(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
The Politics of Upheaval: 1935-1936, The Age of Roosevelt, Volume III (Vol 3)
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The Politics of Upheaval, 1935-1936, volume three of Pu...)
The Politics of Upheaval, 1935-1936, volume three of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.s Age of Roosevelt series, concentrates on the turbulent concluding years of Franklin D. Roosevelts first term. A measure of economic recovery revived political conflict and emboldened FDRs critics to denounce that man in the White house. To his left were demagogues Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and Dr. Townsend. To his right were the champions of the old order ex-president Herbert Hoover, the American Liberty League, and the august Supreme Court. For a time, the New Deal seemed to lose its momentum. But in 1935 FDR rallied and produced a legislative record even more impressive than the Hundred Days of 1933 a set of statutes that transformed the social and economic landscape of American life. In 1936 FDR coasted to reelection on a landslide. Schlesinger has his usual touch with colorful personalities and draws a warmly sympathetic portrait of Alf M. Landon, the Republican candidate of 1936.
The Crisis of the Old Order: 1919-1933, The Age of Roosevelt, Volume I
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The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933, volume one of P...)
The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933, volume one of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.s Age of Roosevelt series, is the first of three books that interpret the political, economic, social, and intellectual history of the early twentieth century in terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the spokesman and symbol of the period. Portraying the United States from the Great War to the Great Depression, The Crisis of the Old Order covers the Jazz Age and the rise and fall of the cult of business. For a season, prosperity seemed permanent, but the illusion came to an end when Wall Street crashed in October 1929. Public trust in the wisdom of business leadership crashed too. With a dramatists eye for vivid detail and a scholars respect for accuracy, Schlesinger brings to life the era that gave rise to FDR and his New Deal and changed the public face of the United States forever.
The Coming of the New Deal, 1933-1935 (The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. 2)
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The Coming of the New Deal, 1933-1935, volume two of Pu...)
The Coming of the New Deal, 1933-1935, volume two of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.s Age of Roosevelt series, describes Franklin Delano Roosevelts first tumultuous years in the White House. Coming into office at the bottom of the Great Depression, FDR told the American people that they have nothing to fear but fear itself. The conventional wisdom having failed, he tried unorthodox remedies to avert economic collapse. His first hundred days restored national morale, and his New Dealers filled Washington with new approaches to recovery and reform. Combining idealistic ends with realistic means, Roosevelt proposed to humanize, redeem, and rescue capitalism. The Coming of the New Deal, written with Schlesingers customary verve, is a gripping account of critical years in the history of the republic.
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With a new introduction by the author The Vital Center ...)
With a new introduction by the author The Vital Center is an eloquent and incisive defense of liberal democracy against its rivals to the left and to the right, communism and fascism. It shows how the failures of free society had led to the mass escape from freedom and sharpened the appeal of totalitarian solutions. It calls for a radical reconstruction of the democratic faith based on a realistic understanding of human limitation and frailty.
Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. was an American historian, social critic, and public intellectual.
Background
Schlesinger was born on October 15, 1917 in Columbus, Ohio, the son of Elizabeth Harriet (née Bancroft) and Arthur M. Schlesinger (1888–1965), who was an influential social historian at Ohio State University and Harvard University, where he directed many PhD dissertations in American history. His paternal grandfather was a Prussian Jew who converted to Protestantism and then married an Austrian Catholic. His mother, a Mayflower descendant, was of German and New England ancestry, as well as a relative of historian George Bancroft, according to family tradition. His family practiced Unitarianism.
Education
Schlesinger attended the Phillips Exeter Academy, New Hampshire, and received his first degree at the age of 20 from Harvard College, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1938. After spending the 1938–1939 academic year at Peterhouse, Cambridge as a Henry Fellow, he was appointed to a three-year Junior Fellowship in the Harvard Society of Fellows in the fall of 1939. At the time, Fellows were not allowed to pursue advanced degrees, "a requirement intended to keep them off the standard academic treadmill"; as such, Schlesinger would never earn a doctorate.
Career
Membership in the Society of Fellows at Harvard allowed him to do the research for The Age of Jackson, published when he was only 27 in 1945. (After 1942 Schlesinger Jr. had been involved in the World War II effort in Washington, D. C. and overseas. ) Schlesinger Jr. was appointed to the Harvard history department, where his father was still a professor.
Schlesinger Jr. moved his scholarly focus from the pre-Civil War period to that of the New Deal while he was a Harvard professor. Teaching American intellectual history from the colonies to the present, he concentrated his research upon the Age of Roosevelt and published the first three volumes covering the years to 1936: The Crisis of the Old Order (1957); The Coming of the New Deal (1958); and The Politics of Upheaval (1960). In the mid-1980s he resumed work on his multi-volume history of the New Deal.
If Schlesinger Jr. had only published these historical works he would be known to the educated public as well as to historians, for all of his books are well written and widely read. But it was his political involvements and the relation of his writing to these involvements which made Schlesinger a public figure of unusual interest.
He became the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at the City University of New York in 1966.
Though Schlesinger Sr. (1888-1965) was a liberal, a Democrat throughout the 1920s, and a supporter of the New Deal, his scholarship did not visibly manifest his political views and his partisan political activity was slight. Schlesinger Jr. was more active personally in partisan politics, and his scholarship seemed to cast votes. The Age of Jackson, written during FDR's fourth term, argued that the pre-Civil War reform era was one of a series of alternating liberal cycles which followed conservative periods, each of which failed to address the nation's political, economic, and social problems. Schlesinger attempted to demonstrate that Jacksonian democracy was a conscious social movement emanating mainly from "have-nots" in the eastern and southern parts of the country. The alleged class conscious eastern radicalism and the regional alignment suggested, of course, links with the New Deal, and it was said that The Age of Jackson "voted" for Roosevelt, as well as Jackson.
In 1949 Schlesinger Jr. published The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, a history of American social thought organized around the political issues of the post-World War II years. The Vital Center voted retrospectively for Truman in the election of 1948, both in terms of domestic New Deal programs and in the formulation of opposition to totalitarianism, whether of fascism on the right or communism on the left. Written for the moment, The Vital Center remains a remarkably enduring testament for the mainstream of the Democratic Party almost 40 years after it was published.
An active supporter of Adlai Stevenson in his unsuccessful bids for the presidency in 1952 and 1956, Schlesinger Jr. switched his speech-writing to John Kennedy for the election of 1960. Kennedy or Nixon: Does it Make Any Difference (1960) made his case for JFK. After serving in the White House as a special assistant to Kennedy and resigning his Harvard faculty position, Schlesinger wrote A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965).
His political visibility obscured the fact that Schlesinger Jr. remained an acute scholarly commentator in book reviews on the monographic works of other historians in American intellectual, political, and social history. In addition, he served as editor of the History of American Presidential Elections (4 volumes, 1971) and in 1986 wrote 14 stylish essays describing The Cycles of American History.
Following Bill Clinton's proclamation of a new covenant in his 1992 presidential acceptance speech, Schlesinger asserted that a new era had begun. He based his assertion on the cycles of American history theory put forth by his father. The elder Schlesinger predicted in 1939 that the New Deal would run out of steam in the mid-1940s. It would give way to a conservative tide, he predicted, which in turn would yield a new liberal epoch starting in 1962. The next conservative phase would begin around 1978.
On the strength of this record, it was logical to predict, as the younger Schlesinger did in 1986, that at some point, shortly before or after the year 1990, there should come a sharp change in the national mood and direction. The reason each phase recurred at roughly 30-year intervals, Schlesinger asserted, was because generational change was the cycle's mainspring. But because each generation kept faith with its youthful dreams, Schlesinger argued, the forward momentum was guaranteed.
During the 1990s, Schlesinger was among an increasing number of writers, analysts and political observers who recognized that all was not well with multiculturalism and politically correct trends.
After he retired from teaching, he remained involved in politics for the rest of his life through his books and public speaking tours. Schlesinger was a critic of the Clinton Administration, resisting President Clinton's cooptation of his "Vital Center" concept in an article for Slate in 1997. Schlesinger was also a critic of the 2003 Iraq War and called it a misadventure. He put much blame on the media for not covering a reasoned case against the war.
Schlesinger died on February 28, 2007, at the age of 89 when he experienced cardiac arrest while he was dining out with family members in Manhattan.
Two of his works were published posthumously.
Achievements
Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr. was an outstanding historian of the United States and an influential activist in the Democratic Party. What was unique was the extent to which he brought his scholarship to bear upon his partisan politics.
He won the Pulitzer Prize twice for his works, ‘The Age of Jackson’ and ‘A Thousand Days’ respectively.
His book, ‘The Crisis of the Old Order’ won him two awards - Bancroft Prize and Francis Parkman Prize.
He won the National Book Award in History and Biography for ‘A Thousand Days’ and National Book Award in Biography for ‘Robert Kennedy and His Times’.
He was the proud recipient of National Humanities Medal, Four Freedoms Award and Paul Peck Award. In 2006, he was awarded a medal by Elmhurst College for epitomizing the ideals of Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr.
He was among the founders of Americans for Democratic Action.
Views
Quotations:
“If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself. ”
“Economists are about as useful as astrologers in predicting the future (and, like astrologers, they never let failure on one occasion diminish certitude on the next). ”
“Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman. ”
“Righteousness is easy in retrospect. ”
“Television has spread the habit of instant reaction and stimulated the hope of instant results. ”
“The genius of impeachment lay in the fact that it could punish the man without punishing the office. ”
“We are not going to achieve a new world order without paying for it in blood as well as in words and money. ”
“Santayana's aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it. ”
“The purpose of democratic statecraft is, or should be, to find the means of ordered liberty in a world condemned to everlasting change. ”
“The use of history as therapy means the corruption of history as history. ”
Membership
He was a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard.
He became the president of the American Institute of Arts and Letters in 1981.
He was also a Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Connections
He first married author Marian Cannon in 1940 with whom he was blessed with four children. After thirty years of togetherness, the couple filed for divorce in 1970.
In 1971, he tied the nuptial knot yet again with Alexandra Emmet. The couple was blessed with a son. He also had a step son from Emmet’s first marriage.
Father:
Arthur Meier Schlesinger Sr.
(February 27, 1888 – October 30, 1965)
Mother:
Elizabeth Harriet (née Bancroft)
Daughter:
Katharine Kinderman
(1942–2004)
Daughter:
Christina Schlesinger
(born November 19, 1946)
Son:
Andrew Schlesinger
He is a writer and editor.
Son:
Robert Schlesinger
He is managing editor for opinion at U.S. News and World Report, a liberal blogger on the site's Thomas Jefferson Street blog and the Huffington Post, and the writer of a biweekly column for U.S. News.
Son:
Stephen C. Schlesinger
He is an American author, political commentator, and international affairs specialist.
