In my own undergraduate days, when the New Deal remained a center of heated controversy between old-fashioned liberals and conservatives, a favorite topic in U.S. history anthologies and on survey examinations was an old chestnut: Did the New Deal save American capitalism? Professors who admired Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal often posed that question and answered it in the affirmative, usually in self-defense against assertions from the right wing that FDR's administration had been honeycombed with subversives bent on destroying the nation's inherited economic arrangements. The question served as one way to soften the New Deal by linking it to traditional American values, stressing its ties to the past, and deemphasizing its radicalism. In the 1960s and 1970s, revisionist scholars on the Left carried this theme to an extreme by proclaiming that Roosevelt and the New Dealers had succeeded too well in shoring up capitalism through programs that compounded longstanding economic inequalities and ignored the needs of racial minorities, women, and the rural poor. In one version of this story, the New Deal boiled down to little more than a transfer of power between capitalist blocs, from the House of Morgan to the Rockefellers, from the old, labor-intensive, protectionist, manufacturing, elite to the new, capital-intensive, free-trade, high-technology barons of the emerging serviceand consumer-oriented economy. Other central issues of interpretation closely linked to the debate over the relationship between the New Deal and capitalism have included the following: How many New Deals were there-two? three? Did each reflect a different constellation of economic and intellectual forces? Did World War II doom the New Deal's major objectives? Who benefited from its major initiatives? Into this still lively discussion comes Jordan Schwarz's The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt, a series of spirited biographical portraits linked by a common theme: how the New Deal employed the credit of the federal government to create something called state capitalism and how state capital-