"My plans are fashioned and practical; I shall roll up my sleevesmake America over!"
When Rexford Guy Tugwell was a youth of 24, he wrote these Whitmanesque lines in a windy piece of free verse. America paid little attention. At Columbia University the regents sometimes seemed to resent Professor Tugwell's attempts to remake that small corner of the U.S. But he won the admiration of his next-door neighbor, Professor Raymond Moley, and packed off to Washington with him in 1933, to become one of Franklin Roosevelt's first brain-trusters. Disfavor, as it must to all favorites, came to blunt Rex Tugwell; he was...