PROSPERITY ROAD

Analyzing the New Deal’s lasting impact.

This fine-grained study by a distinguished British historian of the modern United States explains how “a feeble federal government was…transformed into a welfare state that enabled Americans to survive the most severe economic depression in American history.” Badger’s tightly woven account of the transition from the voluntarism of the 1920s to FDR’s full-blown use of the federal government in the 1930s is not for the faint of patience. But persistent readers will understand why FDR recognized that federal laws were needed to help a desperate nation. He and Congress fashioned public works and economic assistance programs that benefited millions, reenergized American education, and, through projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority, jumpstarted rural communities. An instinctual politician, FDR was “feeling his way” to policies that look “coherent only in retrospect” but remain admirable. When he failed, it was due to divisions still familiar today, with the “greedy” (big business) turning a blind eye to the “needy” (America’s working poor). The book’s most compelling moments happen when Badger drops the mask of strenuous objectivity and allows himself judgments, praising Hoover (“It is difficult to think of him as anything other than a thoroughly admirable human being”) or insisting, provocatively, on the “ordinariness” of the KKK. Badger’s rosy view that the New Deal elevated living standards abroad might surprise some readers, as will his understatement that the U.S. has only “sometimes” helped colonizers and authoritarian rulers (Batista, Marcos, Mobutu, Pinochet, Somoza, Suharto...). But Badger also usefully makes clear that, in 1933, FDR and Congress acted to help during a real crisis, not a manufactured one. During his first 100 days, Congress established the Civilian Conservation Corps and created support structures whose lasting social impacts the current president, during his second term’s first 100 days, sought to blunt via a flurry of executive orders.

Persuasively shows that federal assistance programs created and strengthened the modern United States.