The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War.

• Author: Blum, John Morton

Alan Brinkley Alfred A. Knopf, $27.50 By John Morton Blum

In The End of Reform, Alan Brinkley defines his focus in his subtitle: "New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War," and he maintains that focus throughout the book. Other historians have employed structures similar to his to enclose the terrain of New Deal political economy, Brinkley's chosen turf, and to reach conclusions congruent with his. The archival resources and the contemporary literature of the period command the general organization, as well as the major emphases and interpretations, common to historical treatments since Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s influential Age of Roosevelt. But while Brinkley does not break new ground, his analysis of the changing agenda of liberalism is both persuasive and important, a product of his thorough and scrupulous research, enhanced by crisp and economical prose.

In the first half of his book, Brinkley examines the impact of the political and economic developments in 1937-38 on the outlook of New Deal liberals. The recession of that period moved them to re-examine policies they had favored since 1933. New Dealers continued to center their concerns on wealth, class, and economic power, on erasing or ameliorating the injustices of corporate capitalism. They also continued, Brinkley observes, to disagree among themselves about social and economic programs, as they had from the beginning. One school (including Rex Tugwell and Donald Richberg) remained wedded to the associational or corporatist ideas that had led to the creation of the failed National Recovery Administration. In contrast, another camp (that of Tommy Corcoran, Robert Jackson, and James Landis) championed anti-monopoly efforts.

Brinkley describes the varied origins and objectives of both kinds of programs. He goes on to discuss the advocates of countercyclical spending (Marriner Eccles and Leon Henderson, among others), many also anti-monopolists, whose arguments gained coherence and strength from the publication in 1936 of J.M. Keynes's General Theory, and gained relevance from the serious downturn of the economy.

It was the Keynesians, of course, who caught the president's ear in 1938, to the distress of budget balancers in the Treasury Department. But, as Brinkley notes, Roosevelt embraced Keynes's countercyclical measures only as an expedient, not out of informed commitment. So, too, the ventures in anti-monopoly studies of the Temporary National Economic Council (TNEC) and the...