Three Cheers for the Unemployed: Government and Unemployment Before the New Dea by Udo Sautter, and: Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes, 1874–1952 by T. H. Watkins (review)

BookReviews 229 Book Reviews Udo Sautter. ThreeCheersfor the Unemployed: Governmentand Unemployment Before theNew Deal. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. xiv+ 402. T. H. Watkins. RighteousPilgrim:TheLife and Timesof HaroldL. le/res,1874-1952. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990. Pp. xii+ 1,010. Since Bill Clinton's victory, accompanied by rhetoric about what will or will not be done in a hundred days, has resurrected folk memories about Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, it is good to have these two books to remind us of some of the realities of the 1930s and of just bow much our own time isstill shaped by perceptions and limitations left over from the era of the New Deal. The books themselves are quite different: one is a model monograph dissecting the cautious evolution of what would become New Deal policy about unemployment insurance while the other is an oversize and largely unsatisfying biography of one of FDR's maverick cabinet members. But, taken together they illustrate nicely two sides of the irregular polygon that was the New Deal: on the one side are the experts and professors evolving a cautious "scientific" approach to the problem of unemployment, while on the other side, we have a progressive lawyer from Chicago who, in William Leuchtenburg 's phrase, became "the greatest builder since Cheops." Other sides, largely unrepresented in these volumes, would include the several varieties of Democratic politicians, the labour movement, organized farmers, and, of course, Roosevelt himself . Sautter, who is Ti.ibingen-trained and teaches at the University of Windsor, meticulously traces the evolution of attitudes toward and actions about unemployment in the United States from the post-Civil War era to the New Deal. More than twothirds of his text (127-338) treats the period between the end of World War I and the end of Hoover's presidency. A brief epilogue (339-45) summarizes the New Deal approaches to unemployment. Sautter begins by examining the three major "solutions " to the problem of unemployment-labour exchanges, public works, and unemployment insurance-and sees the years before World War I as the "seedtime" 230 CanadianReviewof American Studies of unemployment refonn (120). He devotes an all too brief trail-blazing chapter to the limited uses to which the new U.S. Employment Service was put during World War I (121-26), before his detailed analysis of the final years of the old order. His focus moves from the ideas of reformers such as John B. Andrews to the incorporation of those ideas in dozens of congressional hearings, debates, resolutions, and bills. It is a sometimes tedious story,but Sautter makes sense of it and clearly demonstrates that on this topic, at least, the New Deal "solutions" grew directly out of the studies and debates of the preceding decades. It.was not their novelty but their scope that made the New Deal responses new. He rejects Otis Graham's claim that FDR's responses "had only the faintest roots in the pre-Depression period" and supports the view that it was the devastating experience of the Great Depression that created the public receptivity to the anti-individualistic solutions of the New Deal. The book is massively documented; there are more than 650 footnotes, most of them with multiple citations, checklists of bills, resolutions, and hearings, and an impressive list of manuscript sources consulted. It is, however, unfortunate that Cambridge's policy deprives scholars of the massive bibliography that should accompany this thorough and useful work. Watkins, who is editor of the Wilderness Society's magazine, and the author of eight other books largely about the West, tells us that the genesis of this biography was a 1983assignment from an editor who, appalled by the antics of Reagan's James G. Watt, wanted an article about a "good" interior secretary (861). This initial perception , that Ickes was the guy in the white hat and that his enemies (who sometimes seemed to include the rest of the world) were the guys in the black hats, permeates the work. Prior to the 1980s,little had been published about Ickes partially because his own prolific writings-eight books including an autobiography and the infamous three-volume...