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Franklin D Roosevelt And The New Deal |  | Author: William E. Leuchtenburg
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Seller: Goldstone Books UK
Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 463079
Media: Paperback
Edition: First Harper Torchbooks Edition
Pages: 432
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 0061330256
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.917
EAN: 9780061330254
ASIN: 0061330256
Publication Date: August 17, 1963
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
When the stability of American life was threatened by the Great Depression, the decisive and visionary policy contained in FDR's New Deal offered America a way forward. In this groundbreaking work, William E. Leuchtenburg traces the evolution of what was both the most controversial and effective socioeconomic initiative ever undertaken in the United States—and explains how the social fabric of American life was forever altered. It offers illuminating lessons on the challenges of economic transformation—for our time and for all time.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 13
 VERY INTERESTING December 24, 2009
Ann Braley (North Carolina , USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Gives great detail into what the New Deal was. Relates well to current events as well. Would recommend as an intro to FDRs presidency.
If you want just one book about Roosevelt & the new deal, this is it June 17, 2009
Louie's Mom (Dallas)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I heard a lot about another book on this subject, "The Forgotten Man" by journalist and former WSJ editorialist Amity Shlaes, but decided to read this one instead. The few scholarly people whose reviews of the Shlae's book I found online weren't impressed with it as the author clearly used selected statistics to try to make an ideological point. I wanted to read something by a historian who was a respected scholar in the field so I picked this book. This book is jammed full of facts as to the political, economic and social environment and as a result it is somewhat slow reading. However, it is an excellent and thorough book. The author clearly doesn't idolize or villify FDR - which makes him more credible than many other authors who have written about this period.
 Setting the Record Straight about FDR February 8, 2009
Dana Garrett
12 out of 14 found this review helpful
As the USA contemplates taking on an $800 billion stimulus package to jump start its moribund economy, many are asking if there has ever been a comparable investment that has triggered a recovery. The usual answer is Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" and how it wrested the USA from the Great Depression.
But some, mostly conservative, revisionist scholarship has questioned that answer. This scholarship points to the recession of 1937 as evidence that the New Deal spurred little or no recovery at all. These scholars further claim it was the onset of War World 2 with all its attendant war manufacturing that wrested the USA's economy from the throes of the Great Depression, apparently oblivious to the irony that the rearmament campaign was a massive government spending spree.
Fortunately, we have William E. Leuchtenburg's Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940 to set us straight. Reading Leuchtenburg's work, it's clear that the revisionists use quite selective evidence. They are especially suspect for what they don't tell us. For example, by 1936 the New Deal had
* created at least 6 million jobs
* increased the national income by half in 1936 from what it was in 1933
* doubled industrial output
* spurred Detroit to manufacture more cars than any year since 1929
* energized utility companies to sell more electricity than any time in the past
* quadrupled the net income of farm operators
* caused corporation profit sheets, which ran a $2 billion deficit in 1933, to run ran $5 billion in the black (p. 194)
To be sure, there was a recession in 1937, but it was not because of the New Deal policies. Rather, it was precisely because they were being abandoned:
"The more successful the New Deal was, the more it undid itself. The more prosperous the country became, the more the people returned to the only values they knew, those associated with an individualistic, success-oriented society. ... During the upturn of 1935 - 37, conservative argued that, since the crisis had passed, reforms were no longer appropriate. When the recession struck, this plea had even greater force; as the nerve of business opposition revived, the old convictions that business could run the economy with greater efficiency than bureaucrats reappeared." (p.273)
Roosevelt took a more moderate line during the recession, partly because of the intransigence of Congress. Consequently, the economy didn't recover until the massive government spending that occurred during the run up and onset of the second world war. Even so there is a lesson in the recovery that the conservative revisionists would never want to admit:
"Although it was the war that freed the government from the taboos of a balanced budget and revealed the potentialities of spending, it is conceivable that New Deal measures would have led the country into a new cycle of prosperity even if there had been no war. Marked gains had been made before the war spending had any appreciable effect. When recovery did come, it was much more soundly based because of the adoption of the New Deal program." (p.347)
Both the New Deal spending and the rearmament spending were budget busting stimulus programs. In terms of the impact they had on the economy, they both had the same effect: viz., they spurred a recovery. And both effectively questioned and refuted the conservative assumptions that balanced budgets and a private sector largely free from the targeted economic stimuli of the public sector are the sine qua non of a recovering economy.
Learn History November 1, 2007
Easy Reader NY (New York State)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Leuchtenberg was (?) an extraordinary historian, this book was incredible. The writing was so deft and enjoyable, his mastery of all the facts across multiple sources so clear and unquestionable, this is history as it was done in the Golden Age.
Good text July 2, 2007
S. Aitchison (Cedar City, UT USA)
5 out of 8 found this review helpful
This was used as a textbook in one of my college history courses and was pretty easy to follow. I enjoyed learning about this time period.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 13
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