Content area
Full Text
I will always remember my first encounter with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. I had holed up at Vermont’s Saxtons River Inn in 1979 and stayed awake for three days and nights reading his “Age of Roosevelt” trilogy (The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933 [1957]; The Coming of the New Deal [1958]; The Politics of Upheaval [1959]) . I already knew Schlesinger had made Andrew Jackson into a proto-Roosevelt with not an ounce of clay in his feet in The Age of Jackson (1945). (“I was hopelessly absorbed in the dilemmas of democratic capitalism made vivid for my generation by FDR and the New Deal, and I underplayed and ignored other aspects of the Age of Jackson,” the historian acknowledged some sixty years later.1) As I saw it, the first of the three volumes was marred only by its lack of empathy for Roosevelt’s Republican predecessor.
Its two successors were absolutely brilliant. Schlesinger never left you guessing that during the Eisenhower Era, he was rooting for the return of liberalism and an activist President. “By bringing to Washington a government determined to govern, Roosevelt unlocked new energies in a people who had lost faith, not just in government’s ability to meet the economic crisis, but almost in the ability of anyone to do anything,” a typical passage reads (The Coming of the New Deal, p. 22; emphasis in the original). “He well knew that more was at stake than America—that the challenge of achieving economic security within a framework of freedom offered civilized society a decisive test” (The Politics of Upheaval, p. 656). FDR’s faith “in the Constitution was founded, plausibly enough, in the whole experience of the American history”; the anti-New Deal justices who expounded its meaning “betray[ed]” it (The Politics of Upheaval, pp. 449, 451). At the same time, Schlesinger panned his paragon on occasion, and characterized the President’s torpedoing of currency stabilization during the London Economic Conference as “deplorable” (The Coming of the New Deal, p. 229).
The Coming of the New Deal was “based upon truly exhaustive research— printed sources (including a full study of the contemporary periodical press), the manuscript collections at Hyde Park and the National...