New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDK's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America.

• Author: Smiley, Gene
• Position: Book review

New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDK's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America

By Burton Folsom Jr.

New York: Threshold Editions, Simon and Schuster, 2008.

Pp. xvi, 318. $27.00 cloth.

In the darkest days near the end of the Great Depression of 1929-33, Franklin Delano Roosevelt emerged to become the nation's savior. He brought hope to the downtrodden and dispossessed, developed policies to pull the economy out of the Depression and by those policies staved off more radical proposals that would have emasculated American capitalism. So popular was he that he was elected to an unprecedented four consecutive terms as president, his reelection in 1936 bringing the largest Electoral College vote victory margin in U.S. history. His legacy continues to this day. Ronald Reagan was an admirer of FDR and his New Deal, as is the current president, Barack Obama.

So goes the popular understanding of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an understanding that has been expressed in countless high school and college U.S. history textbooks, numerous popular books, movies, television shows, and documentaries. Some of the leading American historians have helped to cement this view. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.--one of the leading liberal New Deal historians of the mid- and late twentieth century and a founder of the left-liberal group Americans for Democratic Action (ADA)--wrote the influential and laudatory three-volume work Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957-60). Another ADA leader, William Leuchtenberg, who was also a leading New Deal scholar, wrote Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). The scholarly works of Irving Bernstein (A Caring Society: The New Deal, The Worker, and the Great Depression [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985]) and David Kennedy (Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999]), among others, have further influenced the general perception of Roosevelt and the New Deal. So powerful has this wave of adulation been that the tale has assumed almost mythic proportions.

But that myth has always had cracks in its foundation. By the late 1930s, journalist John Flynn, who began his career as a liberal, was criticizing Roosevelt and the New Deal so sharply that FDR wrote confidential letters to the journal publishers to try to stop his columns. Economist and banker Benjamin M. Anderson was an early critic, as were economic journalist Henry Hazlitt and, somewhat...