title: Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
author:  Ira Katznelson 
description: Surveying the Democratic Partys control of the federal government from 1933 to 1953, Katznelson embarks not on a history of the New Deal per se but, rather, on an assessment of the limits placed on it by opposition in Congress. His work accordingly analyzes the voting scorecards for numerous acts of legislation, focusing intently on the influence of southern Democrats on political outcomes. Initially stalwart supporters of Roosevelts economic liberalism, southerners enthusiasm waned as they perceived the challenges to the social order of racial segregation posed by various proposals; by the late 1930s, they had essentially stopped further expansion of the New Deal. However, WWII revived New Dealers, whose wartime proposals for economic planning and fair employment Katznelson recounts through their legislative fates under the continuing influence of southern Democrats. Positing that the New Deal preserved liberal democracy, but at the expense of compromises with illiberal forces, Katznelsons hefty history weighs other historians interpretations of the New Deal as it knowledgeably advances its own. --Gilbert Taylor
zlib_text: FEAR ITSELF
  The New Deal
  AND THE
  Origins of Our Time
  IRA KATZNELSON
  
  DEDICATION
  For Deborah, and her
  ever-expanding bounty
  
  EPIGRAPH
  I live in an age of fear.
  E.B. White, letter to the
  New York Herald Tribune,
  November 29, 1947
  
  CONTENTS 
  Cover
  Title Page
  Dedication
  Epigraph
  Introduction: Triumph and Sorrow
  PART I FIGHT AGAINST FEAR
  1. A Journey without Maps
  2. Pilot, Judge, Senator
  3. “Strong Medicine”
  PART II SOUTHERN CAGE
  4. American with a Difference
  5. Jim Crow Congress
  6. Ballots for Soldiers
  PART III EMERGENCY
  7. Radical Moment
  8. The First Crusade
  9. Unrestricted War
  PART IV DEMOCRACY’S PRICE
  10. Public Procedures, Private Interests
  11. “Wildest Hopes”
  12. Armed and Loyal
  Epilogue: January 1953
  Notes
  
  Acknowledgments
  Photograph Credits
  Index
  Copyright
  Also by Ira Katznelson
  
  INTRODUCTION 
   Triumph and Sorrow
  LESS THAN A YEAR after Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency, Charles
  Beard, the nation’s leading historian, reported how, “with astounding
  profusion, the presses are p