Bridegroom of the Storm

THE AGE OF' ROOSEVELT--Vol. III: THE POLITICS OF UPKEAVAL (749 pp.)--Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.--Houghton Mifflin ($6.95).

"There's one issue in this campaign," Franklin Roosevelt told Adviser Raymond Moley before the 1936 election. "It's myself, and people must be either for me or against me."

The issue the voters decided then has since become more complex for the historian and biographer. Liberal Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., 42, is unequivocally for F.D.R.; his problem is to thread the maze of pose, purpose and paradox that was F.D.R. The Roosevelt enigma dominates The Politics of Upheaval as it did the two previous volumes of Schlesinger's massive chronicle of the New Deal and its master builder. In essence. Roosevelt stamped his personality on an entire era without revealing his inner self.

Polymorph at Work. In Author Schlesinger's pages, F.D.R. wears one face but many masks. There was Roosevelt, the klieg-lit primadonna. the aristocratic humanitarian, the radical conservative who could say: "I want to save our system, the capitalistic system ... To combat crackpot ideas, it may be necessary to throw to the wolves the 46 men who are reported to have incomes in excess of $1,000,000 a year." Roosevelt distrusted theory, yet surrounded himself with theorizing braintrusters. He was a gleeful social experimenter, yet wistfully longed for a balanced budget. There was Roosevelt, the calculating political tactician who combined a reform-laden 1936 State of the Union message with a conservative budget, hoping by such ambivalence "that brave words would restore the faith of the left while lack of deeds might in time restore the hope of the right."

Polymorphic F.D.R. existed more than most public men in the eye of the beholder. To his foes, he was a shameless opportunist. To his friends, F.D.R. was the sympathetic champion of their special needs and cares. In the words of a North Carolina mill hand: "Mr. Roosevelt is the only man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is a son of a bitch." What F.D.R. stood for, says Author Schlesinger, in a rather academic mouthful, was ''the humanization of industrial society."

Big Brother or Dutch Uncle. The view that people mattered less than laissez-faire economics was at the root of the Depression, as Schlesinger analyzed it in the first volume of The Age of Roosevelt. Vol. II, The Coming of the New Deal, took up the bold New Deal improvisations of "the first hundred days." In Schlesinger's grand design, which may now run to five or six volumes. The Politics of Upheaval, covering the years 1935-36. is a transition book between what he calls the first and second New Deals:

"The First New Deal characteristically told business what it must do. The Second New Deal characteristically told business what it must not do." Big Brother was replaced by Dutch Uncle. Social evangelists of centralized planning, e.g., Rexford Guy Tugwell, gave way to the legal bird dogs of reform recruited mostly from Harvard Law School by Tommy Corcoran and Benjamin Cohen. As Schlesinger sees it, the heady momentum of social experimentation had been lost, Roosevelt temporarily wallowed in "a stew of indecision." and a narrow Supreme Court majority stood poised to strike down NRA, AAA and a host of other government alphabetical agencies.

Schlesinger spends much of his book limning the critics of left and right who pelted the Administration. Some of them Roosevelt could shrug off; others were far from laughable: Father Coughlin, who described himself as "a religious Walter Winchell" and believed that all bankers were devils and Jewish bankers the most devilish of the lot; Dr. Francis Townsend, who proposed to give every oldster over 60 a pension of $200 a month with the proviso that he spend it within the month; Huey Long, Louisiana's "messiah of the rednecks," who, in a rare moment of insight, called himself "a wedded man with a storm for my bride."

Force-feed to Health. Roosevelt, too, says Schlesinger, knew himself as the bridegroom of a worldwide storm. When Biographer Emil Ludwig asked him his purpose, F.D.R. replied, "To obviate revolution." Just when the Supreme Court seemed to stymie Roosevelt's legal reforms, he resumed the offensive, pushed through Congress social security, banking and utility reorganization, collective bargaining and a graduated income tax. It is not entirely clear from Schlesinger's account whether Roosevelt jumped or was pushed into the second New Deal. There was the pressure of 9,000,000 unemployed, the falling debris of social experiments that had proved unworkable or unconstitutional. There were the nudges from Keynes-minded economists who wanted to force-feed the economy back to health, spending when business was afraid to spend, becoming an employer when there was private unemployment. For an economy in distress, many of the shock treatments of yesterday have become the household remedies of today.

Describing the landslide election of '36, Author Schlesinger, using Alf Landon's previously unopened private papers, reveals an attractive personality who had far more liking and leaning toward F.D.R. and the New Deal than his reputation as a ''Kansas Coolidge" and the vituperative 1936 presidential campaign would suggest. In one telling vignette in a Topeka chicken restaurant, a bellicose Hoover barks rapid boos at a Roosevelt radio speech, and an embarrassed Landon hustles him away from the cluster of newsmen. When the supposedly bitter rivals met at a preelection Governors' conference in Des Moines. relations between Landon and F.D.R. were so harmonious that Kansas' Republican Senator Arthur Capper observed sourly: "I fully expected one of the candidates to withdraw."

History or Hagiography? Author Schlesinger's panoramic style captures much of the sweep and excitement of an era more historically dramatic than most. Occasionally, his copious research numbs the memory it is meant to jog. He periodically confuses hagiography with history, so that F.D.R.'s New Deal becomes a kind of King Arthur's court peopled with Sir Rexford, and Sir Harry, and Sir Felix and other knights of the Round Table. With consummate showmanship, Franklin Roosevelt did embody something of the gallantry of a tilt with the dragons of poverty and unemployment. The credo Schlesinger finally inscribes for him is less mythic than modest, and may be no more than just: "He had no philosophy save experiment, which was a technique; constitutionalism, which was a procedure; and humanity, which was a faith."

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