This volume is a unique ethnographic experience, displaying the New Deal as a national event, and not something that simply existed inside the Washington Beltway. Most writers of and from this period never escaped the confines of the District of Columbia. Ginzberg, with the aid of a Columbia University fellowship, did just that.

He traveled all parts of the country - with special emphasis on the American Far West and Southwest, with a not inconsequential stay in Hollywood, where the American style was forged to accompany the political change-over.

Ginzberg's work is amazingly free of self-serving or hagiographic qualities. His sense of how the New Deal took dangerous fiscal risks, the far from unified responses by the big business nemesis, and the surprisingly complex responses from university elites, will all serve to give a human face to a political upheaval that has grown hazier with time and clumsier with one new interpretation after another of this epoch.