In the 1920s, life was good for most Americans-and great for many. Prosperity built on the new economic premise of buy now, pay later ruled the decade known as the Roaring Twenties. Then the bubble burst, and America s house of cards came tumbling down. With stunning suddenness, the stock market Crash of 29 revealed the flaws in America s economy and plunged the nation into the worst depression it had ever known. The troubled citizenry called on its newly elected president to lead it out of economic chaos. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-second president of the United States, stood forth to meet the challenge. At his inauguration in March 1933, he told the American people they had nothing to fear but fear itself. FDR calmed their fears and embarked on a whirlwind program of domestic reform. His program became known as the New Deal. It empowered the government like never before-and changed the face of America forever.

History is an account, either verbal or written, which describes past events, good or bad. In truth, most recorded history is a mostly false narrative of mostly unimportant occurrences which are the doings of czars, despots, and tyrants and their lackey soldiers. For the most part, right or wrong, history has always been written by the winners—of whatever contest. And therefore, since the ‘losers’ are irrelevant and meaningless, it may then take society many decades, or more, to finally learn that most things were done, not really as the supporters and academics had recorded them for posterity. History is more than just learning names, dates, and places. Real history is knowing why certain events happened at a certain given time in a particular certain place. And real history is admitting that the supposedly ‘greatest’ saviors of humanity were really mankind’s ‘greatest’ purveyors of human misery.

How was FDR's image constructed—by himself and others—as such a powerful icon in American memory? In polls of historians and political scientists, Franklin Delano Roosevelt consistently ranks among the top three American presidents. Roosevelt enjoyed an enormous political and cultural reach, one that stretched past his presidency and across the world. A grand narrative of Roosevelt's crucial role in the twentieth century persists: the notion that American ideology, embodied by FDR, overcame the Depression and won World War II, while fascism, communism, and imperialism—and their ignoble figureheads—fought one another to death in Europe. This grand narrative is flawed and problematic, legitimizing the United States's cultural, diplomatic, and military role in the world order, but it has meant that FDR continues to loom large in American culture. In FDR in American Memory, Sara Polak analyzes Roosevelt's construction as a cultural icon in American memory from two perspectives. First, she examines him as a historical leader, one who carefully and intentionally built his public image. Focusing on FDR's use of media and his negotiation of the world as a disabled person, she shows how he consistently aligned himself with modernity and future-proof narratives and modes of rhetoric. Second, Polak looks at portrayals and negotiations of the FDR icon in cultural memory from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century. Drawing on recent and well-known cultural artifacts—including novels, movies, documentaries, popular biographies, museums, and memorials—she demonstrates how FDR positioned himself as a rhetorically modern and powerful but ideologically almost empty container. That deliberate positioning, Polak writes, continues to allow almost any narrative to adopt him as a relevant historical example even now. As a study of presidential image-fashioning, FDR in American Memory will be of immediate relevance to present-day readers.

No group of American minority voters shifted allegiance more dramatically in the 1930s than Black Americans did. Up until the New Deal era, Blacks had shown their traditional loyalty to the party of Lincoln by voting overwhelmingly the Republican ticket. By the end of F.D. Roosevelt’s first administration, however, they tremendously voted the Democratic ticket. The decades long, wholesale attachment of Blacks to the party of Lincoln, with its laudable efforts to support Blacks (Emancipation Proclamation and Reconstruction) was understandable and inevitable enough. The anomaly was the massive shift by Blacks to the Democratic Party, traditionally identified with its long list of constant anti-Black and premeditated opposition to Black liberation: opposition to emancipation and Reconstruction, and with an ongoing record of all forms of racial discrimination, segregation, disfranchisement, exclusion, white primaries, and white supremacy. The transformation of the Black vote from solidly Republican to solidly Democratic did not happen instantaneously, but rather it developed over decades of maturing as a result of the amalgamated efforts of Presidents and Black leaders. The move of Black voters toward the Democratic Party was part of a nationwide trend that had occurred with the creation of the Roosevelt Coalition of1936. This national shift would make the Democrats the majority party for the next several decades including a very decisive margin of Black voters in the balance of power.

One of the greatest American presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt built a coalition of labour, ethnic, urban, low-income and African-American voters that underwrote the Democratic Party's national ascendancy from the 1930s to the 1980s. Over his four terms, he promoted the New Deal – the greatest reform programme in US history – to meet the challenges of the Great Depression, led the United States to the brink of victory in the Second World War, and established the modern presidency as the driving force of American politics and government. Iwan Morgan takes a fresh look at FDR, showing how his leadership enabled the United States of America to become the most successful country of the twentieth century. This astute and original assessment of a highly consequential presidency explains how Roosevelt enhanced the governing capacity of his office, promoted a constitutional revolution through his dealings with the Supreme Court, and forged a new intimacy between the president and the American people through his genius for political communication. It also demonstrates the significance of his organizational and strategic leadership as commander-in-chief in America's greatest foreign war, his role in holding together the US-British-Soviet Grand Alliance against the Axis powers, and his pioneering development of the national-security presidency that sought to promote a lasting post-war peace for the world. In fluid, immensely readable prose, Morgan focuses on the ways in which FDR transformed the presidency into an institution of domestic and international leadership to establish the modern ideal of the office as an assertive, democratic executive charged with meeting the challenges facing the US at home and abroad.

In this reassessment of New Deal policymaking, Rhonda Levine argues that the major constraints upon and catalysts for FDR's policies were rooted in class conflict. Countering neo-Marxist and state-centred theories, which focus on administrative and bureaucratic structures, she contends that too little attention has been paid to the effect of class struggle.

Born in 1882 in New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt entered public service through the encouragement of the Democratic Party and won the election to the New York Senate in 1910. This book details his administration at the height of the Great Depression as he valiantly led the nation with the phrase, The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

This book demonstrates that there is much about the New Deal that can be characterized as environmental, once one substitutes the word 'environmental' for 'conservation'. Indeed, the scholarship that is contained within this extraordinary book will help correct the widely held view that the New Deal is virtually a blank space in the history of modern environmentalism. In fact, the New Deal carried forward and greatly extended the work of the Progressive Conservation Era, and in many ways helped establish the foundation for the modern environmental movement.

A sharp analysis of the similarities, differences, and impact of the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan--two iconic figures representing polar opposites of twentieth century American politics.

Praise for the previous editions:" ... well written and engagingly contemporary. Recommended ..."