Bibliographical Essay Introduction Two older studies of the New Deal which are still worth consulting are Basil Rauch, The History of the New Deal (Creative Age Press: New York, 1944) and Denis Brogan's unduly neglected The Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Chronicle of the New Deal and Global War (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1952). The standard conservative denunciation of the socialistic trends of the New Deal was Edgar E. Robinson, The Roosevelt Leadership, 1933-1945 (J. B. Lippincott: Philadelphia, 1955). The revolutionary changes brought by the New Deal were celebrated in Carl Degler, 'The Third American Revolution', in Out of Our Past: The Forces that Shaped Modem America (Harper & Row: New York, 1959, second edn., 1970), pp. 379-413, and Mario Einaudi, The Roosevelt Revolution (Harcourt, Brace: New York, 1959). Einaudi praised 'the most important attempt in the twentieth century to affirm the validity and the central role of the political instruments of democracy in facing the crisis of our times'. Sympathetic accounts of the New Deal from a liberal perspective which were nevertheless critical of Roosevelt and his advisers were Eric Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modem American Reform (Knopf: New York, 1952), Rexford G. Tug­ well, The Democratic Roosevelt (Doubleday: New York, 1957) and James MacGregor Bums, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (Harcourt, Brace: New York, 1956). Goldman criticised New Dealers for being too casual about the morality of their methods; Tugwell regretted the lost opportunities for injecting greater discipline into the American economy; Bums regretted that Roosevelt had been attracted by short-term political gains at the expense of the long-term strategic goal of creating a genuinely liberal Democratic Party. The climax of liberal approval of the New Deal's achievements 314 The New Deal were Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr's three volumes in The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order; The Coming of the New Deal; and The Politics of Upheaval (Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1956, 1958, 19(0) and William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (Harper & Row: New York, 1963). Neither author was uncritical: Leuchtenburg in particular noted that the Roosevelt Revolution was only a halfway revolution which excluded from its benefits many who needed help most. Nevertheless, both had impeccable liberal credentials: Schlesinger as a founding member of the Americans for Democra­ tic Action, Leuchtenburg as a former full-time ADA official. Schlesinger celebrated both Roosevelt's genius and the New Deal's pragmatism: 'In the welter of confusion and ignorance, experiment corrected by compassion was the best answer'. Leuch­ tenburg praised Roosevelt for almost revolutionising the agenda of American politics, for creating a more just society by recognising groups which had been largely unrepresented, and for establishing a sounder basis for eventual economic recovery. At a time when there were few specialist monographs, both authors displayed a remarkably sure touch in identifying the critical issues at stake in the most diverse New Deal activities. Both demonstrated an enviable mastery of a vast range of archival material. No one is ever likely to match the richness of Schlesinger's dramatic narra­ tive. No one is ever likely to produce a better one volume treatment of the New Deal than Leuchtenburg's. Radical disillusionment in the 19608 soon produced sharp cri­ tiques of the New Deal. The most notable of these were Howard Zinn (ed.), New Deal Thought (Bobbs-Merrill: Indianapolis, 1966), pp. xv-xxxvi; Paul Conkin, The New Deal (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1968) and Barton J. Bernstein, 'The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform', in Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (Pantheon: New York, 1967), pp. 263-8. See also Brad Wiley, 'Historians and the New Deal' (Radical Education Project: Ann Arbor, n.d.) and Ronald Radosh, 'The Myth of the New Deal' , in A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State (E. P. Dutton: New York, 1972), pp. 146-87. Jerold S. Auerbach vigorously rebutted the New Left case in 'New Deal, Old Deal, or Raw Deal: Some Thoughts on New Left Historiography' , Journal of Southern History 35 (1969), pp. 18-30. Bibliographical Essay 315 Most New Left critiques have been essentially extended essays. There has been no attempt to establish a full-length interpretation of the New Deal and corporate liberalism. The nearest to such a treatment is Gabriel Kolko, Main Currents in Modem American History (Harper & Row: New York, 1976), pp. 100-56. Arthur Schlesinger's three volumes had by 1960 taken the New Deal up to 1936. As yet no fourth volume has appeared. Frank Freidel's definitive biography of Roosevelt came to a halt in 1956. It took Freidel a further seventeen years to advance Roosevelt's career the eight months from the 1932 election to the end of the Hundred Days; see Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: vol. I The Apprenticeship; vol. II The Ordeal; vol. III The Triumph; vol. IV Launching the New Deal (Little, Brown: Boston, 1952, 1954, 1956, 1973). It became increasingly difficult for historians interested in Roosevelt and the view of the New Deal from Washington to absorb the large numbers of specialist monographs on particular New Deal agencies and case studies of the execution of government programmes at the local level. The book which isolated and identified this historiographical shift away from policy-making clashes in the capital was James T. Patterson, The New Deal and the States: Federalism in Transition (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1969). I have attempted to digest the plethora of published and unpublished local case studies that followed Patterson's book in 'The New Deal and the Localities', in Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones and Bruce Collins (eds.), The Growth of Federal Power in American History (Scottish Academic Press: Edinburgh, 1983), pp. 102-15. John Braeman reviewed some of the earlier specialist monographs in 'The New Deal and the "Broker State": A Review of the Recent Scholarly Literature', Business History Review 46 (1972), pp. 409-20. Subsequent gener­ al treatments of the New Deal which stressed both its limitations and the constraints within which reformers operated include Otis L. Graham Jr, 'Years of Crisis: America in Depression and War, 193~1945', in William E. Leuchtenburg, The Unfinished Century: America since 1900 (Little, Brown: Boston, 1973), pp. 357-459, RichardS. Kirkendall, The United States, 1929-1945: Years ofCrisis and Change (McGraw-Hill: New York, 1973) and Barry D. Karl, The Uneasy State: The United States from 1915 to 1945 (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1983), pp. 80-181. The free-market case against the damaging consequences of 316 The New Deal New Deal statism was most eloquently expressed by Milton Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: New York, 1980). Intellectuals on the right in the 1970s found the emphasis on New Deal limitations misguided. Intellectuals on the left found the explanation of those limitations which had been offered by New Left critics unsatisfactory. Neo­ Marxists, notably Theda Skocpol in 'Political Response to Capital­ ist Crisis: Neo-Marxist Theories of the State and the Case of the New Deal', Politics and Society 10 (1980), pp. 155-201, find 'corporate liberalism' an unconvincing concept when applied to the 1930s. The ultimate consequences of the New Deal might have been helpful to corporate capitalists but, they note, empirical case studies failed to show a vanguard of enlightened capitalists pro­ moting New Deal measures. The failure of the New Deal to secure recovery before 1941 also casts doubt on the notion that the state or state managers automatically and inherently acted to serve the interests of corporate capitalism. As yet, the social history of the inarticulate many has not been absorbed into general New Deal historiography. But Robert S. McElvaine's excellent narrative, The Great Depression: America 1929-41 (New York Times Books: New York, 1984) has two important chapters in which he seeks to examine the 'fundamental shift in the values of the American people': '''Fear Itself": Depression Life' and 'Moral Economics: American Values and Culture in the Great Depression', pp. 170-223. Chapter 1 The most compelling personal testimony to the dramatic impact of the Depression on individual lives is contained first in the oral history interviews collected by Studs Terkel in Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (Allan Lane: London, 1970), then in the life histories taken down in the 1930s by the Federal Writers' Project. Selections of these have been edited by Ann Banks, First-Person America (Knopf: New York, 1980), and by Tom Terrill and Jerrold Hirsch, Such as Us: Southern Voices of the Thirties (University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1978). Over 15,000,000 letters from the public survive in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. Robert S. McElvaine studied a random sample Bibliographical Essay 317 of 15,000 of these and other letters to federal agencies for a study of working-class reactions to the Depression. His Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man (University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1983) contains a selection of these, together with letters to Hoover's relief coordinating com­ mittees and to Senator Robert F. Wagner. Gilbert C. Fite, the doyen of American agricultural historians, provides the best analysis of the general problems confronting American farmers in American Farmers: The New Majority (Indi­ ana University Press: Bloomington, 1981), ch. 2. See also Theo­ dore Saloutos, The American Farmers and the New Deal (Iowa State University Press: Ames, 1982), pp. 3-14 on the farm crisis, 1918-33. For the particular plight of western farmers after 1929 see Leonard J.