Dealers and Dreamers: A New Look at the New Deal

Joseph P. Lash

Plunkett Lake Press, Apr 10, 2020 - Biography & Autobiography

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Joseph Lash’s last work is an account of the men and women who helped Roosevelt pull the country out of the Great Depression. When FDR took office in 1933, he set into motion the promise he made when he was first nominated: the New Deal, also called the Roosevelt Revolution, charged the energies and imaginations of some of the most brilliant minds in the country. Lash draws heavily on the private and unpublished papers of Thomas Corcoran and Benjamin Cohen, the two most influential brain trusters of the time, whose policies invigorated the nation and who, independently and together, were driven to promote the social and economic transformations of the thirties.

“This ‘new look at the New Deal,’ as the book is subtitled,... [is] a history of New Deal legislation, from the banking bill that recast the Federal Reserve System, on through the Public Utility Holding Company Act, the Wagner Labor Relations Act, the Social Security Bill and the creation of the alphabetocracy that, as Mr. Lash believes, helped to shift control of the American economy from Wall Street to Washington... a dual biography of two young New Deal lawyers, Benjamin V. Cohen and Thomas G. Corcoran... a roster of New Deal players — Adolph A. Berle, William O. Douglas, Marriner Eccles, Jerome Frank, Leon Henderson, Alger Hiss, Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickes, Hugh S. Johnson, James Landis, Max Lowenthal, Isador Lubin, Raymond Moley, Frances Perkins, Joseph Rauh, Samuel I. Rosenman and Rexford G. Tugwell [and] Harvard Law professor (and later Supreme Court Justice) Felix Frankfurter... the ideological struggle that went on between people like Tugwell, who wanted to plan the economy, and those like Frankfurter and Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, who wanted to break up the trusts and restore freedom to the marketplace. Dealers and Dreamers will be valuable to any reader with certain specific questions about the New Deal in mind.” — Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times

“Dealers and Dreamers is a fascinating, informative book, indispensable for students of the Roosevelt presidency.” — Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The New York Review of Books

“The story of how our present-day institutions were created... [Lash’s] excellent exploitation of the papers of both Cohen and Corcoran, plus judicious use of interviews, makes this a valuable work.” — Warren F. Kimball, Los Angeles Times

“Joseph P. Lash’s last book is a fitting capstone to a noble career. Dealers and Dreamers is a vivid evocation of an era and a fascinating portrait, written with the skill of a master, of some of the most wonderfully engaging figures of a glorious age in American history. But more than that, it is — like all of Joe Lash’s books, and like Joe Lash’s life itself — a work of the most rare sincerity and integrity. What shines forth from every page — as it shines forth from Mr. Lash’s life — is his unshakable determination to be truthful, honest and scrupulously fair. Joe has always been the standard of integrity to which I tried to hold fast, and this book is a final, triumphant example of the fact that he held that standard high to the last.” — Robert Caro

“I found Dealers and Dreamers a veritable treasure trove of historical information about Roosevelt’s Washington. For that reason alone it is an important book.” — Thomas Fleming

“Dealers and Dreamers not only reports the achievements and operations of the New Deal, but also the spirit of the participants, a spirit which I think was very much like that which must have existed among the persons who drafted the U.S. Constitution and put it in force — in each case, reflecting the excitement and satisfaction of participating in a successful revolution, not against government but for government.” — Eugene McCarthy

“By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Eleanor and Franklin, this is a fresh and admiring look at the original ‘brain trusters’ (Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, Adolf Berle) and others crucial to the legislated social transformation presided over by Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression years. Among the ‘others’ Lash pays particular attention to are Thomas G. Corcoran, ‘the unofficial whip of the New Deal,’ and Benjamin V. Cohen, principal draftsman of several ground-breaking bills sent to Congress. The author describes Cohen as the intellectual coordinator of the New Deal and the keeper of its conscience. Working from Corcoran and Cohen’s private papers, he sheds light on the significance of the Securities Exchange Act, FDR’s court-packing attempt, the 1936 presidential campaign, the effect of the New Deal on black Americans and other issues throughout the decade before Pearl Harbor.” — Publishers Weekly

“Lash focuses on two talented technocrats — Benjamin V. Cohen and Thomas C. Corcoran, protégés of Felix Frankfurter, then a professor at Harvard Law School. Though neither had held high office, both played important, frequently pivotal, roles in drafting and ensuring passage of vital New Deal measures like the Securities Exchange Act of 1934... Pragmatists as well as idealists, Cohen and Corcoran viewed politics as the art of the possible. With revolution a decided possibility, they opted for trial-and-error reform as the best means to the end of preserving any vestige of a free-enterprise, constitutional system.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Lash has written an absorbing narrative that captures the spirit of those yeasty times when a heady generation of young intellectuals was ready to roll up its sleeves to rescue America.” — R. Frank Saunders, Jr., The Georgia Historical Quarterly

“Dealers and Dreamers conveys an unmistakable sense that there was something special about the experience of the generation of lawyers who entered public service in the 1930’s.” — G. Edward White, Harvard Law Review

About the author

Joseph P. Lash (1909-1987) was a radical student leader, an Air Force weatherman, a journalist, and a biographer. He was the oldest of five children born to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine who ran a modest neighborhood grocery store and a kosher household on New York's Upper East Side. Small and scrawny, he managed to survive on the tough streets as a member of a gang which adopted him as their “Professor.” His father died in the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, and then 9-year-old Lash refused to drop out of school to run the store. He graduated from City College of New York in 1931, and from Columbia University with a Master's degree in philosophy and literature in 1932.

As America sank into Depression, Lash became a leader in the increasingly radical student protest movement, first as an officer of the Socialist youth organization Student League for International Democracy, and from 1936 to 1939 as executive secretary of the American Student Union, a coalition of radical youth groups. Subpoenaed to testify before the predecessor of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Lash and other leaders gathered were joined at New York’s Penn Station by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt who rode to Washington with them and invited them to lunch at the White House. By the end of the visit she and Lash had formed a lifelong friendship.

From 1940 until 1942, Lash was general secretary of the International Student Service, a progressive student-aid group. He was later a founder, with Mrs. Roosevelt and others, of Americans for Democratic Action and served as an officer for two years. He was also active in liberal Democratic politics. Mr. Lash was drafted during World War II, serving as a sergeant and later second lieutenant in the United States Army Air Force in the Pacific as a weatherman.

In 1950, after two years working as an assistant to the Roosevelts’ son Elliott, Lash joined The New York Post, then known for its liberal editorial positions. He worked for a time as a general assignment reporter and became its United Nations correspondent, a position he held for 10 years. From 1960 until 1966, he was assistant editor of the editorial page.

After Eleanor Roosevelt died in 1962, Lash published Eleanor Roosevelt: A Friend’s Memoir and Franklin Roosevelt, Jr. invited him to write a biography with access to all of Mrs. Roosevelt’s papers. The result was Eleanor and Franklin, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1972, and Eleanor, The Years Alone. Lash published six more books over the next sixteen years, including Roosevelt and Churchill, Helen and Teacher, and Dealers and Dreamers.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Dealers and Dreamers: A New Look at the New Deal
• Author: Joseph P. Lash
• Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press, 2020
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Political; History / United States / 20th Century