The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt

by Jordan A. Schwarz

This bold new analysis of the New Deal dramatically revises our vision of the Roosevelt legacy -- and of the new relation between government and business it made a central fact of American life. With impressive scholarship and narrative brio, Jordan A. Schwarz persuasively demonstrates that the New Deal's architects sought not merely to save an endangered American capitalism but to integrate economically underdeveloped regions of the nation within the scope of a dynamic state capitalism capable, after World War II, of dominating the global marketplace.As he assesses the contributions of such figures as Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, the legal and political "fixer" Thomas G. Corcoran, Texas legislators, Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson, and the quintessential New Deal industrialist Henry Kaiser, Schwarz produces a volume that should be required reading for anyone concerned with current American industrial policy. And he does so with a liveliness and depth of insight that make The New Dealers comparable to the best work of Arthur Schlesinger or Robert Caro.

Genres: History

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Jordan A. Schwarz was an American historian, professor of history at Northern Illinois University, author and authority on the Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt eras and some of their famous figures.

A resident of DeKalb and Chicago, he died of a heart attack at the age of 57.

Reviews

[Lucas Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is good. It is a slog at times. The structure of it favors a more experienced student of the New Deal. The capsule biographies that contribute to a larger argument about the New Deal's economic development of South and West are rich in detail, but often lag in narrative drive. Long digressions in each chapter tend to pick up the figures left off of the table of contents, but they also make the transition from one section to another more intuitive and sometimes only hinted at. Schwarz is a champion of liberalism and a firmly liberal interpretation of the New Deal, his argument about Wilsonian progressives turned anti-New Deal conservatives (Herbert Hoover, Bernard Baruch) was a novel approach to familiar figures. The centrality of Louis Brandies to the New Deal project was also an argument I was not as familiar with. The chapters on lawyers all bled together, except an excellent chapter on David Lilienthal and the TVA, probably the most engaging part of the whole book. Overall, I think this is an important work that has some arguments I'll take with me to the other standards works in the historiography. I'm also glad to say goodbye to this one for awhile.