Books, Arts & Manners: Raw Deal

The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt, by Jordan A. Schwarz (Knopf, 411 pp., $27.50)

WHEN candidate Bill Clinton promised to blast America back to prosperity with “public investment,” he tapped into a deep vein of liberal sentimentality about the pharaonic federal projects of the New Deal. In less ideologically driven circles, however, the reputation of those projects has been sliding for some time: environmentalists now dislike the era’s dams and highways, architects loathe its tower-in-a-field public housing, and economic historians pooh-pooh the projects’ stimulative effect. Jordan Schwarz’s new book pretends to be a history of the New Deal: in fact, it is a confused and confusing attempt to prove that Mr. Clinton and the New Deal sentimentalists are right, that America can pave its way to prosperity.

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The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt, by Jordan A. Schwarz (Knopf, 411 pp., $27.50)

WHEN candidate Bill Clinton promised to blast America back to prosperity with “public investment,” he tapped into a deep vein of liberal sentimentality about the pharaonic federal projects of the New Deal. In less ideologically driven circles, however, the reputation of those projects has been sliding for some time: environmentalists now dislike the era’s dams and highways, architects loathe its tower-in-a-field public housing, and economic historians pooh-pooh the projects’ stimulative effect. Jordan Schwarz’s new book pretends to be a history of the New Deal: in fact, it is a confused and confusing attempt to prove that Mr. Clinton and the New Deal sentimentalists are right, that America can pave its way to prosperity.