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Roosevelt, the Great Depression, and the Economics of Recovery. By Elliot A. Rosen. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. x + 308 pp. Tables, notes, index. Cloth, $39.50. ISBN: 0-813-92368-9.
Reviewed by Jason Scott Smith
In July 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt broke with tradition and flew to Chicago to address the Democratic Convention in person. Accepting his party's nomination for the presidency, FDR declared to the assembled delegates, "We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings." In this meticulous study of how Roosevelt and his advisers responded to the Great Depression, Elliot Rosen confirms that while human beings make economic laws, they also bear responsibility for making economic policies. Rosen's New Dealers made many mistakes in the face of the twentieth century's worst economic crisis, groping toward solutions and often finding themselves overwhelmed by the scale of the problems they faced.
Drawing on many years of research in a great variety of archival collections, Rosen has produced a book that makes two contributions. First, it provides a finely grained portrait of the political and intellectual considerations that shaped the economic policies of the New Deal. second, it links this research base to a larger argument about the relationship of the New Deal to the performance of the American economy during the 19305. This is a book that endeavors to cover a great deal of...