After the New Deal

...The treatment of the Roosevelt coalition in 1936, which makes valid points not made before, would have been strengthened by more consideration of the American Labor Party of New York than the almost passing references made...

...A political crisis impended if Roosevelt could not regain the initiative...

...as there is about Lincoln after almost a century...

...he was above all a political man, and the political situation dictated which way to go: toward the Left...

...But the depression was by no means over, and Left, Right, and phony Left demanded new departures with voices of growing strength...

...Perhaps the Senate progressives were inadquate, perhaps Roosevelt was right in thinking that he could get more by working with Southern conservatives than with Northern and Western progressive prima donnas, but quoting statements by Harold Ickes and Rex Tug-well about the progressives' unreliability, rather than documenting the charge by close description of their actions, is not persuasive...

...A slightly longer section treats the enactment of the second New Deal and is followed by a shorter treatment of the difficulties of the New Deal with the Federal courts, stopping short of the Supreme Court fight of 1937...

...The New Deal was substantially on the books...

...He relieves reader weariness—after all, it is a huge book—with apt quotations and revealing anecdotes...

...LUCY P. CARNER is a member of the national board of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom...

...It deserves the wide audience it will get, and the audience will be politically wiser and better informed for having read it...

...Within the Administration groups and alliances tugged and hauled over such basic matters as further industrial planning versus restoring competition and budget-balancing versus deficit spending...

...Governor Landon, incidentally, allowed Schlesinger access to his papers and consented to be interviewed, and the Landon that emerges from these pages is a somewhat more sophisticated and liberal person than was generally thought in 1936...

...In September, 1935, Roosevelt wrote publisher Roy Howard, ". . . the 'breathing spell' of which you speak is here—very decidedly so...

...People also need to be reminded that Alfred M. Landon was not by any means a nasal, naive Neanderthal...

...His books were brisk and sentimental, saturated with fact and suffused with moral indignation...

...By the end of the first session of the 74th Congress, Capitol Hill and the White House had put through the Social Security Act, the Wagner Act, Marriner Eccles' banking law, rural electrification, WPA, the Guffey Coal Act, the Public Utilities Holding Company Act, and a progressively amended tax program...

...behind an anti-lynching bill, and that he hoped his "oratorical extremism would nullify the effect of . . . legislative and administrative moderation" and thereby give "new heart to his friends" while "diminishfing] the grievances of his enemies...

...The Right took a thorough drubbing, the Left for the most part went along with Roosevelt, and the phony Left after Huey Long's assassination bogged down in an impossible alliance of Father Coughlin, Gerald L. K. Smith, Dr...

...Townsend, and William Lemke...

...he wrote "The Decline of American Communism...

...It is fortunate that one who does chooses to write about Roosevelt and the Great Depression, for there seems to be after fifteen years almost as much popular misinformation and misconception about F.D.R...

...The measures of the earliest New Deal had been enacted, and the voters in November, 1934, had returned heavier Democratic Congressional majorities than ever...

...Nevertheless, The Politics of Upheaval is impressive...

...Schlesinger's decision to consider the legislative history of the Wagner Act in the previous volume blurs one important difference between the first and second New Deals and, because Roosevelt resisted Wagner's bill until he saw it would pass anyway, the author tends to give the White House too much credit for the record of the 74th Congress...

...In a sketch of a few sentences, full of well-turned phrases, he gives the reader what is necessary to know of his characters' personalities...

...The final section culminates in the 1936 elections...

...In terms of the polarized politics of the mid-1930's Roosevelt did not go very far Left, but from the vantage point of our own era of consensus the record of the Administration and the Congress in the spring and summer of 1935 seems a tremendous progressive achievement...

...Sample: "The last of the prewar muckrakers, [Upton] Sinclair somehow kept a gentle but durable innocence while all around him—Steffens to his left, Mark Sullivan and Hearst to his right —capitulated to images of power and success...

...When one considers the background of the Wagner Act, one wonders about the validity of the assertions about the unreliability of the Senate progressives...

...ARTHUR WEINBERG edited a book on Clarence Darrow titled "Attorney for the Damned...

...Not many historians of this generation write successfully for a wide nonprofessional audience...

...DAVID FELLMAN, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, wrote "The Defendant's Rights...

...Enough had been accomplished, however, to give Roosevelt in 1936 the greatest electoral victory any Presidential candidate has ever won...

...Roosevelt, it seems to me, never decided upon intellectual grounds what he wanted to do except in a most general way...

...As excellent a book as this is—the best of the three volumes, in my opinion, because the subject-matter better fits the author's conceptions and interests—I must enter a few dissents...

...Indeed, more attention to state and local politics throughout the volume would have enriched the story...

...He could not lead until he knew where he wanted to go...

...Just as the popular view of Lincoln as The Great Emancipator vastly oversimplifies and distorts reality without being absolutely wrong, so does the popular view of Roosevelt as The Great Liberal...

...JOHN M. SWOMLEY is executive director of the Fellowship of Reconcllation...

...But Roosevelt did next to nothing while opposition mounted in all quarters...

...The writing is first-rate...

...The run to the Left was a brief one...

...Schlesinger writes narrative history as well as any American historian of this century...

...FREDERICK C. MOSHER is a professor of political science at the University of California...

...As late as January, 1935, Roosevelt himself had described his budget message as "tory...

...Reviewed by David A. Shannon In late 1934 and early 1935 President Roosevelt, like a Model T when you most wanted to get it started, was "stuck on center...

...He has a sense of drama, wit, and a sharp eye for irony...

...Americans of all shades of political opinion need to be reminded that Roosevelt "avoided ideological commitment . . . even avoided intellectual clarity," that even at the height of his most liberal period he maintained friendly relationships with Democratic city bosses of the most squalid sort and party conservatives such as Bernard Baruch and Jesse Jones, that in December 1934 even Morgenthau's tax plan was too radical for F.D.R.'s taste, that he never threw his support THE REVIEWERS DAVID A. SHANNON teaches American history at the University of Wisconsin...

...This excellent book opens with a section of about two hundred pages on the angry voices that demanded something more or something different, from Huey Long to the homegrown radicals of the period, too long neglected, such as Tom Amlie of Wisconsin and Maury Maverick of Texas...

...Schlesinger's research is wide, especially for a general book like this, which could be expanded into a shelf of volumes...