Right from the start of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, Ira Katznelson addresses skeptical readers. With everything that has been written on the New Deal, what new material could Katznelson possibly offer? What will he do with nearly five hundred pages (and more than 150 pages of discursive endnotes)? Katznelson admits that he is repainting “the most painted political landscape of twentieth-century America” (7). This repainting ultimately does not fully change the color of the New Deal, but it is a big synthesis of New Deal politics that offers a provocative fresh coat of paint.

Katznelson, the Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University, is best known for another book on race and the New Deal (When Affirmative Action Was White, 2005). Fear Itself builds on ideas from that earlier book. In Katznelson's 1930s America, southern Democrats wield tremendous power over the Democratic Party, and no other political party is even seriously in the game. Katznelson began exploring the implications of that political structure in When Affirmative Action Was White, and he broadens and amplifies it here. Racism was built into New Deal politics, he argues. This point is critical. In many New Deal histories, the racist outcomes of some policies (the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers, disproportionately black employment, from Social Security, for example) are an accident. They are a matter of circumstances, an unintended consequence of decisions made. Not so, says Katznelson. As Depression-era politicians scrambled to save democracy and capitalism, Katznelson emphasizes that “the Jim Crow South was one collaborator America's democracy could not do without” (95). He discusses some breathtakingly racist New Dealers (like Senator and Ku Klux Klan member Theodore Bilbo (59)), and far more segregationist New Dealers whose understanding of race was inextricable from their ideas about the economy (like the southern Democrats behind the Glass-Steagall Act (255)). Fear Itself is about the compromises made, a pro-New Deal book that does not flinch at the New Deal's “ironies and limitations” (7).

Katznelson's New Deal spans from 1933 to 1953, including the Truman years and the election of Eisenhower, making for a “long New Deal.” In the four-part narrative, he surveys the fears of Americans in these years. First, he says, was a fear of dictatorships and the potential collapse of democratic government. Second, Katznelson looks at the more domestic fear of the southern racial order. This includes both fear of its violence (focussed on antilynching law) and fear of its potential demise (focussed on tense negotiations over whether soldiers had to pay southern poll taxes). Third, he moves to American fears of warfare, and the political negotiations that framed World War II. In the final section of the book, Katznelson examines postwar compromises, such as those over labor right and over nuclear weaponry. The book progresses more thematically than chronologically, and is held together by a focus on these responses to American fears. Unfortunately, Katznelson undertheorizes this idea of “fear,” at least compared to the amount of work he wants it to do here. He briefly considers fear through some psychological texts, but overlooks the burgeoning literature on the history of emotions. Katznelson's discussion of fear is not unconvincing, but he rests so heavily on “fear” as an explanation of political action that it seems important that he further explore just what it means.

Situated between political science and history, Katznelson's argument is supported by both a close reading of the Congressional Record and a quantitative analysis of Congressional roll call votes. With graphs of voting blocs, he imagines Congressional politics and legislation as the center of the New Deal. This is a significant departure from most approaches to the period. Katznelson argues that Congressmen, as “gatekeepers” for most federal politics, need a more prominent role in the historiography. Especially when it comes to the New Deal period, Katznelson explains, the role of the President and the executive branch has been overemphasized. Franklin D. Roosevelt looms large in both national imagination and political historiography. That most exhausted question of New Deal historiography is again made relevant: was the New Deal more radical, or liberal, or conservative? Katznelson's use of Congressional politics offers a twist on the usual answers, as he insists we not ask what Roosevelt did or did not do, but instead what Congress did or did not make possible.

The Congressional focus also allows Katznelson to get to the second half of his title – The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. He describes a Congress taken hostage by what is really a minority of the country's interests (the US South, which he defines as including seventeen states). Senators filibuster everything they disagree with, and structures like seniority and the committee system allow the minority opinion to have power disproportionate to their numbers. The President, who leans more politically left than Congress, faces regular difficulty when he tries to move on his own agenda. This, Katznelson argues, is a way of reading Franklin D. Roosevelt's years in office that might help us think through our own political circumstances. He sets this out explicitly in the introduction, but does not emphasize such parallels or invoke President Obama or his Congress in the actual text. This might disappoint some readers, but I appreciated the subtlety. The reader will make connections him- or herself, and the text avoids becoming as presentist as the subtitle might suggest.

Fear Itself is a major contribution to the historiography in New Deal or World War II American politics. It challenges the literature on race and the New Deal, puts a spotlight on Congressional history, and furthers recent efforts to situate American history in a global context. Most importantly, it will almost certainly be the springboard for many new research projects, as historians and political scientists challenge, defend, and build on Katznelson's expansive mural.