Backlash: The Killing of the New Deal

by Robert- Shogan

On election night 1936, Franklin D. Roosevelt was sitting on top of the political world. Within a year, two seismic events would transform the political landscape. A nationwide outbreak of labor unrest, particularly the spread of a new and potent union weapon, the sit-down strike, and FDR's launching of a scheme to overhaul the Supreme Court would combine to generate a fierce public backlash that tarnished Roosevelt's mystique and drained the lifeblood from the New Deal. This is the engrossing story that Robert Shogan relates so compellingly in Backlash.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published September 25, 2006

Reviews

[Louise · Rating 2 out of 5]

The New Deal is very much alive. We still have Social Security, a SEC, minimum wage laws, the right for workers to organize and a lot of other reforms. For this reason, the title was intriguing. I thought the book would be about the McCarthy era or about Reaganomics, but this is not the case. The author's thesis is that the sit down strikes resulting from labor reforms and Roosevelt's attempt to enlarge the Supreme Court created a backlash that killed the New Deal.

The thesis not at all proven in the text. In the last chapter the author backpedals. He appears to reduce the thesis to these events hampering Roosevelt's influence in further pursuit of reforms. This is not demonstrated either. I don't have the background to know whether FDR's influence waned in 1938-39 or not, (he won the 1940 election quite handily) but contradictory evidence is given in the text. While some legislation stalled, the Supreme Court changed and bowed to Roosevelt's will after these events.

I have the idea that this book is really an essay that has been enlarged with biographical anecdotes and some stories that humanize labor history.