Volume 36, Number 2 · February 16, 1989
Getting FDR's Ear
By Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Dealers and Dreamers: A New Look at the New Deal
by Joseph P. Lash
Doubleday, 510 pp., $24.95
Liberal: Adolf A. Berle and the Vision of an American Era
by Jordan A. Schwarz
Free Press, 452 pp., $24.95
Saving Capitalism: The Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the New Deal, 1933–1940
by James S. Olson
Princeton University Press, 246 pp., $30.00
Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy
by George McJimsey
Harvard University Press, 474 pp., $25.00
Who whom? as Lenin used to say: Who dominates whom? In some moods Americans like to see their president as a demigod bestriding all about him; in other moods, they find a certain relish in seeing him as a puppet controlled by a cabal of secret advisers. This second idea goes back at least to the Whig theory of Andrew Jackson as the creature of Amos Kendall and the Kitchen Cabinet. Henry A. Wise of Virginia called Kendall Jackson's 'thinking machine, and his writing machine—ay, and his lying machine,…chief overseer, chief reporter, amanuensis, scribe, accountant general, man of all work—nothing was well done without the aid of his diabolical genius.' Even John Quincy Adams could write in 1840 that Jackson and his successor Martin Van Buren 'have been for twelve years the tool of Amos Kendall, the ruling mind of their dominion.'
Review, 4431 words
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