Review of Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933–1956

Jordan Schwarz made a daring effort to put public works at the center of all this in his The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (1993), a book built around sketches of fifteen New Dealers (a term broadened to include Herbert Hoover) who looked past the welfare state to focus their efforts on permanent improvements of Americas capital structure and its standard of living (p. xii). New Deal pub- Reviews of Books 665 lic works programs wrought in concrete and steel a tangible representation of a political philosophy, and the result was truly revolutionary, a revolution . . . awesome in scale and scope because it not only transformed the landscape but saved capitalism (pp. 258259). [...]Smith ends by stressing that the central significance of the New Deal, achieved through massive public works spending that continued to and beyond the Eisenhower-launched interstate highway system, was using public investment to spur economic development during and after the 1930s (p. 262).