critics have claimed, or his greatest strength, as others insist. But it was the
essence of the man. ¹

So, too, was the New Deal a confusing amalgam of ideas and impulses—a
program that seemed to have something in it to please everyone except those
who sought a discernible ideological foundation. “Take a method and try it,”
Roosevelt liked to say. “If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above
all, try something.” Such statements have sometimes led critics and admirers
alike to conclude that the New Deal reflected nothing but pragmatic re/
sponses to immediate problems; that it was, as Hofstadter described, little
more than a “chaos of experimentation.” “To look upon these programs as
the result of a unified plan,” Roosevelt's erstwhile advisor Raymond Moley
wrote in a sour memoir published after his falling out with the president,
“was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures,
school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter's tools, geometry books, and chem/
istry sets in a boy's bedroom could have been put there by an interior deco/
rator.” But it also reflected Roosevelt's instinct for action—his belief in, if
nothing else, the obligation of the leaders of government to work aggressive/
ly and affirmatively to deal with the nation's problems. ²

Roosevelt was no ideologue; but neither he himself nor the New Deal he
created lived in an ideological vacuum. The blizzard of experiments that co/
existed, and sometimes clashed, within the Roosevelt administration were
the product not just of short-term, pragmatic efforts to solve immediate
problems. They were the product too of the well of inherited ideologies that
he and other New Dealers had derived from the reform battles of the first
third of the century and from which they felt at liberty to pick and choose as
they saw fit. The New Deal may have had no coherence, but it did have foun/
dations—many of them.

Roosevelt entered office convinced that he faced three urgent tasks. He
needed to devise policies to end the Great Depression. He needed to create
programs to help the millions in distress weather hard times until prosperi/
ty returned. And he needed, most New Dealers believed, to frame lasting re/
forms that would prevent a similar crisis from occurring again. He made
strenuous efforts to fulfill all of these tasks. And while he succeeded fully at
none of them, he achieved a great deal in the trying.

Roosevelt's first and most compelling task was to restore prosperity. But in
truth the New Dealers had no idea how to end the Depression because they
had only the vaguest idea of what had caused it. Some believed the Depres/
sion was a result of overproduction, which had driven down prices and

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