THE AGE OF' ROOSEVELT—Vol. III: THE POLITICS OF UPKEAVAL (749 pp.)—Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.—Houghton Mifflin ($6.95).
"There's one issue in this campaign," Franklin Roosevelt told Adviser Raymond Moley before the 1936 election. "It's myself, and people must be either for me or against me."
The issue the voters decided then has since become more complex for the historian and biographer. Liberal Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., 42, is unequivocally for F.D.R.; his problem is to thread the maze of pose, purpose and paradox that was F.D.R. The Roosevelt enigma dominates The Politics of Upheaval as it did the two previous volumes of Schlesinger's massive chronicle of the New Deal and its master builder. In essence. Roosevelt stamped his personality on an entire era without revealing his inner self.
Polymorph at Work. In Author Schlesinger's pages, F.D.R. wears one face but many masks. There was Roosevelt, the klieg-lit primadonna. the aristocratic humanitarian, the radical conservative who could say: "I want to save our system, the capitalistic system ... To combat crackpot ideas, it may be necessary to throw to the wolves the 46 men who are reported to have incomes in excess of $1,000,000 a year." Roosevelt distrusted theory, yet surrounded himself with theorizing braintrusters. He was a gleeful social experimenter, yet wistfully longed for a balanced budget. There was Roosevelt, the calculating political tactician who combined a reform-laden 1936 State of the Union message with a conservative budget, hoping by such ambivalence "that brave words would restore the faith of the left while lack of deeds might in time restore the hope of the right."
Polymorphic F.D.R. existed more than most public men in the eye of the beholder. To his foes, he was a shameless opportunist. To his friends, F.D.R. was the sympathetic champion of their special needs and cares. In the words of a North Carolina mill hand: "Mr. Roosevelt is the only man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is a son of a bitch." What F.D.R. stood for, says Author Schlesinger, in a rather academic mouthful, was ''the humanization of industrial society."
Big Brother or Dutch Uncle. The view that people mattered less than laissez-faire economics was at the root of the Depression, as Schlesinger analyzed it in the first volume of The Age of Roosevelt. Vol. II, The Coming of the New Deal, took up the bold New Deal improvisations of "the first hundred days." In Schlesinger's grand design, which may now run to five or six volumes. The Politics of Upheaval, covering the years 1935-36. is a transition book between what he calls the first and second New Deals: