Lilac Time in Washington

THE AGE OF ROOSEVELT--VOLUME II: THE COMING OF THE NEW DEAL (669 pp.) --Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.--Houghton Mlfflm ($6.75).

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was probably born ten years too late. When Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated for his first term, Schlesinger was in prep school (Phillips Exeter Academy"), and today he writes of the New Deal with the nostalgia usually found in men who have narrowly missed a famous war. Schlesinger. now 41. sentimentally evokes memories that could not possibly be his own: "The interminable meetings, the litter of cigarette stubs, the hasty sandwich at the desk . . . the call from the White House, the postponed dinner, the neglected wife, the office lights burning late into the night, the lilacs hanging in fragrance above Georgetown gardens while men rebuilt the nation over long drinks . . ."

In this volume, lilac time lasts barely two years (with a few extensions), from March 1933 to the end of 1934. Originally. The Age of Roosevelt was to have been a one-volume job. but Harvard's Historian Schlesinger became so fascinated with his subject that he now expects he may need four or more volumes before he can complete his monument to F.D.R. Like the first volume. The Crisis of the Old Order (TIME, March n, 1957). this one relies too heavily on scraps from the daily press, and often reads as though it were threaded rather than written. And while there is a firmer effort to be objective, the method of quoting both for and against a man or an issue frequently results in a Mexican standoff. And so many people are quoted in an effort to get "behind the mask" of Roosevelt that the reader begins to long for a page of forthright analysis from the historian rather than a mess of scraps from people with masks of their own to keep in place.

Alphabetical Nostrums. Middle-aged readers may feel a touch of the old nostalgia as the AAA, TVA, NRA and all the other alphabetical nostrums pass in review. As Schlesinger moves from agency to agency, he frequently comes through with accurate and telling thumbnail sketches of the crowd around F.D.R. There is Henry Wallace ("At a certain point, his mind seemed almost to break through a sonic barrier . . . into rhapsodic mysticism"), who could speculate whether the reverse side of the U.S. Great Seal, with its all-seeing eye. did not prefigure the Second Coming of the Messiah. There is erratic, hard-drinking General Hugh Johnson, who. when he was finally forced to resign from NRA, in his farewell speech to his staff tearfully quoted (in Italian) the lines sung by Madame Butterfly before she commits harakiri. Author Schlesinger also manages a certain amount of humor in describing the great rush of theorists to Washington, including the Agricultural Department lawyer who. on a field trip. saw his first lightning bug and cried: "Good God! What's that?"

Schlesinger offers a clear and orderly description of how the New Deal agencies came into being, were fought over, adjusted themselves to success or failure. But as Schlesinger tells it. the outcome was almost always success: he even purports to show something good--a sense of solidarity--resulting from the wreck of NRA. Like his hero F.D.R.. Author Schlesinger proves himself a thoroughgoing pragmatist; he sticks close to events, rarely offers perspective on them. There is little effort to explore the philosophical roots of the New Deal, and there is no attempt at long-range assessment beyond the reiterated conviction that the men who were having those long drinks under the lilac bushes saved the country from disaster. In discussing the New Deal's opponents, Schlesinger stresses their rages and follies. Generally. F.D.R.'s adversaries are made to seem like those stubborn mules who refused to plow the cottonfields under; there is no suggestion that in the long view of history the mules may possibly have had a point.

Grand Old Actor. The essence of history is hindsight, and it is difficult to read Schlesinger's account of labor's rise, e.g., the bitter, bloody Teamsters strike in Minneapolis, without reflecting on the monstrous extremes of power which the downtrodden of yesterday have reached. A future historian, not so solid as Schlesinger on the do-gooding glamour of it all. may yet weigh the memorable reforms accomplished by the New Deal against its ominous drive toward the welfare state.

At a time when "presidential leadership" or lack of it is a heated topic, Schlesinger's assessment of Roosevelt as an executive is intriguing. On the book's evidence. Roosevelt dodged decisions as long as he could, operated in a wild confusion of often contradictory ends, preferred to create ten new jobs rather than abolish an existing one. All this Schlesinger defends as a manifestation of genius, the triumph of flair over disorder; and in a sense perhaps it was.

Of the witnesses Schlesinger calls in, two of those most fascinated by the President were also among the most acute. Said Hugh Johnson: "[He succeeded] not as a master of planning or knowledge, but as a master of dexterity." And Artist Peggy Bacon, in an ironic comment on his look, said: "Clever as hell but so innocent . . . a grand old actor."

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