The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt

This bold new analysis of the New Deal dramatically revises our vision of the Roosevelt legacy -- and of the new relation between government and business it made a central fact of American life. With impressive scholarship and narrative brio, Jordan A. Schwarz persuasively demonstrates that the New Deal's architects sought not merely to save an endangered American capitalism but to integrate economically underdeveloped regions of the nation within the scope of a dynamic state capitalism capable, after World War II, of dominating the global marketplace. As he assesses the contributions of such figures as Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, the legal and political "fixer" Thomas G. Corcoran, Texas legislators, Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson, and the quintessential New Deal industrialist Henry Kaiser, Schwarz produces a volume that should be required reading for anyone concerned with current American industrial policy. And he does so with a liveliness and depth of insight that make The New Dealers comparable to the best work of Arthur Schlesinger or Robert Caro.