Search results for ""author eric rauchway""

The period between a presidential election and inauguration has no constitutional name or purpose, but in these months, political legacies can be made or broken. In Winter War, Eric Rauchway shows how the transition from Herbert Hoover to FDR in the winter of 1932-33 was the most acrimonious in American history. The two men represented not only different political parties, but entirely different approaches to the question of the day: how to recover from the economic collapse and the Great Depression. And in their responses to that question, they help launch, in the space of a few months, the political ideologies that would dominate the rest of the twentieth century.As Rauchway shows, the period between the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt on November 8, 1932, and his inauguration on March 4, 1933, was one of tremendous political ferment. FDR took his first steps to launch the New Deal, while the outgoing Herbert Hoover laid the foundation for an anti-New Deal conservative movement. Rauchway reveals that, far from the haphazard expertimenter he is often thought to be, FDR had a coherent plan for saving the country from the Great Depression even before he arrived in office. He laid the foundations for that plan, giving speeches about a national bank holiday and raising farm prices, while also meeting with experts up and down the Eastern seaboard in order to staff his cabinet with the most innovative economic minds around. Hoover, for his part, began to plot his revenge and his return to the presidency (he had only served one term). He blocked FDR's moves wherever he could, spoke bluntly about the supposed danger the New Deal posed to democracy, and attempted to convince anyone who would listen that FDR was not up to the task of the presidency, whether intellectually or physically. The embittered and increasingly conservative Hoover launched the opposition to the New Deal - and thereby the modern conservative movement - before any New Deal legislation even reached the floor in Congress. Drawing from previously unexploited sources to paint an intimate portrait of political infighting at the highest levels, Eric Rauchway offers a new account of the making of twentieth century liberalism, and its backlash.

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The Progressives-those reformers responsible for the shape of many American institutions, from the Federal Reserve Board to the New School for Social Research-have always presented a mystery. What prompted middle-class citizens to support fundamental change in American life? Eric Rauchway shows that like most of us, the reformers took their inspiration from their own lives-from the challenges of forming a family. Following the lives and careers of Charles and Mary Beard, Wesley Clair and Lucy Sprague Mitchell, and Willard and Dorothy Straight, the book moves from the plains of the Midwest to the plains of Manchuria, from the trade-union halls of industrial Britain to the editorial offices of the New Republic in Manhattan. Rauchway argues that parenting was a kind of elitism that fulfilled itself when it undid itself, and this vision of familial responsibility underlay Progressive approaches to foreign policy, economics, social policy, and education.

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The New Deal shaped our nation's politics for decades, and was seen by many as tantamount to the "American Way" itself. Now, in this superb compact history, Eric Rauchway offers an informed account of the New Deal and the Great Depression, illuminating its successes and failures. Rauchway first describes how the roots of the Great Depression lay in America's post-war economic policies--described as "laissez-faire with a vengeance"--which in effect isolated our nation from the world economy just when the world needed the United States most. He shows how the magnitude of the resulting economic upheaval, and the ineffectiveness of the old ways of dealing with financial hardships, set the stage for Roosevelt's vigorous (and sometimes unconstitutional) Depression-fighting policies. Indeed, Rauchway stresses that the New Deal only makes sense as a response to this global economic disaster. The book examines a key sampling of New Deal programs, ranging from the National Recovery Agency and the Securities and Exchange Commission, to the Public Works Administration and Social Security, revealing why some worked and others did not. In the end, Rauchway concludes, it was the coming of World War II that finally generated the political will to spend the massive amounts of public money needed to put Americans back to work. And only the Cold War saw the full implementation of New Deal policies abroad--including the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Today we can look back at the New Deal and, for the first time, see its full complexity. Rauchway captures this whole in a remarkably short space, making this book an ideal introduction to one of the great policy revolutions in history. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

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