The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy

These superb essays are essential for understanding the impact of the Franklin Roosevelt presidency and his policies over time. This book is not a biography of FDR. It is an important reflection of his presidency. Here is a very good review of the book I found by presidential historian Michael R. Beschloss at the Washington Post website. "FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT defied tradition in so many ways that it is not surprising that he has seemed to defy even the normal rules of history. After leaving office, an American president usually endures a period of historical eclipse... "The architect of the New Deal and the world's saving from fascism did not have to undergo any historical waiting period. The first major wave of Roosevelt scholarship a decade or two after FDR's death -- books by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Frank Freidel of Harvard, James MacGregor Burns of Williams, John Morton Blum of Yale, and William E. Leuchtenburg, then of Columbia -- resoundingly affirmed his greatness... "Now that the Cold War is over and the domestic consensus about the role of government has fractured, we may have to hold onto our hats for the next great torrent of Roosevelt scholarship. Conservatives will likely turn up the heat against Roosevelt's role in the establishment of a permanent welfare state. Left-liberals will probably be more angry than ever that he failed to do more. Neo-isolationists will fire new fusillades against the four-term one-worlder in the White House. "In such an atmosphere, William Leuchtenburg's The FDR Years will serve as benchmark and provocation. An absorbing collection of eight essays and an oral-history interview with the author, most previously published but vigorously revised, the book covers topics from Roosevelt's relationship with Huey Long to the Tennessee Valley Authority and the New Deal's use of the war metaphor... "The first is the importance of the New Deal. Leuchtenburg recalls that by the early 1970s, the chief academic attack on Roosevelt's domestic leadership was coming not from conservatives but from the New Left. So much had such scholars shaped the literature that a Harvard friend told Leuchtenburg that his students took it 'to be axiomatic that the New Deal amounted to very little,' not much more than a 'spirited evasion of the overriding issues of the twentieth century'... "In a chapter called 'The Achievement of the New Deal' (based on his 1972 Harnsworth inaugural lecture at Oxford), Leuchtenburg defends the importance of Roosevelt's domestic programs to American life. They 'radically altered the character of the State in America,' expanded presidential power, transformed the relationship between government and finance, labor and management, started 'a new system of social rights to replace dependence on private charity,' opened the American power structure to new groups and brought about the great political realignment of the mid-1930s. "The second front in the struggle for Roosevelt's place in history

In this fine collection of essays, William Leuchtenburg provides an excellent companion piece to his masterpiece, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Anyone interested in a general overview of FDR's presidency should check out that book first. This is meant more as a series of insights on highly specific topics, mostly culled from invited lectures that Leuchtenburg has given around the world.