[Dangerfield is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning study The Era of Good Feelings (1953). In the following review, Dangerfield contends that the in-depth analysis of politics and economics in Schlesinger's The Coming of the New Deal is complemented by a "detailed exposition of theory and philosophy being put to work during a highly critical period" of the Roosevelt presidency.]

The exhilarating arrival of the New Deal; its introduction to the public at large of so many able, energetic, controversial, eccentric and brilliant figures; its vitality; the dramatic, visible, audible gallantry of the President himself—all of these are here [in The Coming of the New Deal], as might be expected. Schlesinger's previous books assure the reader in advance that the personalities behind those names once so familiar—Roosevelt, Wallace, Ickes, Johnson, Tugwell, Hopkins, Richberg, Perkins, Morgenthau, Douglas and all—will be brilliantly presented. The author is a master of historical characterization, which is, to be sure, the easiest kind of writing if one has a flair for it; he is also good at narrative, at compressing dense and resisting material into a formal and intelligible sequence, and that is by no means so easy.

Readability is important, literary skill is valuable; but history has been known to get along without either. What matters, obviously and finally, is the author's interpretation of the New Deal as a transforming force. The present volume deals chiefly with the years 1933 and 1934, when the New Deal was in its first phase, still searching in all directions for possible solutions, not yet in open conflict with the Court. Here a reviewer is in some difficulty: this is a work in progress, and in his final evaluation the author may well modify his conclusions on any phase of the Age of Roosevelt in terms of its relation to the period as a whole. So far Schlesinger appears to take the conventional view that the New Deal at this stage should be judged as much by its promises as by its performances; and that the more questionable of its performances—the National Recovery Administration is the most obvious of them—are to be examined by the light of the promises contained in them. I see no reason to cavil at this view: to be conventional in these days sometimes requires a strong mind.

But what were the promises? Here one is obliged to do a little guessing. The Coming of the New Deal implies that the New Deal did not at any time hold out the promise of a radical reorganization. It might have done so. In all our history, no reforming party had hitherto come to power at a time of economic collapse. But the legislation exacted from an obedient Congress during the Hundred Days, though profuse and exciting, could all be traced back to precedents in American history. What was breath-taking was the speed and the scope of the performance. Three followed a long search for the restoration of Demand—of consumers' purchasing power—and this gave the opposition time to shake itself back into what might be called respectable shape.

Sackcloth is not a robe banking and business wear with pleasure, still less with distinction; and the season of repentance was brief. Once it was over, the old ritualistic cries, the mating calls of sterile ideas, were heard again: back to the gold standard—a balanced budget—economy in government—hands off business. It was not here, however, that the really dangerous criticism lay. The really dangerous criticism was directed toward the relief aspects of the emerging program. At its most strident, this criticism sounds absurd today; it did not sound absurd then: such is the abyss which the New Deal has dug between the present and the immediate past.

When someone asked him about homeless boys riding the rails in search of employment, Henry Ford said equably, "Why, it's the best education in the world for those boys, that traveling around. They get more experience in a few months than they would in years at school." Even a liberal businessman like Robert E. Woods of Sears, Roebuck could identify relief as the New Deal's "one serious mistake." "While it is probably true that we cannot allow everyone to starve (although I personally disagree with this philosophy of the city social worker)," Wood wrote, "we should tighten up relief all along the line…."

The old equation between starvation and genius, or that infinite capacity for taking pains which was sometimes held to have something to do with genius, was handily transferred to the economic scene and easily related to national character. For the federal government to save people from starvation and intolerable anxiety was to destroy initiative, and so on and so forth. One need not trouble oneself with these primitive cries, uttered by comic millionaries who went to the Translux to hiss Roosevelt. Submarginal living might produce an Andrew Carnegie or a Jack Dempsey; the whole experience of America said that it had never, for example, produced a good farmer. What is significant is that this kind of thinking was not confined to primitive minds; men like Hopkins were troubled by it; the President was too. What is important is that these men never succumbed to their uneasiness.

Indeed, the later criticism that Roosevelt was an "enemy to his class" was only superficially (if savagely) concerned with banking reform or civilizing the Stock Exchange or soaking the rich: it was always directed toward the objectives for which the rich were being soaked. The rich, in any case, were not Roosevelt's class, though he had lived with them all his life and had little respect and certainly no veneration for them: he belonged to the Hudson River squirearchy. Far back in the past of this squirearchy there was a tradition of scientific farming and quasi-feudal land-owning; so that Roosevelt's soil conservation program, in the history of which he was deeply read, did not spring only from the example of his cousin T. R.; it was quite in the tradition of the Hudson River squires. What was not in this tradition was his concern for the people who lived on the soil. And this concern, which proclaimed him a traitor to his class and which was odious to the rich who were not of his class, did not come so easily as regards the urban unemployed, whose lives could not be touched by the rehabilitation of TVA. It is of the first importance, in contemplating the changes which took place within the first New Deal, to consider that, in 1933 and 1934, it may have been difficult even for men of good will to rid themselves of the notion that there was something debilitation, something anti-historical (i.e., anti-American) about the welfare state.

Ultimately, when all the debates had taken place between men of conflicting philosophies inside and outside the Administration, it was the President who decided what should be the nature and speed of the New Deal. Schlesinger here takes the administrative view and, with all the limitations which such a view implies, it is the correct one: what greater, unadmitted and unrecognized pressures dictated the President's decisions we are unlikely ever to know. His direction of events is naturally best observed in the field of foreign relations, where Presidents traditionally have a free hand; and here the story of the London Economic Conference of 1933 is full of interest.

Schlesinger admits that Roosevelt's handling of this conference was "deplorable"; but, to simplify an argument which he refrains from making very complex, he sees the issues involved in these terms. On the one hand, there were the gold countries, intent upon stabilizing the exchanges and restoring the gold standard; on the other hand, there was Roosevelt's determination that nothing should hinder America's drive for recovery. At the same time the author says, rather casually, that Roosevelt did think about the possible synchronization of world spending, with a view to raising world prices. In this way, he could be said to have favored a policy of international cooperation: one could discover, lurking in the recesses of his being, a personage who resembled a Wilsonian internationalist.

The conference was, no doubt, doomed from the start: yet Roosevelt's wrecking of the conference, a deliberate act if ever there was one, does suggest that at this time he was an isolationist. The Johnson Act of 1934 almost, if not quite, hardens the suggestion into a certainty. Not that there was, at this period, anything incompatible between isolationism and old-fashioned progressivism. First things first as a national policy—at least until 1936 when Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland and Franco started his insurrection—had merit, considering what Schlesinger calls the "controlling realities," and chief among the controlling realities was America's desperate need for recovery. First things first was light years away from "America First." But Schlesinger's interpretation of Hull's tariff policies in terms of "the triumph of reciprocity" is not too persuasive. In short, it is difficult to see the New Deal in its heyday as anything but isolationist: part of the fascination of Roosevelt is his ability to change, even gradually, even if it took a war situation to change him and, incidentally, to rescue the New Deal.

A similar gradualism can be seen in Roosevelt's attitude toward NRA. Just as, at the beginning of the Hundred Days, he refrained from nationalizing the banking system, so on this larger industrial scene he persisted in the belief that recovery could be achieved through a partnership between business and government: the result was the big-business formula of scarcity and high prices. It took him some time to realize all this, and he might not have realized it as soon as he did if the Court had not ably assisted him by striking down NRA. In the same conspectus one may place his attitude toward organized labor. "He sympathized with organized labor more out of a reaction against employer primitivism than as necessarily a hopeful new development in itself…. Neither politically nor intellectually was the New Deal much interested in the labor movement during Roosevelt's first years." The elements necessary for a change of thinking were all there, and specifically in clause 7a of the National Industrial Recovery Act: they had not yet come together in the President's mind.

In the extraordinary ferment of the first Administration, and of Roosevelt's own mind, it is not surprising that so much that was cautious and conservative should have been found side by side with so much that was experimental, pragmatic and progressive. The promises of the first New Deal, like the performances of the second, can be interpreted in terms of a conflict between reform and recovery. Roosevelt only hinted at really basic reforms of the capitalist state: he was interested in the practical means and the logical consequences of recovery. That is to say, he tried to impose upon the repellent features of the capitalist state, as he found them, the benign image of the welfare state. He did not succeed wholly; but to the extent that the image has become ineffaceable, he succeeded magnificently.

This conflict was partly responsible for the administrative confusion of the New Deal; and The Coming of the New Deal stresses, very rightly I think, the question of Roosevelt as an administrator. He could be called a very poor administrator or an artist in administration; poor because he was wasteful; an artist because he was flexible. He believed in bringing into his government men of all kinds of economic and political beliefs: in this sense his Administration was one prolonged debate; but the debate was so arranged that the best information was made available to him and the last word was left with him. He had himself no discernible philosophy; he knew how to put conflicting philosophies to work. In the extraordinary chaos of temporary agencies, which so often overlapped or even nullified one another, he maintained, somehow or other, some kind of positive direction. His way of pitting one man against another, of leaving everyone uncertain as to the security of his position in the government, of subjecting people to a sadistic teasing, kept his advisers on their toes; just as his warmth and his charm held them together.

It was a personal triumph, and the personality behind was complex and baffling. Schlesinger, going back to Archilochus' distinction between hedgehog and fox, says that Roosevelt was all fox. He was devious, evasive, at times untruthful. Not even his intimates could be sure that they knew anything about him; there was, at the heart of the labyrinth, a solitary reserve which could not be entered. Schlesinger believes, however, that "one cannot exhaust the Roosevelt mystery by saying that he was complicated … he was complicated everywhere except in his heart of hearts." In his heart of hearts lay a simple, a rather naive idealism.

It was certainly this which the public sensed, or that majority of the public which listened to him with pleasure and voted for him without pain. It was because of his idealism, not in spite of it, that Roosevelt was able to dramatize so successfully one great constitutional event—the transformation of the Presidency from an organ of government into an influence which should pervade every corner of the national life. If we had not experienced the immanence of a Roosevelt, we might not today feel so crippled by the remoteness of an Eisenhower.

History is, in one sense, a translation. It takes the complex of the past and carries it across—makes it understandable—to those who think and live in the complex of the present. Obviously, it is an incomplete translation at best. There is a good deal in the past that is too idiomatic for a successful rendering, and a good deal more that is simply irrecoverable. Nor can any single work give more than a fragment of what is recoverable. I don't see much virtue in criticizing a book for not being what its author never intended it to be. One could remark on the absence of any intellectual history in this work; but then that may come, and presumably will come, in a later volume. What is more serious is the relative poverty of its social history—we are left with a very indistinct idea of the condition of the people under the first New Deal. But that would require another kind of book. The Coming of the New Deal presents an administrative and political study: not a close analysis of economic theory and political philosophy, but a detailed exposition of theory and philosophy being put to work during a highly critical period. As such it is a powerful, a memorable, an important book.