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Boobs & Crooks. In the end, Author Schlesinger damages his own case, for even Roosevelt admirers are bound to be distressed by the way in which Schlesinger weights his scales with selected evidence to drag down businessmen and to hoist F.D.R. No one can reasonably deny the errors and terrors of the era. But in Schlesinger's version, financiers and members of the Hoover Administration almost without exception are boobs or crooks or both; their reluctance to recognize the Depression for what it was, and to force more stringent Government action, is attributed to nothing more than blindness or greed. And Schlesinger's set pieces on the U.S. scene during the Depression read like excerpts from the New Masses of the 30s; his description of the Democratic Convention hall in 1932 is thick with cloying, selfconscious phrases: "The organ drowning out the bad times, casting out the sad times . . . HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN."
It will be interesting to see, in later volumes, how much credit Roosevelt's New Deal gets for saving the nation, and how the villainous businessman finally acquired enough vision to contribute his mite to an expanding economy. In the meantime many a reader will wish that Author Schlesinger would allow a remarkable and memorable American to be judged on his own great merits and great faults, without loading the historian's dice in his favor.