The Making of the Roosevelt Coalition: Some Reconsiderations

Abstract

Kristi Andersen. The Creation of a Democratic Majority 1928-1936. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979. 160 + xv pp. Barbara Blumberg. The New Deal and the Unemployed: The View from New York City. Lewisburg, Pa., and London: Buckneii University Press and Associated University Presses, 1979. 332 pp. Sidney Fine. Frank Murphy: The Detroit Years. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975. 608 + ix pp. Sidney Fine. Frank Murphy: The New Deal Years. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979. 708 + xii pp. John W. Jeffries. Testing the Roosevelt Coalition: Connecticut Society and Politics in the Era of World War II. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979. 312 + xiv pp. Martha H. Swain. Pat Harrison: The New Deal Years. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1978. 316 + ix pp. The New Deal remains not only a major topic for research among students of American history, but, even more than three decades after Roosevelt's death, a subject of continuing historiographical controversy. One focal point of this controversy involves its socio-economic aspect. The contemporary conservative indictment has found few exponents among later historians.1 Rather the historiographical controversy has largely pitted liberals against radicals—those who praise the New Deal for successfully relieving distress, disciplining business and humanizing the industrial order versus those who fault the Roosevelt administration for failing to transform the basic structure of socio-economic power in the United States.2