As in 1952, Schlesinger’s reaction to defeat was a belief that the Democratic Party had lost touch with its roots, betraying the progressive ideals and values of the liberal tradition—a neat example of what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls “confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out and interpret new evidence in ways that confirm what you already think.” Two months later, now writing to “Lyndon” as “Arthur,” Schlesinger returned to his theme. “If we try to identify ourselves with government retrenchment, who will ever take us seriously as a party again,” he asked. “The great tradition of the Democratic Party,” he urged, “is the tradition of affirmative government—the tradition of Jackson, [William Jennings] Bryan, Wilson and FDR.”39
And it was to the task of restoring that tradition that Schlesinger now finally turned, not this time as a political operative, but as the author of a transformational new narrative of America’s recent history.
CHAPTER TEN
A SAINT’S LIFE
“Nothing is worse than the pre-publication limbo,” Schlesinger wrote in February 1957 to his friend James Wechsler at the New York Post. The nervousness was understandable. His previous scholarly book, The Age of Jackson, had won him a Pulitzer Prize at the precociously tender age of twenty-eight years. As the New York Times helpfully reminded readers when The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933 was finally published on March 4, “At the age of 39 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. is firmly established as one of our leading younger historians and as one of the shining lights of the Harvard faculty.” Even a man of Schlesinger’s intellectual assurance would have been foolhardy not to recognize the risk involved in such a “grandiose” new project. He had risen high and fast, and now had a long way to fall.1
The first volume was a year late, but two more volumes—The Coming of the New Deal and The Politics of Upheaval—would be published in quick succession in 1959 and 1960. Thus by the time of the next presidential election in 1960, Schlesinger had established his narrative on Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal as the major statement on progressive liberalism in US history.
Franklin Roosevelt had hovered as a spectral presence throughout Schlesinger’s 1945 book, The Age of Jackson, finally being summoned to the forefront of the narrative in the last pages. Now Schlesinger offered a thesis that presented Roosevelt as the ultimate expression of three major traditions in the Republic. FDR had decisively committed the country to Hamiltonian progressivism, building on the work of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and acting upon the need for “executive vigor and government action.” Alongside this activism, FDR had also displayed a Jeffersonian respect for the dangers inherent in the new instruments of public power created by this executive vigor. “In the hands of a people’s Government this power is wholesome and proper,” Roosevelt had cautioned, “but in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people.” As the measure for what was “wholesome and proper,” Schlesinger pointed to the third tradition, the Jacksonian heritage, which FDR summed up as “the American doctrine that entrusts the general welfare to no one group or class, but dedicates itself to the end that the American people shall not be thwarted in their high purpose to remain the custodians of their own destiny.” For Schlesinger, it was this last tradition that assumed a special significance, because its spirit provided the key for Roosevelt to make an “earnest, tough-minded, pragmatic attempt to wrestle with problems as they come, without being enslaved by a theory of the past, or by a theory of the future.” Through these values, Schlesinger concluded, Roosevelt had been able to steer the United States away from “social catastrophe” during the Great Depression and to the brink of victory in a global war. These were themes that Schlesinger then addressed at length.2
In the prologue to The Crisis of the Old Order, Schlesinger brings us to the White House on the eve of Roosevelt’s inauguration, conjuring a scene in which America stood teetering at the edge of an abyss:
The White House, midnight, Friday, March 3, 1933. Across the country the banks of the nation had gradually shuttered their windows and locked their doors. The very machinery of the American economy seemed to be coming to a stop. The rich and fertile nation, overflowing with natural wealth in its fields and forests and mines, equipped with unsurpassed technology, endowed with boundless resources in its men and women, lay stricken. “We are at the end of our rope,” the weary President [Herbert Hoover] at last said, as the striking clock announced the day of his retirement. “There is nothing more we can do.”3
It was in many ways a typical Schlesinger paragraph: the style vivid, appealing, and dramatic; the narrative clear, with the politics subtle yet unmistakable. The midnight hour, the sense of uncertainty as the banking system shut down; how unnecessary the crisis was in a country of such abundance in people and resources; and at the heart of it all, a leader who had run out of ideas and hope: here was the America that the old order had laid to waste and for which it offered no remedies.
Uncertainty was everywhere. As dawn broke “gray and bleak” in the streets around the Capitol Building, “the colorless light of the cast-iron skies, the numb faces of the crowd, created almost an air of fantasy.” The Washington and New York Establishment, “the well groomed men, baffled and impotent in their double breasted suits,” began to gather. And yet here riding into the middle of the crisis, not quite to the strains of Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus, came Franklin Roosevelt. On the journey to the inauguration ceremony, the outgoing president sat glum and monosyllabic. Expectant crowds pressed in for some sign of hope. Suddenly Roosevelt understood that “the two men could not ride on forever like graven images.” While Hoover’s face remained “heavy and expressionless,” the president-elect “began to smile to the men and women along the street and to wave his top hat.” Optimism and good cheer in the face of adversity began to take effect. “Men and women now curiously awakened from apathy and daze,” Schlesinger writes. In Washington the weather remained cold and gray, but “across the land the fog began to lift.”4
The Crisis of the Old Order sets out to explain how the United States in 1933 had arrived at such a perilous state of affairs and why Franklin D. Roosevelt, a patrician from the Gilded Age estates of the Hudson Valley, embodied the best hopes of the American people. At the heart of Schlesinger’s story was the corruption of the Age of Business in the 1920s. “If the business of America was business,” he writes, “then business meant more to Americans than the making of money.” Capitalism seemed to have “transcended its individualism and materialism, becoming social and spiritual.” Business became a “new faith [that] permeated the churches, the courts, the colleges, the press. It created a literature of complacency. . . . It developed an economics of success and a metaphysics of optimism.” For some, like Calvin Coolidge, “the process went even farther: the factory was the temple, work was worship, and business verged on a new religion.” With scorn seeping through the page, Schlesinger cites the example of Bruce Barton, best-selling author of The Man Nobody Knows (1925). “Barton assimilated Jesus Christ into the new cult,” Schlesinger records, “observing admiringly of the Son of God that He had ‘picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.’ ” Salvation, then, was to be “measured by success; and success thus became the visible evidence of spiritual merit.”5
The problem with the new faith, however, was that it “knew no skepticism.” The nation seemed to have reached “a permanent plateau of prosperity.” Business was expanding and foreign trade growing; the stock market was going up and up; national leadership “could not now be in more expert or safer hands.” Speaking in his inaugural address in March 1929, the new president, Herbert Hoover, confidently announced, “I have no fears for the future of our country. It is bright with hope.”6
The 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Depression that followed may not have been Hoover’s fault, but it was his job to sort them out
. “The American system remained essentially a presidential system,” Schlesinger writes, and “in the end, all things come down to the man in the White House.” For Hoover (as it would be for Roosevelt, although Schlesinger does not say so), the “battle in [his] mind” was between a scheme of public works and his mounting concern about balancing the budget. In the end, “the infatuation with the balanced budget thus destroyed a major plank of Hoover’s first anti-depression plan—the expansion of public works.” Schlesinger’s judgment on Hoover was a harsh one, but not entirely out of keeping with the president’s subsequent historical reputation. Revisionists Patrick D. O’Brien and Philip Rosen point out that the traditional image of Hoover (which they blame on Schlesinger) “as an irresponsible reactionary who lacked a sense of humanity . . . has gradually and largely been supplanted in historical writing as historians now often describe a humane reformer with an idealistic vision of America.” Yet as Robert Merry sums up in his book on presidential historical standings, it may well be that “Hoover attacked the problem with vigor [and] was a far more activist president than history has acknowledged. But his efforts didn’t work, and he was tossed aside.”7
For Schlesinger, it was not just the Republican Party that posed a threat to Roosevelt’s plans. Skeptics lurked everywhere among Democrats too, with key figures working to “commit the party to conservatism.” During the 1932 presidential campaign, FDR’s own vice presidential running mate, the famously scatological John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner IV, warned Roosevelt that if he went “too far with some of these wild-eye ideas, we are going to have the shit kicked out of us.” Garner at least told FDR “he is the boss and we will all follow him to hell if we have to.”
Other defeated rivals and party figures proved more troublesome. Al Smith, the party’s nominee in 1928 and by now deeply embittered that FDR had usurped him, warned that we should “stop talking about the Forgotten Man and about class distinctions.” Smith wanted government retrenchment, not investment, as did other influential figures such as Governor Albert Ritchie of Maryland and former US Treasury Secretary Carter Glass. The 1924 (losing) Democratic nominee, John W. Davis, summed it up by accusing Hoover of traveling “the road to socialism” and warning Roosevelt not to follow suit.8
But Schlesinger’s Roosevelt was not to be persuaded by conservatives inside or outside the party. “Washington observers began to note that liberals making the pilgrimage to Warm Springs [FDR’s retreat in Georgia] returned more cheerful than conservatives,” he writes. In January 1933, the president-elect outlined to reporters a broad vision of multipurpose development, linking waterpower, forestry, flood control, conservation, reclamation, agriculture, and industry in a vast experiment, beginning in Tennessee and spreading throughout the country.9
Here at last was a leader who had the moral and intellectual leadership to meet the challenge of the times, Schlesinger concludes in the first volume of The Age of Roosevelt. And what times they were, he writes, when “the American experiment in self-government was now facing what was, excepting the Civil War, its greatest test . . . even more perhaps hung on the capacity to surmount crisis than in 1861, [for] in 1933 the fate of the United States was involved with the fate of free men everywhere.”
“Many had deserted freedom, many more had lost their nerve,” Schlesinger writes exultantly on the last page. “But Roosevelt, armored in some inner faith, remained calm and inscrutable, confident that American improvisation could meet the future on its own terms.” That was the character on display as FDR traveled with President Hoover to the inauguration ceremony:
Deep within, he seemed to know that the nation had resources beyond its banks and exchanges; that the collapse of the older order meant catharsis rather than catastrophe; that the common disaster could make the people see themselves for a season as a community; as a family; that catastrophe could provide the indispensable setting for democratic experiment and for presidential leadership. If this were so, then crisis could change from calamity to challenge. The only thing Americans had to fear was fear itself. And so he serenely awaited the morrow. The event was in the hand of God.10
Schlesinger’s prose seems cloyingly purple by contemporary standards, but reviewers in 1957 had few complaints about his bravura and elan. Orville Prescott in the daily New York Times noted that “Mr. Schlesinger is as industrious in research as a history professor ought to be [but] he writes much more skillfully than all but a very few professors of history.” Despite some “massively detailed . . . heavy going” passages, here was “an account of the intellectual and political climate of the first third of this century [that] is sometimes brilliant, often entertaining and always informative and educational.” Academic reviewers similarly enjoyed Schlesinger’s style. Columbia’s William E. Leuchtenburg admired the “verve” and “slashing vigor” of the book. G. M. Craig at Toronto recognized an “exciting and absorbing read.” Frank Thistlethwaite, the founding chairman of the British Association for American Studies, enjoyed a “sustained, fluent and often brilliant narrative.” John D. Hicks at Berkeley acknowledged Schlesinger’s “gifts of a high order” in the ability to “write with verve and vigor, know how to make the most of every dramatic possibility, and be able to exploit the reader’s appetite for suspense.”
Some reviewers did object, however, to the overtly political nature of the book. “The Crisis of the Old Order is a frankly Democratic interpretation of recent history,” Prescott wrote in the Times, “and it will certainly antagonize many Republicans.” But fellow historians, too, worried about the partisan nature of the book. Craig thought, “the informed reader will often cringe at the author’s almost diabolical pursuit of his villains, and at his easy tolerance of the occasional failings of his hero.” Oberlin’s Thomas LeDuc huffed that “the book is so passionate in tone and so meager in new research that it need not be dignified by an extensive review.” Even the sympathetic Thistlethwaite worried that the book was an example of “partisan history, written, one suspects, in Mr. Adlai Stevenson’s words on the jacket, to demonstrate ‘how the democratic process can shake off despair and produce vigorous leadership,’ ” and that it did not adequately complete its advertised task of addressing “all the important questions raised by America’s ‘struggle to come of age in the modern world.’ ”11
Yet the most penetrating review of all came from Leuchtenburg, who was at work on his own outstanding history of the New Deal that would win both the Bancroft Prize and (like The Crisis of the Old Order) the Parkman Prize. “One marvels at the apparent effortlessness with which Schlesinger writes, his mastery of the material, and the great scope of this ambitious project,” he wrote. “Yet, for all of this, one puts down the book with a sense of disappointment.” Leuchtenburg’s complaint was that Schlesinger had put contemporary politics above historical objectivity. Because the book presented the period as “a conflict between good (liberal, Democratic) men against bad (conservative, Republican) men,” it had left the reader with “little sense of the men of the times as prisoners of historical forces or a particular historical situation.” Moreover, this Manichean struggle left no room for nonpolitical figures such as T. S. Eliot or William Faulkner, who themselves spoke to the broader crisis of the old order.12
Although the Columbia school had set its stall out in opposition to Schlesinger’s Age of Jackson, Leuchtenburg himself was not personally or professionally hostile to Schlesinger and later he would express admiration for his work.13 Even this unfavorable review was essentially constructive in nature (which, of course, made it all the more damning), concluding, “It is precisely because he [Schlesinger] is such a gifted historian that it is important to explore the shortcoming of this first volume in some detail.” Moreover, Leuchtenburg added, “If in his forthcoming volumes, Schlesinger will permit himself to be disciplined by his material, instead of committing to an inhibiting thesis, The Age of Roosevelt will be one of the benchmarks of historical writing this century.”
Debates about objectivity
in history had been raging within the profession since at least the first decades of the century when New Historians such as Charles Beard and Carl Becker repeatedly argued that the usual professional standard of icy impartiality was intellectually dishonest. Arthur Schlesinger Sr. had been one of those who stood out against the trend, arguing, for example, when it was put to him by Perry Miller that the first world war had prompted the “rewriting of American history,” that “I am not aware that it had any such effect.” For Arthur Jr. the lens was subtly different. For him it was not so much the impact of the immediate past on the writing of history that mattered, as the reverberations of history with the present, particularly the political present. “I have long been fascinated and perplexed,” he would write in 1966, “by the interaction between history and public decision: fascinated because, by this process, past history becomes an active partner in the making of new history; perplexed because the role of history in this partnership remains both elusive and tricky.”14 To enemies on the other side of the political divide, such as neoconservative Norman Podhoretz, Schlesinger’s view made him “an exceptionally bad historian: incapable of doing justice to any idea with which he disagreed, and so tendentious that he invariably denigrated and/or vilified anyone who had ever espoused any such idea”—a judgment not far removed from the view, albeit expressed with more academic politesse, by Leuchtenburg that Schlesinger’s was “a tortured reading” of the 1920s.15
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