NEWS

Columbia publishes book in honor of UNC historian

By DAVID WILLIAMSON
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- Columbia University has published a book of essays about the New Deal in honor of Dr. William E. Leuchtenburg, William Rand Kenan Jr. professor of history emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a longtime Columbia faculty member.

Edited by Dr. William H. Chafe, dean of arts and sciences at Duke University, "The Achievement of American Liberalism" includes 11 essays by historians, including Chafe, who trained under Leuchtenburg, as well as a contribution by Dr. Alan Brinkley of Columbia.

"We dedicate this book to William E. Leuchtenburg in tribute to all he has done to make twentieth-century political and social history such a vibrant and vital field of inquiry and, in gratitude for the model he has presented to all of us of how to research tirelessly, argue fairly and tenaciously, and write gracefully and elegantly," Chafe wrote.

Leuchtenburg is "in many respects the person who more than anyone else has framed our thinking about the New Deal and its legacy for liberalism," the editor wrote. "As author of the prize-winning classic ‘Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal’ (1963), Leuchtenburg set forth the parameters of all future discussions of the New Deal."

The UNC professor’s contribution to the liberal legacy of the period was threefold, Chafe said.

First, he showed how the New Deal was at best a "half-way revolution" in that it extended the power of the federal government in such areas as the economy while failing to deal with issues of health and ignoring those most in need of help such as farm laborers and domestic workers. Second, he provided the key answer to the question of where the New Deal came from -- the massive federal intervention in the economy during World War I.

"Third, Leuchtenburg has shaped a generation of scholarship on the New Deal and its legacies for liberalism by the students he has trained," Chafe wrote. "Few American historians have so directly sculpted and trained successive generations of scholars."

More than 20 of his former students have published two or more books, and many of those books have defined the parameters of the political and social history of the past half-century, he said.

"A literary craftsman of exquisite taste, Leuchtenburg imparted to his students both the encouragement for each to find his or her own voice, and the insistence that, whichever voice was chosen, it must be expressed with clarity, conciseness and elegance," Chafe wrote. "’Writing,’ he has said, ‘is its own justification, the way a beautiful day is, or eating a peach. There is a feeling of joy when you have done something well.’"

Subtitled "The New Deal and Its Legacies," the collected essays explore the achievements and shortcomings of liberalism from the 1930s to the present, with particular emphasis on race, gender and class.

Topics include the New Deal, the "high tide" of the Democratic Party, the U.S. Supreme Court during the Roosevelt era, communism as an issue in American politics, the scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, race and the Holocaust. Others are the political culture of the 1950s, including race and rock ‘n’ roll, women’s issues such as feminism, Southern history and liberalism after the 1960s.

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Note: Leuchtenburg can be reached j.a.l@mindspring.com

Contact: David Williamson, (919) 962-8596