Recommended Reading

General accounts of the 1930s include John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and David Brody, eds., The New Deal, 2 vols. (1975), a collection of essays on both national and state trends; Joseph P. Lash, Dealers and Dreamers (1988), a sympathetic view of key New Deal figures; Jordan A. Schwarz, The New Dealers (1993), a more critical account; Harvard Sitkoff, ed., Fifty Years Later—the New Deal Evaluated (1985), a scholarly reappraisal; and Roger Biles, A New Deal for the American People (1991), a good overview.

Books on the economic crisis include Michael A. Bernstein, The Great Depression (1987); Studs Terkel, Hard Times (1970); and T. H. Watkins, The Hungry Years (1999). Jordan Schwartz, Interregnum of Despair (1970), and Albert Romasco, The Poverty of Abundance (1965), deal with Hoover’s failure to stem the Depression.

Frank Burt Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 4 vols. (1952–1976), is the most comprehensive biography of FDR, but the last volume covers only through mid–1933. Freidel covers FDR’s entire life in broad outline in Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny (1990). Other biographical accounts of value are Rexford G. Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt (1957); Kenneth Davis, FDR: The New Deal Years, 1933–1937 (1986); Sean J. Savage, Roosevelt: The Party Leader, 1932–1945 (1991); and Patrick J. Maney, The Roosevelt Presence (1998). The rich memoir literature for the New Deal includes Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (1946), and Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt (1952). For biographies of Eleanor Roosevelt, see Joseph Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (1971); Lois Scharf, Eleanor Roosevelt (1987); and Blanche Wiesen Cook’s two volumes, Eleanor Roosevelt (1992, 1999). Susan Ware traces the role of women in the New Deal in Beyond Suffrage (1981). J. Joseph Huthmacher has written a fine biography of a major New Deal figure, Senator Robert Wagner and the Rise of Urban Liberalism (1968).

Recent biographies of important New Deal leaders include Stephen M. Neuse, David E. Lilienthal (1996); Jeanne Nienaber Clarke, Roosevelt’s Warrior: Harold Ickes and the New Deal (1996); John C. Culver and John Hyde, American Dreamer (2000), a life of Henry A. Wallace; and George McJimsky, Harry Hopkins (1987).

The transition from Hoover and the beginning of the New Deal is traced in Elliot Rosen, Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Brain Trust (1977). Gary Dean Best is very critical of FDR’s efforts to overcome the Depression in Pride, Prejudice and Politics (1990). The best of many books dealing with farm problems in the 1930s are Theodore Saloutos, The American Farmer and the New Deal (1982); Janet Poppendieck, Breadlines Knee-Deep in Wheat (1986); Sally H. Clarke, Regulation and the Revolution in United States Farm Productivity (1994); and two books on the impact of drought on Great Plains farmers: Donald Worster, Dust Bowl (1979), and James N. Gregory, American Exodus (1989), on the “Okie” migration to California. Searle F. Charles traces Harry Hopkins’s role in the New Deal in Minister of Relief (1963); William McDonald describes the WPA’s cultural activities in detail in Federal Relief Administration and the Arts (1969). For labor developments, see John Barnard, Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Auto Workers (1983); Robert H. Zieger, John L. Lewis (1988) and The CIO, 1935–1955 (1995); and Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule (1991). Irving Bernstein surveys the impact of the Depression on workers in two books, The Turbulent Years (1970) and A Caring Society (1985).

Among the many books surveying the various New Deal programs, the most useful are William R. Brock, Welfare, Democracy, and the New Deal (1988); William R. Childs, Trucking and the Public Interest (1985); Thomas K. McCraw, TVA and the Power Fight, 1933–1939 (1971); Jane D. Mathews, The Federal Theatre, 1935–1939 (1967); and Richard A. Reiman, The New Deal and American Youth (1992). Other important books on the New Deal are Otis L. Graham, Jr., An Encore for Reform (1967); Ellis Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly, 1933–1939 (1965); and Roger Biles, The South and the New Deal (1994).

Studies by critics of the New Deal include George Wolfskill, Revolt of the Conservatives (1962); T. Harry Williams, Huey Long (1969); William Ivy Hair, The Kingfish and His Realm (1991); Glen Jeansonne, Gerald L. K. Smith: Minister of Hate (1988); and Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (1982). For intellectual radicalism in the 1930s, see Terry A. Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals (1986), and Richard Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams (1973).

Raymond Wolters offers a critical view of Roosevelt’s policies toward blacks in Negroes and the Great Depression (1970); Harvard Sitkoff is more positive in A New Deal for Blacks (1978). For the plight of African Americans in New York, see Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode”: Black Harlem in the Great Depression (1991). Abraham Hoffman deals with the repatriation issue in Unwanted Mexican-Americans in the Great Depression (1974). For the impact of the Depression on women, see William H. Chafe, The American Woman (1972); Susan Ware, Holding Their Own (1982); and Lois Scharf, To Work and Wed (1980).

For Roosevelt’s quarrels with the Supreme Court, see William L. Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn (1995), and Barry Cushman, Rethinking the New Deal Court (1998). The best accounts of the waning of the New Deal are James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal (1967), and Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform (1995).