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"The First New Deal characteristically told business what it must do. The Second New Deal characteristically told business what it must not do." Big Brother was replaced by Dutch Uncle. Social evangelists of centralized planning, e.g., Rexford Guy Tugwell, gave way to the legal bird dogs of reform recruited mostly from Harvard Law School by Tommy Corcoran and Benjamin Cohen. As Schlesinger sees it, the heady momentum of social experimentation had been lost, Roosevelt temporarily wallowed in "a stew of indecision." and a narrow Supreme Court majority stood poised to strike down NRA, AAA and a host of other government alphabetical agencies.
Schlesinger spends much of his book limning the critics of left and right who pelted the Administration. Some of them Roosevelt could shrug off; others were far from laughable: Father Coughlin, who described himself as "a religious Walter Winchell" and believed that all bankers were devils and Jewish bankers the most devilish of the lot; Dr. Francis Townsend, who proposed to give every oldster over 60 a pension of $200 a month with the proviso that he spend it within the month; Huey Long, Louisiana's "messiah of the rednecks," who, in a rare moment of insight, called himself "a wedded man with a storm for my bride."
Force-feed to Health. Roosevelt, too, says Schlesinger, knew himself as the bridegroom of a worldwide storm. When Biographer Emil Ludwig asked him his purpose, F.D.R. replied, "To obviate revolution." Just when the Supreme Court seemed to stymie Roosevelt's legal reforms, he resumed the offensive, pushed through Congress social security, banking and utility reorganization, collective bargaining and a graduated income tax. It is not entirely clear from Schlesinger's account whether Roosevelt jumped or was pushed into the second New Deal. There was the pressure of 9,000,000 unemployed, the falling debris of social experiments that had proved unworkable or unconstitutional. There were the nudges from Keynes-minded economists who wanted to force-feed the economy back to health, spending when business was afraid to spend, becoming an employer when there was private unemployment. For an economy in distress, many of the shock treatments of yesterday have become the household remedies of today.
Describing the landslide election of '36, Author Schlesinger, using Alf Landon's previously unopened private papers, reveals an attractive personality who had far more liking and leaning toward F.D.R. and the New Deal than his reputation as a ''Kansas Coolidge" and the vituperative 1936 presidential campaign would suggest. In one telling vignette in a Topeka chicken restaurant, a bellicose Hoover barks rapid boos at a Roosevelt radio speech, and an embarrassed Landon hustles him away from the cluster of newsmen. When the supposedly bitter rivals met at a preelection Governors' conference in Des Moines. relations between Landon and F.D.R. were so harmonious that Kansas' Republican Senator Arthur Capper observed sourly: "I fully expected one of the candidates to withdraw."