The Changing Tide in America

by JAMES H. POWERS

THE Roosevelt Era, as portrayed in the five latest volumes of the “ Chronicles of America ” series, published by Yale University Press under the editorial direction of Allan Nevins, begins to emerge as a phase− brilliant, spectacular, invigorating, contradictory — of one of history‘s larger transitions.

The deep tide of change began to flow in at the end of the First World War; it rolled on like Old Man River, indifferent to obstruction or mistaken policy or the heady defiances of a deluded nationalism. Before Harry M. Daugherty, in his own phrase, found Warren G. Harding “sunning himself like a turtle on a log“ and “pushed him into the waters” of a dubious destiny, the tide had begun to swell. Throughout the “seemingly endless golden day" of the Coolidge regime if was inexorably rising, still unidentified, eventually to overwhelm and engulf the luckless engineer who fondly imagined that he was taking over the helm of state in the best of all possible worlds. Of the Republican triumvirate and Congresses presiding over our policies, domestic and foreign, throughout the turmoil and optimism, the corruption and industrial high jinks of the fabulous twenties, only Herbert Hoover eventually sensed the presence of the vast economic changes which had been making steady progress below the surface of our national life ever since the new science and industrial technologies of the twentieth century had been subjected to the explosive release of the First World War.

In the first of these important volumes, From Versailles to the New Deal, Professor Harold U. Faulkner of Smith is at pains to point out that Hoover strove at last with courage and some little wisdom to make head against the flood tide of troubles besetting the nation. It was too late. The very mental climate he and his immediate predecessors had nurtured in the nation thwarted him. An exuberantly expansive technology had run rampant too long in the fields of industrial production, shattering the familiar economic molds of society and shaping new ones. Social concepts and political institutions, which must never be permitted to lag too far behind in adaptation to meet the changes resulting from this process, had been too long ignored. That, the consequences were disastrous will surprise only those who fail to perceive one of the oldest of truths: the lords of industrial technology and laissez faire always lend to become laws unto themselves when the balance among social, political, and economic forces in society is distorted and gov - ernment, becoming their vassal, defaults on its larger responsibilities to the whole of society.

Herbert Hoover‘s misfortune was that of a bewildered technician adrift on strange forces he could only in part identify. Roosevelt’s tragedy was more purely Greek. To a greater degree than any other President since Wood row Wilson, he knew what was happening; but even his enormous energies and massive, confident faith could not contain the whole essential problem.

He identified the secular flow of the century and moved gallantly to dominate it if that were possible. And, briefly, possible it was. The bright courage and the audacity of that endeavor, the brilliance of the efforts at improvisation, the genius of a leadership which summoned back men‘s faith in themselves and braced their wills through domestic adversity and desperate war — these, fittingly enough, have given the period its name, once for all. To them Dr. Denis W. Brogan, the English historian from Cambridge University, pays measured tribute and applies shrewd analysis in one of the most stimulating volumes of the series, The Era of Franklin Dr. Roosevelt. I doubt if a better, more sanely balanced, one-volume study of the major phases of the New Deal than this has been written.

That the magnitude of the task gradually exhausted Franklin D. Roosevelt does not lessen the significance of his effort. For the first, time since the machine age bowed to the age of power in the Americas, an attempt was made, with some conspicuous successes, to adapt political and social institutions in a free society to the changing tempo of a headlong industrial technology which was subjecting production to a whole series of transformations and forcing profoundly significant revisions in the life and habits of the people. The importance of that endeavor will not escape any friend of human freedom who understands the purport of Faulkner’s dictum that “those who dominate the economic and social life of a nation are bound in the long run to dominate its government and its political ideals.” The historian was looking back over the twenties, at the fact. Roosevelt was looking ahead, across the century, at the inexhaustible resources of the human mind and personality.

“We know that revolutions are not complete or new,” Dr. Brogan reminds us. With the testimony of his own England and the record of the United States before him, he might have added, cautiously,

that they need not necessarily be violent where an informed and strong leadership can find renewal out of the ranks of a people sufficiently aware of the value of its liberties to accept the discipline required for preserving them. So, after the preparation given by Faulkner’s probing study of the economic, political, and social fantasia of the twenties, and Brogan’s admirably written survey of the New Deal, the reader turns to Fletcher Pratt’s war for the World for an assessment of the Roosevelt Era in extremis.

The Struggle for Survival, which will cover the story of the home front in the United States during World War II in this series of Chronicles, has been delayed. Pratt‘s story of our fighting forces in that struggle provides, however, abundant testimony about one of the consequences of the rehabilitation of men’s faith in themselves and in their ability to confront domestic adversity. There is a truly formidable reinforcement of their courage against the odds of war. Here, surely, vigorous leadership found a people ready to rally against the initial disaster, to make the sacrifices essential to victory once the issues were clearly drawn.

Fletcher Pratt’s otherwise excellent book suffers from a defect of its author‘s virtues: it is primarily a history of the naval war. In particular it offers us a story of the struggle in the Pacific. While the invasion of Africa and the campaign there, the assault on Italy, and the gigantic drive over the coasts of Normandy into Europe all receive substantial attention, there is no doubt as to where this historian‘s real interest lies. It is with the carriers and the airmen, the Marines and the soldiers battering their way up the island fringes of Japan‘s hastily charted empire of conquest. It is with the Fleet, gathering its forlorn remnants after Pearl Harbor; playing for time and reinforcement that waited upon the brawn and skill of construction yards; out maneuvering, outguessing, and outgambling its formidable enemy above Midway; exacting toll on stealthy raids; heading into disaster and out again along the Slot above Guadalcanal, the Coral Sea, and Savo; steadily building power; tempering and proving the strategic and tactical skill of some of the greatest naval commanders in American history. The blunders are recorded meticulously, too. Fletcher Pratt can be pitiless on occasion.

War for the World ties in, like the earlier volumes of the series, and like Allan Nevins’s admirable twovolume study of our diplomacy and foreign policy during the Roosevelt Era, with the great technological transition of our times. The conflict Pratt records was like no other sea warfare known to history. The Japanese admiral who ordered his battle force to withdraw because he couldn’t see his opponents underlines the changes through which naval warfare was being speeded by a science headed for the atomic bomb.

There is a certain tidy logic in Pratt’s treatment of this country’s war effort on the fighting fronts; it may be measured by the developments in naval construction and aircraft, in weapons and procedures, between the day when the bombs showered down upon Pearl Harbor and the moment when that terrifying “great mushroom of fire” rose over Nagasaki. For America the war had begun in the Pacific. There likewise it ended — not for America alone, but for the world.

It is only necessary to thumb the pages of Nevins’s two books on the foreign policy and diplomacy of the period between Versailles and the appearance of the United Nations to be reminded of the intimate connection between historic change throughout the world in this century and the experience of the American nation during the era of Roosevelt. Again the view broadens. Any idea of a part icularist, domestically engendered Rooseveltian revolution begins to dissipate. Mr. Nevins’s The United Stales in a Chaotic World and its companion volume, the New Deal and II arid Affairs, perform, like the other books in this fine series, a function of synthesis. Each of these historians is a specialist, either in the period or the subject he discusses. Among them, nevertheless, they manage to define an age in transition. It is a shift as deep, wide, and significant as any since the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution.