Eric Rauchway - Böcker

The Progressives-those reformers responsible for the shape of many American institutions, from the Federal Reserve Board to the New School for Social Research-have always presented a mystery. What prompted middle-class citizens to support fundamental change in American life? Eric Rauchway shows that like most of us, the reformers took their inspiration from their own lives-from the challenges of forming a family. Following the lives and careers of Charles and Mary Beard, Wesley Clair and Lucy Sprague Mitchell, and Willard and Dorothy Straight, the book moves from the plains of the Midwest to the plains of Manchuria, from the trade-union halls of industrial Britain to the editorial offices of the New Republic in Manhattan. Rauchway argues that parenting was a kind of elitism that fulfilled itself when it undid itself, and this vision of familial responsibility underlay Progressive approaches to foreign policy, economics, social policy, and education.

Shortly after arriving in the White House in early 1933, Franklin Roosevelt took the United States off the gold standard. His opponents thought his decision unwise at best, and ruinous at worst. But they could not have been more wrong.With The Money Makers , Eric Rauchway tells the absorbing story of how FDR and his advisors pulled the levers of monetary policy to save the domestic economy and propel the United States to unprecedented prosperity and superpower status. Drawing on the ideas of the brilliant British economist John Maynard Keynes, among others, Roosevelt created the conditions for recovery from the Great Depression, deploying economic policy to fight the biggest threat then facing the nation: deflation.Throughout the 1930s, he also had one eye on the increasingly dire situation in Europe. In order to defeat Hitler, Roosevelt turned again to monetary policy, sending dollars abroad to prop up the faltering economies of Britain and, beginning in 1941, the Soviet Union. FDR's fight against economic depression and his fight against fascism were indistinguishable. As Rauchway writes, Roosevelt wanted to ensure more than business recovery he wanted to restore American economic and moral strength so the US could defend civilization itself." The economic and military alliance he created proved unbeatable,and also provided the foundation for decades of postwar prosperity. Indeed, Rauchway argues that Roosevelt's greatest legacy was his monetary policy. Even today, the Roosevelt dollar" remains both the symbol and the catalyst of America's vast economic power. The Money Makers restores the Roosevelt dollar to its central place in our understanding of FDR, the New Deal, and the economic history of twentieth-century America. We forget this history at our own peril. In revealing the roots of our postwar prosperity, Rauchway shows how we can recapture the abundance of that period in our own.

The period between a presidential election and inauguration has no constitutional name or purpose, but in these months, political legacies can be made or broken. In Winter War, Eric Rauchway shows how the transition from Herbert Hoover to FDR in the winter of 1932-33 was the most acrimonious in American history. The two men represented not only different political parties, but entirely different approaches to the question of the day: how to recover from the economic collapse and the Great Depression. And in their responses to that question, they help launch, in the space of a few months, the political ideologies that would dominate the rest of the twentieth century.As Rauchway shows, the period between the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt on November 8, 1932, and his inauguration on March 4, 1933, was one of tremendous political ferment. FDR took his first steps to launch the New Deal, while the outgoing Herbert Hoover laid the foundation for an anti-New Deal conservative movement. Rauchway reveals that, far from the haphazard expertimenter he is often thought to be, FDR had a coherent plan for saving the country from the Great Depression even before he arrived in office. He laid the foundations for that plan, giving speeches about a national bank holiday and raising farm prices, while also meeting with experts up and down the Eastern seaboard in order to staff his cabinet with the most innovative economic minds around. Hoover, for his part, began to plot his revenge and his return to the presidency (he had only served one term). He blocked FDR's moves wherever he could, spoke bluntly about the supposed danger the New Deal posed to democracy, and attempted to convince anyone who would listen that FDR was not up to the task of the presidency, whether intellectually or physically. The embittered and increasingly conservative Hoover launched the opposition to the New Deal - and thereby the modern conservative movement - before any New Deal legislation even reached the floor in Congress. Drawing from previously unexploited sources to paint an intimate portrait of political infighting at the highest levels, Eric Rauchway offers a new account of the making of twentieth century liberalism, and its backlash.