Of New Deals and Old Questions

Jo Anne E. Argersinger. Toward a New Deal in Baltimore: People and Government in the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. 284 pp. Joseph P. Lash. Dealers and Dreamers: A New Look at the New Deal. New York: Doubleday, 1988. 510 pp. David P. Peeler. Hope Among Us Yet: Social Criticism and Social Solace in Depression America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. 340 pp. The major histories of the New Deal era have been notoriously partisan. As early as 1965, an historian with strong loyalties to the idea of a free market noted that "most New Deal histories were standing invitations to vote Democratic, to value federal initiative,... to accept a welfare state and an indirect fiscal and monetary management of the economy."1 When Paul Conkin made that critical observation and offered his own more sceptical, though not necessarily deprecatory, reinterpretation of Roosevelt and the New Deal, he might well have guessed that his small book would, twenty- three years later, still occupy a singular place in its treatment of the political shifts and partisan divisions that first appeared in the 1930's. For it remains true that the splendid books by the defenders of liberalism, Schlesinger, Leuchtenburg and Freidel, still stand as our most compelling interpretations of the New Deal. Apart from some attempts by 1960's and 1970's radicals to criticize the New Deal tradition "from the Left, " the monographs that have appeared since have only filled in the details of "progressive" politics and liberal triumphs

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