[Woodward is an American historian, editor, and professor emeritus who has written extensively on the American South. He is the author of several books on American history, including The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) and The Burden of Southern History (1960). His Origins of the New South (1951) won the Bancroft Prize for American History in 1952 and Mary Chestnut's Civil War (1981), which Woodward edited, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1982. In the following review of Schlesinger's The Crisis of the Old Order, Woodward offers a favorable assessment of the book's treatment of fifty years of political and social trends that culminated in the 1933 election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the presidency of the United States.]

"This is, I suppose, a bad time to be writing about Franklin Roosevelt," says Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in an apologetic foreword to his The Crisis of the Old Order.

Nonsense! As a matter of fact the Harvard history department, of which Mr. Schlesinger is a member, has for several years devoted a large part of its man-hours to the production of books on FDR and the military and political aspects of his period. Such industry could only have been based on the theory that this is a most excellent time to be writing about Franklin Roosevelt.

Weighing advantages against disadvantages, and using the book under review as a test case, one can find much to justify the theory. The obvious disadvantage is, of course, want of perspective. The compensating advantage is the opportunity for the exploitation of living memory. Assuming all the considerable risks involved in the foreshortened perspective, and by no means avoiding all the pitfalls, Mr. Schlesinger has made brilliant use of the compensatory advantages. The result of his daring gamble is a permanent enrichment of our historical literature.

Actually, most of the present volume is not about Roosevelt at all, but about the early years of a rather specially defined "Age of Roosevelt"—which turns out to be even longer than the "age" it seemed to the Roosevelt-haters. According to the author it embraced "half a century of American life." In this long volume he only gets down to the first inauguration in 1933. He goes back to the Populists for a bow to the founding fathers, then in turn pays his respects to contributions by the muckrakers, reformers, and progressives at the start of the century, as well as the accomplishments of the Republican Roosevelt and of Woodrow Wilson. Only with the end of the First World War, however, does he dig in for more than an impressionistic survey, and only with the crash of 1929 does he become systematic and detailed.

The special quality that gives Mr. Schlesinger's history the fillip of an intellectual cocktail is his use of analogy, a rather sinful indulgence in the eyes of orthodox historians. It was his bold assertion of the freedom to analogize that distinguished his Age of Jackson, in which there was an implied analogy between the 1830s and the 1930s. His analogies are not obvious and explicit, but subtle and implicit. The present work on Roosevelt is not so heavily seasoned with analogy as was the earlier one on Jackson, but there is enough to lend it a distinctive flavor. When he writes about the disillusionment over a lost peace that followed the First World War, about the effect of war upon reformers and their ideals, about the spread of anti-intellectualism, the excesses of the Red scare and the witch hunters, and the alienation of the intellectuals, he does not need to spell out the implications for the analogous phenomena of a later postwar era. "The old Wilsonians watched the New Era in indignation and contempt," he observes. And the alert reader can see the lips of the old New Dealers curl with scorn over subsequent goings on.

Another special quality of this gifted historian is his talent for perceiving and capturing the interplay between ideas and action, between abstract theory and concrete event, between thought and politics. We are shown how the imagination of a generation was fired by idealism, then chilled by disillusionment, anesthetized by cynicism, and finally all but alienated from the native heritage of freedom and drawn toward an alien creed. The account of the defection of artists, writers, and intellectuals in the early Thirties is especially perceptive. Shrewd also is the author's identification of certain influences in this process, particularly that of Lincoln Steffens's Autobiography, John Chamberlain's Farewell to Reform, and John Strachey's The Coming Struggle for Power.

For a historian whose primary interest is analytical and interpretative, Mr. Schlesinger shows no little ingenuity in evoking the mood and drama of time and place. A period that ranges between such extremes of hope and despair, luxury and bankruptcy, optimism and pessimism as the period between 1919 and 1933 offers plenty of scope for such ingenuity. The author is convincing in his portrayal of the gross complacency and Philistinism of the Harding and Coolidge era. But he is downright moving in his picture of the depths of depression: of Pennsylvania miners "freezing in rickety one-room houses, subsisting on wild weed-roots and dandelions, struggling for life in black and blasted valleys"; or of Kentuckians who "ate violet tops, wild onions, and the weeds which cows would eat (one wrote, 'as cows won't eat a poison weeds'), while wan children attended school without coats, shoes, or underclothes"; or of the thousands of "wild boys" who wandered the country. "I don't want to steal," a Pennsylvania man wrote Governor Pinchot, "but I won't let my wife and boy cry for something to eat…. How long is this going to keep up? I can't stand it any longer…. O, if God would only open a way."

The only questionable allocation of space in the book would seem to be the hundred pages devoted to a brief biography of Franklin Roosevelt down to 1933. This is skillfully enough done but interrupts the narrative unduly without contributing anything very new about the subject. A real contribution does appear, however, in a penetrating analysis of the FDR behind the public mask of grin and gusto and exuberant optimism. Even intimate friends rarely glimpsed the enigmatic and complex hidden man, an inscrutable combination of craftiness, hardness, and private sadness, "a man without illusions." A thesis is advanced about this man and his times. It is that the traditions of liberal reform were continuous from Populism to the New Deal, and that the antithetical elements of that tradition—agrarian and urban, Bryan and T.R., trust-busting and government regulation, New Freedom and New Nationalism—all found expression and apparent reconciliation in Franklin Roosevelt. It is too early to criticize the thesis, for it remains to be established in later volumes.

This is a long running start for a big jump: from 1933 to 1945. The publisher predicts it will be accomplished in three more volumes. It looks like more than that to me. At any rate, this book clearly launches one of the important historical enterprises of our time.