader in politics...
...557 pp...
...The background for this is summarized brilliantly...
...The third is to go up to Pearl Harbor, and the fourth will deal with the years when the Roosevelt Administration was at war...
...After the summary of what had gone before the emergence of Roosevelt Schlesinger invests about 100 pages in a short biographical account of his subject from his childhood on the Hudson to the 1932 campaign...
...553 pp...
...From the conservativp side of the aisle it is already being denounced as low in the quality of its thought, vulgar in conceptual apparatus, and slick, as the handiwork of a sophisticated advertising writer, in its presentation...
Vol. 21 • May 1957 • No. 5
