David Pietrusza

Roosevelt Sweeps Nation: FDR's 1936 Landslide and the Triumph of the Liberal Ideal David Pietrusza

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.