Book Review - The New Deal by Paul K. Conkin

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Book Review - The New Deal by Paul K. Conkin

First published in the politically turbulent years of the late 1960's, Paul Conkin's 'The New Deal' is considered now one of the defining books closely associated with the New Left school of historical criticism. The New Left was a political movement that grew up, frequently, in college and university campuses in the mid to late 1960's as a response to a growing perception of an entrenched social hierarchy within American society.1 At the time of writing, Conkin's book was not a conscious attempt to provide a New Left reading of the New Deal, as he himself states in the preface he had, 'never heard of any movement called the New Left'. Conkin was clearly, being a young professor at a dynamic and progressive institution like the University of Maryland, influenced by the spread of the radical disillusionment at the time, and this shows in the reasons he gives for writing this book. Conkin viewed the perception of the New Deal in journalism as well as in the historiographical trend prior to the 1960's as largely uncritical, that the even the most scholarly literature reflected a 'smug or