PRESTOPUNDIT

For the Survival of Democracy : Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s by Alonzo Hamby is reviewed by Rick Perlstein in the NY Times. Quotable:

The generation that created his field [FDR studies], he writes .. ''established a tone that still dominates the study of American politics in the 1930's: a near-adulatory perspective, occasionally nagged by a sense that F.D.R. was too 'conservative' to lead us entirely into the promised land of equalitarian social democracy.'' He also notes the inconvenient fact that hobbles them: it's impossible to argue that the New Deal accomplished what it set out to do, namely, to produce a genuine economic recovery. But it is not in answering the question ''Did it work?'' that Hamby ventures his most aggressive contribution to this discussion. He's more interested in what there was to admire in Roosevelt's attempt. He concludes: not too much ..