Saving Capitalism: The Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the New Deal, 1933–1940 by James S. Olson (review)

118 Shorter Book Reviews link between the tortured sociopathic "Blackie"and the imprisoned O'Neill of Tao House (125). The Last Conquest appears to be O'Neill's fmal attempt to exorcise his Catholic demons. Days Without End, an earlier attempt, had ended with John Loving's conversion to the old Faith, but O'Neill knew that that conclusion was not true. Apparently, his mountain-top retreat became the scene of one last dramatic struggle between "The Man" and ''The Magician." If O'Neill could have finished this play, it might have been the catharsis he had been looking for, because he seemed on the verge of marrying heaven and hell in his demonic figure, "The Magician"--a character who really wants Jesus Christ to win and who tries to goad humans into action by his cynical putdowns of "The Man" (53ft). But O'Neill was not able to finish the play. Therefore, Floyd's statements that "these plays would have made strong social statements," and that they are "devoid of any autobiographical references, indicating that O'Neill could write worthwhile material without an emotional/psychological crutch" seem incorrect on two counts (xiii). First, only the finished plays would tell us if he were capable of making "a strong social statement"; and second, the autobiographical nature of the drafts actually prevented him from finishing them. Long Day's Joumey Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten, on the other hand, are the best O'Neill and the closest he was able to come dramatically to forgiving himself, his family and God, for life. Joyce Deveau Kennedy Department of English Mount Saint Vincent University James S. Olson. Saving Capitalism: The Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the New Deal, 1933-1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. xii+ 246 pp. In this volume, Ja.mesS. Olson, author of the excellent Herberl Hoover and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, 1931-1933 (19n), carries the history of that agency through 1940. The role played by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) under the leadership of the ambitious and politically astute Jesse Jones has not received due attention from historians of the New Deal. William E. Leuchtenburg's magisterial Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (1963), for example, has only two brief references. Olson's detailed account, therefore, is a significant addition to our knowledge about the period. His contribution is the more valuable because--as Olson argues--the RFCs "effort to provide a financial transfusion for the money Shorter Book Reviews 119 markets" was not simply the leading example of "the New Deal promotion of state capitalism during the 1930s," but "the most enduring legacy of the early New Deal" (42, 86). The work raises the question of the extent to which the New Deal, or at least the early New Deal, was simply a continuation of Hoover administration policies. Olson shows that the three major features of the Emergency Banking Act of 1933--a national bank holiday, the procedures for reorganization of troubled banks, and RFC purchase of bank stock--were the products of Hoover administration officials that Hoover himself shied away from embracing until it was too late. More important, the Roosevelt administration remained as wedded as its predecessor to the fallacy that expansion of the money supply, low interest rates and the ready availability of credit would automatically result in economic growth. Both were thus surprised and baffled when the RFCs efforts to liquefy the money markets failed to bring recovery. Only after the failure of the RFCs direct business loan program undermined the capital-shortage theory of the Depression was the door open for acceptance of the Keynesian approach--and that did not happen until the latter-1930s. On the other hand, the change of administrations did mean a significant new departure. Whereas Hoover and his associates remained deeply fearful lest the federal government displace private institutions in the money markets, Jesse Jones "was committed to the idea of state capitalism, at least as far as the banking system was concerned" (68). That commitment, however, did not involve support for any radical remodeling of the socio-economic system. Jones shied away from the ambitious plans of Rexford G. Tugwell or...