1

A New Deal Historiography: A Study of American Political Attitudes

Kathy Li

Nearly a century later, the Great Depression remains a momentous part of the American psyche.

A landmark in American politics, democratic liberalism, and the American reform regime, historians have

evaluated this tumultuous period not just as the generation-defining crisis that it was, but also as a portrait

of American traditions, values, and culture. The scholarship of the New Deal is perhaps most noteworthy

for the diverse schools of thought that it has come to house over numerous decades. A prime example of

how historical interpretations evolve over time, since its nascent stages, interpretations of the New Deal

have shifted alongside America’s ever-changing cultural and political climates.

Early historians like Arthur Schlesinger Jr.— an exemplar of the progressive historians that loom

over New Deal scholarship — have attempted to contextualize Roosevelt and his New Deal within the arc

of American liberalism and reform. Amid successive shocks to the American political landscape, the

1960s and 1970s were largely dominated by an emergent New Left scholarship, turning a much more

critical eye on Roosevelt and the New Deal. Finally, the latter years of the 20th century saw a growth of

post-revisionist critique — a movement that has branched into a milieu of sociological and cultural

studies of the New Deal. Strewn throughout these broad themes, New Deal scholarship has forged

connections with the Progressive and Populist Eras of the early twentieth century, delved into discussions

of American foreign policy, and grappled with inherent problems of race and class at home. 

Broadly, this essay will aim to provide a synopsis of how New Deal scholarship has evolved over

time. By no means an exhaustive survey of the expansive field of New Deal literature, this essay aims to

offer a chronological inspection of New Deal historiography. In doing so, it is hoped that the trends that

will emerge can offer insights into the commanding political and social climate at each span in time.

THE FOUNDATIONAL LITERATURE (1950s)

It is impossible to discuss New Deal scholarship without turning to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the

historian who best defined the progressive school approach to the New Deal. Joined by other historians
 2

including William Leuchtenburg, Frank Freidel, and Richard Hofstadter, Schlesinger is a progenitor of

the classic interpretation of the New Deal. His landmark three-volume work, The Age of Roosevelt: The

Coming of the New Age (1957-1960), is the touchstone progressive view of the New Deal. This

perspective that dominated in the 1940s and 1950s largely viewed American history as an ever-evolving

progression of liberal reform. In that vein, the New Deal was seen as a continuation of the country’s

already-established liberal tradition, where the demands of the people would lead to tangible social,

economic, and political reforms.1 Indeed, the New Deal was similar to the Progressive Era in many ways:

it arose out of a desire to change economic dysfunction and to preserve America from the new social,

political, and economic threats being lobbed its way. 2 Schlesinger approached the New Deal this way,

arguing that the New Deal liberalism was yet another incarnation of American liberalism. Like

Jacksonian democracy, it emerged from the people as a liberal reaction to the conservative forces of big

business and privileged interests.3 Schlesinger thus places the New Deal in the context of American

reform, calling Roosevelt’s response to the crisis as “his extraordinary sensitivity to the emergent

tendencies of his age and to the rising aspirations or ordinary people.” 4

Frank Freidel took a similar view in his four-volume work, Franklin D. Roosevelt (1952-1973).

Freidel also situated the New Deal within the reform tradition, characterizing Roosevelt and New Dealers

as pioneers of a grassroots liberal reform. 5 Other progressive historians include Henry Steele Commager,

who argues in Growth of the American Republic that the New Deal was deeply rooted in American

traditions, marking a natural progression of liberal reform. This progressive scholarship of the New Deal

would largely view it as evolutionary—a period borne out of necessity but nonetheless a part of the

progressive historical narrative. Many scholars, however, placed more emphasis on the significance of the

1
Aaron D. Purcell, “Historical Interpretations of the New Deal and the Great Depression,” in Interpreting American
History: The New Deal and the Great Depression, (The Kent State University Press, 2014), 10,
https://muse.jhu.edu/book/33650.
2
Morton Keller, “The New Deal: A New Look,” Polity 31, no. 4 (Summer 1999): 660,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3235241.
3
Purcell, “Historical Interpretations of the New Deal and the Great Depression,” 11.
4
Alfred Friendly, Jr., “Schlesinger Restages New Deal With its Clash of Characters,” The Harvard Crimson,
January 23, 1959, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1959/1/23/schlesinger-restages-new-deal-with-its/.
5
Purcell, “Historical Interpretations of the New Deal and the Great Depression,” 11.
 3

New Deal as a turning point in American history, transforming the State’s relationship to society. Freidel

argues in The New Deal in Historical Perspective, 2nd ed. (1965) that the New Deal made lasting

contributions to the American liberal agenda and would serve as a precedent for future laws. 6

Undoubtedly, the New Deal wrought a revolution in the role of government; it fed the hungry, provided

welfare, employed millions, enforced labor regulations, bailed out failing financial institutions, and

invested heavily in the arts.7 This idea of the “guarantor state”—a welfare state that not only provided its

citizens with a social safety net but also bailed out its financial institutions—emerges from this period of

New Deal historiography, through works like Carl Degler’s “The Third American Revolution” from Out

of Our Past (1959) and James MacGregor Burns’ Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (1956).8

Historians Richard Hofstadter and Carl Degler are also part of this “classical school” of New

Deal scholarship, but they mark a departure from the views espoused by progressive historians. A pioneer

in the consensus school of historical thought, Hofstadter viewed the New Deal as a complete departure

from previous strains of American reform. 9 Pushing back against Schlesinger’s interpretation, in The Age

of Reform: From Byran to FDR (1955), Hofstadter refuses to place the New Deal within the progressive

era of reform. Instead, he argues that the New Deal was merely a pragmatic, emergency response to a

crisis scenario.10 According to Alan Brinkley, Hofstadter’s book is one of the most influential works ever

published on 20th century American history, shaping virtually every discussion of modern American

reform after 1955.11 Hofstadter analyzes at length how the New Deal differs from the Progressive and

Populist movements, arguing that it does not fit on the long continuum of reform and was largely

unaffected by the interest or class politics of Progressivism and Populism. Simply put, the New Deal was

6
Stuart Kidd, “Redefining the New Deal: Some Thoughts on the Political and Cultural Perspectives of
Revisionism,” Journal of American Studies 22, no. 3 (December 1988): 391, http://www.jstor.com/stable/27555051.
7
James Nuechterlein, “Our New Deal Nation,” First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, no.
146 (October 2004): 41, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2004/10/our-new-deal-nation.
8
Arthur P. Dudden, review of Out of Our past. The Forces That Shaped Modern America, by Carl N. Degler, The
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and biography 83, no. 4 (October 1959), https://www.jstor.org/stable/20089240;
James M. Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, 1882-1940, (Mariner Books, 2002). x
9
Purcell, “Historical Interpretations of the New Deal and the Great Depression,” 13.
10
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Byran to F.D.R, (New York: Vintage Books, 1955).
11
Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War, (New York: Alfred A Knopf,
1995), 462.
 4

committed solely to the immediate solution of a debilitating economic crisis. 12 In similar terms, Carl

Degler interprets the New Deal as a watershed moment for American politics, leaving the Progressive and

Populist movements in its past. In his essay “The Third American Revolution” from Out of Our Past,

Degler portrays the New Deal era as a “third American revolution,” completely reforming the role of the

government in society and dismantling a culture of unbridled individualism and laissez-faire enterprise. 13

The scholars who reigned in the 1950s—Schlesinger, Freidel, Commager, Degler, and Hofstadter

—largely focused their discussions on how the New Deal fit within the American progressive and liberal

traditions. Grappling with the question of how the New Deal might fit within a historical narrative of

America, their interpretations arrived on the heels of the Great Depression and the sweeping social

programs that it catalyzed. This early literature on the New Deal laid a foundation for decades of New

Deal historiography that would follow, guiding future discussions of the American presidency, corporate

liberalism, social welfare, and American political culture.

THE NEW LEFT (1960s-1970s)

Starting in the early 1960s, historian William Leuchtenburg presented a more complex view of

the New Deal, shifting the focus of scholarship away from the New Deal in a historical narrative and

moving it into a forthcoming period of New Deal critique. Leuchtenburg is famously quoted for

characterizing the New Deal as a “halfway revolution” with its share of successes and failures in Franklin

D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (1963).14 Leuchtenburg’s sympathetic critique of the New

Deal largely highlights its failures to redistribute wealth and to meaningfully change the plights of

America’s voiceless groups, including farmers, industrial workers, and African Americans. 15 While
12
Brinkley, The End of Reform.
13
Carl Degler, “The Third American Revolution,” in Out of Our Past: the Forces that Shaped Modern America
(New York: Harper & Row, 1970), http://jrgrsd.sharpschool.net/UserFiles/Servers/Server_2748/File/Duggan/
degler_third.pdf.
14
William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940, (New York: Harper and Row,
1963.
15
Alfred Rollins, review of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940, by William E. Leuchtenburg, The
Journal of American History 51, no. 1 (June 1964): 124, http://www.jstor.com/stable/1917962; Esmond Wright,
review of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940, by William E. Leuchtenburg, International Affairs
(Royal Institute of International Affairs) 40, no. 3 (July 1964), https://www.jstor.org/stable/2610909.
 5

Leuchtenburg generally praised Roosevelt’s economic resiliency and his effectiveness as an

administrator, unlike early progressive historians who extolled Roosevelt’s virtues, Leuchtenburg defined

Roosevelt as an economic conservative whose reactionary New Deal left many problems unaddressed. 16

Leuchtenburg’s critique of the New Deal as an incomplete revolution would open the door to a polarizing

era of New Deal criticism.

By the 1960s, America was experiencing a quickly ascending conservative movement that

offered potent critique of liberalism, appealing to individualism and anticommunism. This political shift

sparked a countercultural response in the emergence of the New Left—chiefly young activist scholars

who shared in many of those critiques against liberalism and the traditional American democratic party. 17

Dismissing its characteristics—organized labor, corporate interests, and centralized power—the New Left

sharply critiqued liberalism and derided its institutions as corrupt. 18 It would be remiss to ignore the

disillusionment which came with liberalist idealism amid America’s increasingly unpopular war with

Vietnam, the failure of President Johnson’s Great Society welfare programs, and the seemingly

contradictory masters that liberalism served: capitalism and the general welfare. 19 Evidently, the notion of

a reforming presidency that had enchanted progressive historians was much less attractive to the young

scholars whose political consciousnesses were built upon an era of American liberalism’s failures.

Spearheads of the New Left movement included Paul Conkin, Howard Zinn, Barton Bernstein,

and Gabriel Kolko. In New Deal Thought (1965), Howard Zinn faulted Roosevelt for what previous

generations of scholars saw as his greatest accomplishment—preserving America’s capitalist system. 20

Invoking views that had long been held by the Old Left, including socialists and communists who

opposed the New Deal while it was happening, Zinn argued that the New Deal was an “experiment” that

16
Richard Watson, review of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940, by William E. Leuchtenburg,
The American Historical Review 69, no. 1 (October 1963): 176, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1904489.
17
Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore, “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American
History,” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 74 (Fall 2008): 15,
http://www.jstor.com/stable/27673117.
18
Cowie and Salvatore, “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History.”
19
Kidd, “Redefining the New Deal: Some Thoughts on the Political and Cultural Perspectives of Revisionism,” 393.
20
Nuechterlein, “Our New Deal Nation,” 42.
 6

failed to create a society where the working class shared in prosperity. 21 Zinn’s views present a sort of

junction between the Old and New Left. While the Old Left viewed the world with an economic

substructure with a cultural superstructure, the New Left reoriented this view and interpreted the world

with a cultural substructure, upon which economic superstructures were built. The Old Left viewed

economic inequality as the origin of social inequity; however, the New Left viewed culture as the root of

hegemony and inequity. Amid this wave of New Left literature, many historians focused on ills left

untended, including issues of inequality, poverty, education, and medical care. Zinn’s analysis inspired

many subsequent New Left scholars. Among them, Paul Conkin’s The New Deal (1967) was arguably the

most influential, and Conkin became a typical representative of a legion of younger radical scholars who

attacked capitalism’s spiritual poverty.22 Conkin largely wielded a moralistic critique of the New Deal,

scrutinizing its poor treatment of industrial workers as opposed to Congress’ preferential treatment of

private industry, the marginalization of farmers and the elderly, and an unwillingness to redistribute

wealth.23 Conkin, like other New Left historians including Gabriel Kolko and James Weinstein, chided

the New Deal as disingenuous, serving the interests of the powerful elite. 24

Barton J. Bernstein, another prominent agent of New Left scholarship, lambasted the New Deal’s

inability to rectify what he viewed as sores in American society. He argued that the New Deal “failed to

redistribute income, failed to extend quality and generally countenanced racial discrimination and

segregation.”25 The crux of Bernstein’s perspective, along with many other New Left historians’, was the

New Deal’s failure to eradicate poverty, inequality, and racial discrimination despite its great potential to

do so.26 The forgotten roles of women, minorities, and low income earners constituted a major point of

New Left critique. In the New Left view, struggles of inequality, classism, and racism—in no way abetted

21
Nuechterlein, “Our New Deal Nation,” 42.
22
Nuechterlein, “Our New Deal Nation,” 43.
23
Paul Conkin. “Origins of a Welfare State, 1934-1936,” in The New Deal, 2nd ed. (Arlington Heights: AHM
Publishing, 1975), http://www.pressjohn.com/BookSummaries/booksummaries/TheNewDeal.htm.
24
Conkin, “Origins of a Welfare State”; Purcell, “Historical Interpretations of the New Deal and the Great
Depression,” 17.
25
Barton J. Bernstein “The New Deal: The conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform” in Towards a New Past:
Dissenting Essays in American History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968).
26
Purcell, “Historical Interpretations of the New Deal and the Great Depression,” 17.
 7

by the New Deal “reforms,”—lay at the heart of the American experience. These historians criticized

Schlesinger’s view of American history as an ascension of democracy, arguing instead that genuine

democracy had dimmed in favor of private and government interests. 27

This period, especially starting in the 1970s, also placed a scrutinizing magnifying glass on the

New Deal’s preservation of America’s capitalist systems and liberalism’s rooting in free market

philosophy. Bernstein asserted that instead of recognizing the opportune moment of the Great Depression

to transform capitalism, the New Deal’s reforms were in fact instrumental in maintaining capitalism’s

hold over American society.28 Ronald Radosh’s 1972 essay “The Myth of the New Deal” further chastises

the New Deal for its justification, maintenance, and advancement of the corporate system, all the while

using the “powers of rhetoric” to make industrial workers, minorities, slum dwellers, and farmers believe

that the New Deal was their own.29 Radosh confronts readers with the critical question of how the New

Deal has managed to become a radical, revolutionary point in American history, yet simultaneously

managed to keep the old order intact. Historians in the latter years of this time period would invoke

Marxist or neo-Marxist analyses to interrogate the classist conflicts central to society and examine the

New Deal’s failures to redress those injustices. 30 To many of these scholars, it appeared that the source of

public policy was America’s giant corporations. Gabriel Kolko, in Main Currents in Modern American

History (1976), argues that the New Deal established “new institutional mechanisms” to promote business

stabilization and profitability, protecting corporate capitalism. 31

While the New Left enjoyed massive surges in the 1960s and 1970s, the polarized political

environment guaranteed an equal surge in the revival of the conservative movement. The New Left

attracted voices of dissent from scholars including Jerold Auerbach, James T. Patterson, and Carl Degler.

In his article “New Deal, Old Deal, or Raw Deal: Some Thoughts on New Left Historiography” (1969),

Auerbach fiercely pushes back against Conkin, Bernstein, and Zinn. His central thesis criticizes the New
27
Purcell, “Historical Interpretations of the New Deal and the Great Depression,” 17.
28
Bernstein, “The New Deal: The conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform.”
29
Ronald Radosh, “The Myth of the New Deal,” in A New History of Leviathan (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co.,
Inc., 1972), https://cdn.mises.org/A%20New%20History%20of%20Leviathan_2.pdf.
30
Kidd, “Redefining the New Deal,” 396.
31
Kidd, “Redefining the New Deal,” 396.
 8

Left’s ex-post-facto imposition of the morals and aspirations of the 1960s upon the New Deal, and the

implication that the New Deal was culpable for the failures of subsequent administrations. 32 Auerbach

acknowledges the pressing current of racial issues in the context of the 1960s, but argues that it was not a

paramount New Deal issue, and thus a standard that scholars cannot use to evaluate the 1930s from a

reference point of the 1960s.33

A sub-section of New Left critiques of liberalism flourished in the 1970s, as scholars searched for

connections between the rhetoric of New Deal diplomacy and American foreign policy. Many scholars in

this subfield viewed New Deal diplomacy with skepticism, wary of its expansionist ideology and its

service to the political-economic elite. 34 The 1976 anthology, Watershed of Empire edited by Leonard P.

Liggio and James J. Martin, includes a collection of essays surveying those links between New Deal

diplomacy and liberalism in American foreign policy. Robert Bressler’s essay, “The Ideology of the

Executive State,” argues that the New Deal sought the commercial and moral expansion of American

liberalism—the expansion of which would take hold both at home and abroad. 35 In the essay, “The Good

Neighbor Policy,” Robert Freeman Smith insists that there is a strong strain of ideological and economic

imperialism in New Deal liberalism—the same kind that underscored Roosevelt’s seemingly good-

spirited Good Neighbor Policy vis-à-vis Latin America. 36 In reality, the ideology of liberal capitalism—

preserved by the New Deal—had persisted long before the Great Depression, and had long colored the

loans, trade agreements, and military aid that the United States sent abroad. US foreign policy analysts

including George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, and Lloyd Gardner comprise a unique corner of New Deal

historiography, launching pointed analyses of New Deal diplomacy from the standpoint of its economic

and ideological ambitions.

32
Jerold S. Auerbach, “New Deal, Old Deal, or Raw Deal: Some Thoughts on New Left Historiography,” The
Journal of Southern History 35, no. 1 (February 1969), http://www.jstor.com/stable/2204748.
33
Auerbach, “New Deal, Old Deal, or Raw Deal.”
34
Richard E. Welch Jr., “Review: New Deal Diplomacy and its Revisionists,” review of Watershed of Empire:
Essays on New Deal Foreign Policy by Leonard P. Liggio and James J. Martin, Reviews in American History 5, no.
3 (September 1977): 410, http://www.jstor.com/stable/2701020.
35
Welch, “Review: New Deal Diplomacy and its Revisionists,” 410.
36
Welch, “Review: New Deal Diplomacy and its Revisionists,” 410.
 9

POST-REVISIONISM AND DECENTRALIZATION (1980s – 2000s)

The polemic literature of the New Left was dominant but short-lived, quickly dissipating after the

1970s. Beginning in the late 1970s, scholarship had splintered into numerous fields, entering a new period

of re-evaluation of New Deal history. In the 1980s, attention turned away from the revisionist inspections

of government and institution, but rather to the people and identities that experienced the New Deal.

Groups that had historically been on the margins—women, African Americans, Native Americans,

immigrants, and the white working class—caught the attention of historians. 37 In a departure from New

Left scholarship, many of these studies focused more on individualism and specific personal experiences.

An emergence of racial and feminist critiques of the New Deal also defined much of the 1980s and its

literature. Thomas J. Sugure’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Post War Detroit

(1996) examines how New Deal housing policies exacerbated redlining; Nancy Weiss’ Farewell to the

Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (1983) recounts how the modern racial demographic

makeup of the two parties arose from the New Deal era; and Lizabeth Cohen’s Making a New Deal:

Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (1990) presents a work of new labor history, examining the

lives of factory workers and their families, rather than focusing on the state capitalism that dominated the

1960s and 1970s literature. These sources are all examples of how recent decades in New Deal

historiography have placed much greater emphasis on a bottom-up historical narrative of the New Deal,

analyzing the relationships among “plebeian” participants to political statecraft.

Interdisciplinary studies of the New Deal have also become ascendant in recent years, with New

Deal scholarship reaching into sociological, anthropological, popular cultural, and linguistic studies of the

New Deal.38 Many recent works have re-examined the New Deal era on the extent to which it has

influenced the general trajectory of American liberalism and politics. For example, Alan Brinkley’s The

End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (1995) argued that the New Deal developed a

postwar definition of liberalism, planting in the American political consciousness the idea of the welfare

37
Purcell, “Historical Interpretations of the New Deal the Great Depression,” 19.
38
Purcell, “Historical Interpretations of the New Deal the Great Depression,” 19.
 10

state, social security, and union politics.39 The 2000s has seen a revived interest in the roots of modern

American politics and ideologies, the line of inquiry for which has led many scholars back to the New

Deal era. For example, Jason Scott Smith’s essay “The New Deal Order” (2008) examines how political

economy during the New Deal era has helped clarify contemporary relationships between politics, the

economy, and liberalism.40 Specifically, Smith’s essay represents a renewed interest in analyzing how the

New Deal permanently changed American institutions and how New Deal era policies—like the Social

Security Act and concepts of labor regulations—contributed to the way that the current American

government system operates.

CONCLUSION

New Deal historiography is a rich and ever-growing bank of evolving, divergent, and convergent

perspectives. Guided by the political influences of their times, historians who have forged paths in New

Deal scholarship have written extensively about many intrinsic pillars of American political, cultural, and

social identity. New Deal historiography has witnessed an evolution of American political and social

thought away from the emphasis on the American progressive reform tradition of the 1950s. The question

of American liberalism is one that has been scrutinized extensively across decades, repeatedly reinstated

in different critiques of American systems—from the corporate liberalism that has reigned over American

society for generations, to the phenomenon of American liberal exceptionalism that has taken hold in the

past century. In more recent stages of New Deal historiography, scholarship has seemingly become

fatigued with the institutional and systemic critiques of the New Deal, thus opting to decentralize this

field of literature, focusing instead on the individual groups and people affected by the New Deal policies.

These historians and works reflect the dynamic scholarship that is bound to continue following the New

Deal Era. Inevitably, new works in the future will re-visit this defining moment in American history.

39
Purcell, “Historical Interpretations of the New Deal the Great Depression,” 22.
40
Jason S. Smith, “The New Deal Order,” Enterprise & Society 9, no. 3 (September 2008),
http://www.jstor.com/stable/23701170.
 11

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The Journal of Southern History 35, no. 1 (February 1969): 18-30.
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Bernstein, Barton J. “The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform.” In Towards a
New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968).

Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. New York: Alfred A
Knopf, 1995.

Burns, James M. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, 1882-1940. Mariner Books, 2002.

Conkin, Paul. “Origins of a Welfare State, 1934-1936.” In The New Deal. 2nd ed. Arlington Heights:
AHM Publishing, 1975.
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 12

Cowie, Jefferson, and Nick Salvatore. “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in
American History.” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 74 (Fall 2008): 3-32.
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Degler, Carl. “The Third American Revolution.” In Out of Our Past: The Forces that Shaped Modern
America. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
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Dudden, Arthur P. Review of Out of Our Past: The Forces that Shaped Modern America, by Carl N.
Degler. The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 83, no. 4 (October 1959).
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Purcell, Aaron D. “Historical Interpretations of the New Deal and the Great Depression.” In Interpreting
American History: The New Deal and the Great Depression. The Kent State University Press,
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Friendly, Alfred Jr. “Schlesinger Restages New Deal with its Clash of Characters.” The Harvard
Crimson, January 23, 1959. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1959/1/23/schlesinger-restages-
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Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform: From Byran to F.D.R. New York: Vintage Books, 1955.

Keller, Morton. “The New Deal: A New Look.” Polity 31, no. 4 (Summer 1999): 657-663.
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Kidd, Stuart. “Redefining the New Deal: Some Thoughts on the Political and Cultural Perspectives of
Revisionism.” Journal of American Studies 22, no. 3 (December 1988): 389-415.
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Leuchtenburg, William E. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 1932-1940. New York: Harper and
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Nuechterlein, James. “Our New Deal Nation.” First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public
Life, no. 146 (October 2004). https://www.firstthings.com/article/2004/10/our-new-deal-nation.

Radosh, Ronald. “The Myth of the New Deal.” In A New History of Leviathan. New York: E.P. Dutton &
Co., Incl, 1972. https://cdn.mises.org/A%20New%20History%20of%20Leviathan_2.pdf.

Rollins, Alfred. Review of Franklin D. Roosevelt and The New Deal, 1932-1940, by William E.
Leuchtenburg. The Journal of American History 51, no. 1 (June 1964): 124-125.
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Smith, Jason S. “The New Deal Order.” Enterprise & Society 9, no. 3 (September 2008): 521-534.
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Watson, Richard. Review of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940, by William E.
Leuchtenburg. The American Historical Review 69, no. 1 (October 1963): 176-177.
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