The first sustained scholarly critique of the New Deal from the conservative perspective, this study argues that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was, himself, the primary obstacle to American recovery from the Great Depression of 1933-38. In developing his arguments, author Gary Dean Best focuses on the fact that the depression continued through eight years of the Roosevelt administration, despite unprecedented intervention by the federal government in the nation's economic life. Challenging conventional explanations that fault Roosevelt for not embracing Keynesian spending on a scale sufficient...

The Bonus Marcher incident of the summer of 1932 during the Hoover administration is one of the best known events of the 1930s. Historians and Roosevelt biographers have ever since contrasted the humane treatment of the Bonus Marchers under FDR with the apparent callousness of Hoover. Yet FDR experienced his own Bonus Marcher incident in 1935, one that goes unmentioned in histories of the New Deal years. Fearful of another incident, the Roosevelt administration shipped hundreds of bonus marchers to rehabilitation camps in the South. Many were sent to camps in the Florida Keys for work on...

This book challenges generally accepted views by concluding that the critical press, so often characterized by pro-New Deal historians as conservative or reactionary, was in fact a good deal more liberal than Roosevelt and his advisors. Without its opposition to Roosevelt's policies during the years before Congress began to reassert its constitutional responsibilities, the United States might well have deviated considerably from the path of constitutional and democractic government.

From 1933 to 1938 the critical press (both newspapers and journalists) fulfilled much of the function of...

This study shows that, despite numerous surface similarities, the popular culture of the 1930s was different from that of the 1920s in a variety of ways, and not only because of the Great Depression. It was a period of quiet desperation and shifting values, one in which nickels and dimes replaced dollars as the currency of popular culture, and in which the emphasis was on finding methods to occupy idle time and idle minds. Popular culture during the 1930s is important for understanding not only how Americans coped, but why they did so with such good humor and so little of the discontent...

During the 1930s, a battle was waged over both philosophy and policy between those who described themselves as liberals, both inside and outside the Roosevelt administration. On one side were those who viewed themselves as modern liberals, who saw capitalism as a failure and sought to replace it with a collectivist society and economy. On the other were more traditional American liberals or progressives who aimed merely to reform capitalism, in the belief that individual liberty and a free economy were synonymous. This study examines the role of each during this vital decade. Instead of...

This book examines the underlying causes of the tumult of the 1920s in America that has since captivated writers, readers, moviegoers, and television viewers. During the 1920s, Americans were aware of the momentous changes taking place in their lives. It was an introspective decade. Magazines and newspaper articles, books and anthologies explored the causes, nature, and implications of those changes. The impact of radio, and to a lesser extent motion pictures, rivaled the effects that the invention of printing had had on human society hundreds of years earlier. Add to these developments...

For nearly three decades, the English political scientist Harold Laski was the gray eminence of American liberalism and its most influential Marxist public intellectual. As a fervent proponent of the New Deal in the 1930s, much of Laski's success stemmed from the fact that he offered answers when so many Americans had only questions. By the postwar years, however, his reputation was in decline and his influence left the Democratic Party vulnerable in the1948 elections. In Harold Laski and American Liberalism Gary Dean Best traces the trajectory of Laski's American career and...

The Good Society is a critical text in the history of liberalism. Initially a series of articles published in a variety of Lippmann's favorite magazines, as the whole evolved, it became a frontal assault against totalitarian tendencies within American society. Lippmann took to task those who sought to improve the lot of mankind by undoing the work of their predecessors and by undermining movements in which men struggle to be free. This book is a strong indictment of programs of reform that are at odds with the liberal tradition, and it is critical of those who ask people to choose...