But Is It History?

THE AGE OF ROOSEVELT, I--THE CRISIS OF THE OLD ORDER, 1919-1933 (557 pp.)--Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.--Houghton Mifflin ($6).

In 1919 a handsome young New York aristocrat with a politically useful name spotlighted the man he wanted to see as the next President of the U.S. Said Franklin Delano Roosevelt of Herbert Hoover: "He is certainly a wonder and I wish we could make him President . . . There could not be a better one." By 1932, no two men lived in colder enmity. In F.D.R.'s view. Hoover had become a dragon who was devouring the common man. To Hoover, Roosevelt was at worst an economic madman, at best a mere "featherduster" (the nickname had been devised by kindly friends who considered F.D.R. a mental lightweight, a view then shared by Mr. Justice Holmes and Pundit Walter Lippmann. among others). In the first of four volumes on The Age of Roosevelt, the author of The Age of Jackson now tells how the featherduster became a shining knight who slew the dragon.

The Crisis of the Old Order, a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection for March, shows Harvard Historian Arthur Schlesinger jr. handling history with the touch of a man assembling ammunition for a political campaign. Schlesinger hardly bothers to disguise his bias or his political philosophy, which (at least on the evidence of this book) boils down to the slogan: let Government do it. And he clings to the curiously innocent notion that Government can run the economic show without eventually controlling the entrances and exits of personal and political freedom.

Black & White. Schlesinger lays down a line that many historians will find hard to toe: business during the early years of the 20th century pretty much ran the U.S. Under Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson, the common man had found champions whose influence petered out after World War I. Prosperity left the liberals crying in the wilderness, and businessmen plundered and ruined the economic system. The big boys were so greedy that they not only killed the goose that laid the golden egg but ate it without offering the ordinary man so much as a bone. The country was on the verge of revolution when along came F.D.R. He didn't know much about economics, but he was nice to liberals such as Rexford Tugwell, who proclaimed that "the future is becoming visible in Russia," and A. A. Berle, who saw "no great difference between having all industry run by a committee of Commissars and by a small group of Directors." Above all, F.D.R. denounced business and was committed to large doses of statism. At book's end, in 1933, Roosevelt, "armored in some inner faith . . . serenely awaited the morrow."

All this is not so much written as pasted together. Economic theories, political maneuvers, even the Roosevelt biography--all are told through endless quotations barely held together by some bright phrases. Complex changes are told with the black and white naivete of a medieval morality play even when Schlesinger is not directly dealing with his hero or chief villain: e.g., after World War I, "with peace, selfishness returned"--as simple as that.

Boobs & Crooks. In the end, Author Schlesinger damages his own case, for even Roosevelt admirers are bound to be distressed by the way in which Schlesinger weights his scales with selected evidence to drag down businessmen and to hoist F.D.R. No one can reasonably deny the errors and terrors of the era. But in Schlesinger's version, financiers and members of the Hoover Administration almost without exception are boobs or crooks or both; their reluctance to recognize the Depression for what it was, and to force more stringent Government action, is attributed to nothing more than blindness or greed. And Schlesinger's set pieces on the U.S. scene during the Depression read like excerpts from the New Masses of the 30s; his description of the Democratic Convention hall in 1932 is thick with cloying, selfconscious phrases: "The organ drowning out the bad times, casting out the sad times . . . HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN."

It will be interesting to see, in later volumes, how much credit Roosevelt's New Deal gets for saving the nation, and how the villainous businessman finally acquired enough vision to contribute his mite to an expanding economy. In the meantime many a reader will wish that Author Schlesinger would allow a remarkable and memorable American to be judged on his own great merits and great faults, without loading the historian's dice in his favor.

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