The Fall of the House of Roosevelt
Brokers of Ideas and Power from FDR to LBJ
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- $33.99
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- $33.99
Publisher Description
In the 1930s a band of smart and able young men, some still in their twenties, helped Franklin D. Roosevelt transform an American nation in crisis. They were the junior officers of the New Deal. Thomas G. Corcoran, Benjamin V. Cohen, William O. Douglas, Abe Fortas, and James Rowe helped FDR build the modern Democratic Party into a progressive coalition whose command over power and ideas during the next three decades seemed politically invincible.
This is the first book about this group of Rooseveltians and their linkage to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the Vietnam War debacle. Michael Janeway grew up inside this world. His father, Eliot Janeway, business editor of Time and a star writer for Fortune and Life magazines, was part of this circle, strategizing and practicing politics as well as reporting on these men. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of events and previously unavailable private letters and other documents, Janeway crafts a riveting account of the exercise of power during the New Deal and its aftermath. He shows how these men were at the nexus of reform impulses at the electoral level with reform thinking in the social sciences and the law and explains how this potent fusion helped build the contemporary American state. Since that time efforts to reinvent government by "brains trust" have largely failed in the U.S. In the last quarter of the twentieth century American politics ceased to function as a blend of broad coalition building and reform agenda setting, rooted in a consensus of belief in the efficacy of modern government.
Can a progressive coalition of ideas and power come together again? The Fall of the House of Roosevelt makes such a prospect both alluring and daunting.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This mistitled volume briefly chronicles the integrated political biographies of a dozen or so New Deal figures LBJ, Tommy "the Cork" Corcoran, Abe Fortas, James Rowe, William O. Douglas, Lee Pressman, Clark Clifford and others through the years following FDR's death. The book culminates in the late 1960s and endeavors to show these men's impact on national politics well into the civil rights and Vietnam War era. Janeway, director of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia and author of Republic of Denial, somewhat limits his text by insisting on viewing many events and people through the prism of his parents, journalist Eliot Janeway and novelist Elizabeth Janeway, who played significant but not epicentral roles in this circle. The author also labors to cram the subtle political and policy complexities of no less than five presidencies, plus the vital details of a number of complicated and fascinating lives, into a mere 350 pages. Janeway nevertheless finds space for gossip, such as Douglas and Corcoran falling out during Douglas's messy divorce a matter of no historical moment. But other diversions are more profound, e.g., Janeway's earnest consideration regarding his father's long denial of his Jewishness. In the end, we have an uneven book, one not concerned with anything that might be remotely described as the fall of the house of Roosevelt, and one that would have needed another 300 pages to have fully accomplished the mission assigned.
