New Deal Infighting

Henry Morgenthau Jr., city born, city bred, and married into a New York banking family, chose life as a farmer and publisher of a farm journal in up-state New York. There he and his wife came to know their neighbors, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. That friendship made him head of the Treasury Department for twelve of the most critical years in our history.

Mr. Morgenthau kept a diary, which fills 900 volumes. It contains every important conversation and document with which he was concerned during that time. John Morton Blum is preparing a history of the period based on the diary. His first volume, “From the Morgenthau Diaries—Years of Crisis, 1928-1938” (Houghton Mifflin, $7.50), covers the domestic New Deal. It ends with 1938, the year in which Morgenthau’s efforts to stop emergency spending were signally defeated. Blum’s book is an excellent combination of well-chosen excerpts from the diary, with running comment to make clear the background. He has handled a maze of technical financial problems well. The important questions are not about what is in the book but what is left out.

EL

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Edna Lonigan

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Henry Morgenthau Jr., city born, city bred, and married into a New York banking family, chose life as a farmer and publisher of a farm journal in up-state New York. There he and his wife came to know their neighbors, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. That friendship made him head of the Treasury Department for twelve of the most critical years in our history.

Mr. Morgenthau kept a diary, which fills 900 volumes. It contains every important conversation and document with which he was concerned during that time. John Morton Blum is preparing a history of the period based on the diary. His first volume, “From the Morgenthau Diaries—Years of Crisis, 1928-1938” (Houghton Mifflin, $7.50), covers the domestic New Deal. It ends with 1938, the year in which Morgenthau’s efforts to stop emergency spending were signally defeated. Blum’s book is an excellent combination of well-chosen excerpts from the diary, with running comment to make clear the background. He has handled a maze of technical financial problems well. The important questions are not about what is in the book but what is left out.