| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Elliott A. Rosen. Roosevelt, the Great Depression, and the Economics of Recovery. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2005. Pp. x, 308. $39.50.
The policies pursued by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in response to the economic crisis of the 1930s were hardly a model of consistency. In this sequel to Hoover, Roosevelt and the Brains Trust: From Depression to New Deal (1977), Elliot A. Rosen describes how these seemingly haphazard responses came about. The new president is portrayed as surrounded by experts beholden to traditional images of the economy that were poorly adapted to circumstances of the 1930s, and by others whose ideas were innovative but not always realistic politically. Roosevelt is shown as responsive to special interests and altering policy with an eye toward reelection, virtually from the start.	1
The canvas for this portrait is a detailed narrative of contemporary policy debates. Rosen uses documents from the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, and scores of other manuscript collections to reconstruct contemporary discussions. For the scholar and the student, the resulting volume is valuable simply for illustrating the richness of the available archival materials and what can be done with them.	2
Ultimately, FDR's personality is invoked to explain his administration's new departures, ongoing adaptations, and periodic policy reversals. The president is portrayed as a committed experimentalist, as inclined to split the difference when confronted with diametrically opposing views, and as overly influenced by whoever had happened to visit him most recently.	. . .

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