Rauchway does devote a chapter to Roosevelt’s reluctance to combat southern segregationists, showing that the NAACP and other activists were watching him carefully to see whether he would extend any support to the cause of racial justice. But overall, his Roosevelt is a liberal hero who consistently advocated an expansion of public programs both to ameliorate the immediate suffering of the Depression and to stabilize the economy over the long term. Had Zangara’s bullets gone a different way, had Roosevelt’s running mate (the far more conservative John Nance Garner) ascended to the presidency, the fate of the country would have been profoundly different.

That is surely true, even if—as was often commented on at the time—the New Deal was not a clear-cut agenda that Roosevelt had ready-to-hand before he came into office. Rauchway’s revisionist emphasis shouldn’t eclipse the fact that the legislative efforts that went into the New Deal reflected many different interpretations of the problems facing the country in the 1930s. Even Roosevelt sometimes seemed to retreat from what might appear now to be the most basic precepts of the New Deal. He threw the economy back into recession in 1937 when he tried to balance the federal budget. The federal jobs programs he created were conceived as emergency measures that would last only a few years, revealing his underlying ambivalence about a welfare state.

Roosevelt and his advisers were pushed by events they did not control and by political actors representing a broad range of ideas—communists, socialists, and labor radicals, as well as the followers of Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, and Francis Townsend. By the end of the 1930s, many in Washington believed that the New Deal, whatever it was, had failed. Although unemployment had fallen from its peak and some of the worst pain of the Depression had been mitigated, the economy had not recovered—and wouldn’t until World War II. Even the power and stability of the unions were truly secured only during the war. As the economist Alvin Hansen put it in 1940, when asked whether he believed the “basic principle” of the New Deal was economically sound: “I really do not know what the basic principle of the New Deal is.”

To make the New Deal seem as though it was a program that Roosevelt had worked out well ahead of time is to simplify this history, and to cut against the sense of crisis and contingency that Winter War so powerfully evokes. This version of events also makes the New Deal appear somehow a project of Roosevelt alone, rather than a political response to the wave of protests against the economic inequality and poverty that swept up millions of Americans. That surge of discontent may have been—even more than FDR—the real subject of Hoover’s wrath.

Today, liberal nostalgia for Roosevelt comes easily. The country is mired in crises lacking obvious resolutions; the move toward greater equality that began to unfold during the 1930s has been largely undone. How much easier the situation would be if there were a standard-bearer in the Democratic Party, someone with an inspiring vision to move the country forward! But Roosevelt did not create the New Deal alone; it was the product of a generation of struggle and upheaval, of political unrest and agitation that extended well beyond Washington, D.C.