Winner of the 2023 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal for US History
From the acclaimed author of 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents and 1960: LJB vs JFK vs Nixon—The Epic Campaign that Forged Three Presidencies
comes a dazzling panorama of presidential and political personalities,
ambitions, plots, and counterplots; racism, anti-Semitism,
anti-socialism, and anti-communism, and the landslide referendum on
FDR’s New Deal policies in the 1936 presidential election.
Award-winning
historian David Pietrusza boldly steers clear of the pat narrative
regarding Franklin Roosevelt’s unprecedented 1936 re-election landslide,
weaving an enormously more intricate, ever more surprising tale of a
polarized nation; of America’s most complex, calculating, and
politically successful president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, at the very top
of his Machiavellian game; and the unlocking of the puzzle of how our
society, our politics, and our parties fitfully reinvented themselves.
With
in-depth examinations of rabble-rousing Democratic US Senator Huey Long
and his assassination before he was able to challenge FDR in ’36;
powerful, but widely hated, newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, who
blasted FDR’s “Raw Deal”; wildly popular, radical radio commentator
Father Coughlin; the steamrolled passage of Social Security and backlash
against it; the era’s racism and anti-Semitism; American Socialism and
Communism; and a Supreme Court seemingly bent on dismantling the New
Deal altogether, Roosevelt Sweeps Nation is a vivid portrait of a dynamic Depression-Era America.
Crafting
his account from an impressive and unprecedented collection of primary
and secondary sources, Pietrusza has produced an engrossing, original,
and authoritative account of an election, a president, and a nation at
the crossroads. The nation’s stakes were high . . . and the parallels
hauntingly akin to today’s dangerously strife-ridden political and
culture wars.
