The Achievement of American Liberalism: The New Deal and Its Legacies. Ed. by William H. Chafe. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. xx, 346 pp. Cloth, $52.50, isbn 0-231-11212-2. Paper, $24.50, isbn 0-231-11213-0.)

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The essays collected in this tribute to William E. Leuchtenburg survey the arc of American liberalism from the New Deal to the end of the twentieth century, from its hard-won but ultimately partial midcentury triumphs through its slow decline in the century's waning decades. The contributions, generally broad synthetic essays with a few more finely rendered pieces thrown in for good measure, are almost all effective and accomplished pieces. They naturally group themselves into several clusters. Alan Brinkley, Alonzo Hamby, and Melvin Urofsky offer masterly surveys of New Deal public policy, Democratic party developments, and the Supreme Court, respectively. Richard Fried and Richard Polenberg tackle the Cold War and the challenge posed to American liberalism by Communism and, especially, by anticommunism. Fried usefully puts McCarthyism in a longer historical context, while Polenberg's interesting biographical sketch of J. Robert Oppenheimer seems rather disconnected from the volume's larger themes. William Chafe, Harvard Sitkoff, Steven Lawson, and Cynthia Harrison tackle race, class, and gender—themes that, while now commonplace, retain the capacity to reveal liberalism's limits as well as its accomplishments. Sitkoff is particularly good on the emergence in the wake of the Holocaust of an organizational alliance between African Americans and American Jews that overcame substantial mutual antagonism and ultimately proved critical to the civil rights movement. Lawson's chapter on the payola scandals of the 1950s is the book's most revelatory and surprising piece. He shows how race, culture, and politics mingled in the emergence, tribulations, and triumph of rock and roll, framing the growing anxieties that seized postwar liberalism and prefiguring the clashes that would erupt in the 1960s. Harrison brilliantly surveys the changing nexus of gender, work, and family, demonstrating how deeply American liberalism has been in thrall to mythical images of family structure. Chafe argues, echoing the sociological analysis of William Julius Wilson, that class rather than race or gender has been the most persistent axis of inequality and exclusion in American society and has offered the stiffest challenge to the claims of American liberalism.