Prof. Ira Katznelson's Book Offers a New View of the New Deal

Ira Katznelson 's first political memory dates to when he was 8 years old. His parents were ardent supporters of Adlai Stevenson, the Democrat running against Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, and they were stunned to learn that Katznelson's grandmother did not plan to vote at all. Striking her dining room table with a copy of the Yiddish language Daily Forward for emphasis, she exclaimed, "Since Roosevelt, they are all pygmies!" That incident may well be the origin of Katznelson's enduring interest in Roosevelt's much-scrutinized New Deal, the subject of his most recent book, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time . In analyzing the period from several new perspectives, Katznelson hones in to an unprecedented degree on the influence of Southern Democrats in shaping the historic legislation. "When I thought I would write about the New Deal initially, I did not initially place the Southern question front and center," he says. "It emerged as I shifted away from the riveting figure of Franklin Roosevelt toward Congress." The book represents the second installment of an informal trilogy about Southern power in the making of modern America, part of his broader interest in race relations. The first, When Affirmative Action Was White , probed the impact on African Americans of discriminatory features of decisions taken about social policy, labor law, and the GI bill in the 1930s and 1940s.