After Barack Obama won a second term, against Mitt Romney in 2012, a Republican National Committee “autopsy” concluded that its party's policies were fine, but how it communicated them needed work. Republicans are hardly the first political party to engage in public and private soul-searching after a defeat. But their 332-to-206 electoral loss in 2012, an improvement by 33 electoral votes over their 2008 loss, was far from the worst shellacking the GOP had suffered. In Franklin Roosevelt's four presidential elections, the largest number of electoral votes the party received was 99. Unsurprisingly, Republicans did ample soul-searching in that period.

Elliot A. Rosen has spent a lot of his career analyzing the Republican Party and the period from the Great Depression to World War II. The Republican Party in the Age of Roosevelt: Sources of Anti-Government Conservatism in the United States represents his third volume focusing on that era's politics and economics. He does an excellent job of taking the reader inside the Republican Party and the minds of its leading figures, explaining and situating their economic and political ideologies, with some revision to historiography along the way.

Given that they spent so much of the “age of Roosevelt” in the political wilderness, Republicans had time to think and to engage in internecine warfare. Rosen's discussion focuses on a couple of divisions. One pitted internationalists such as Senator Warren Austin of New Hampshire against isolationists or “nationalists”—some not entirely isolationist, but not in favor of engaging with the world—like “Mr. Republican,” Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, with the party's “shadow secretary of state,” Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, weaving between the groups. Another split involved the degree to which the party should accept Roosevelt's revamping of the federal government's role in American life. Herbert Hoover wanted another chance at the White House, and his 1934 book The Challenge of Liberty provided a template for Republicans who opposed not merely the New Deal, but the ideas behind it. “In a curious twist of subsequent American historiography, Hoover has since then been situated by some academicians as the originator of the interventionist state,” Rosen writes. “Yet from the onset of his public career, his mission was to place curbs on the powers of the central government” (p. 18). Hoover's views largely held sway in the party during the 1930s as the GOP looked for a different face and voice to represent them—which Governor Alf Landon of Kansas did, backing away from his Bull Moose origins as FDR's ill-fated opponent in 1936. Similarly, Rosen's analysis casts considerable doubt on the idea that Vandenberg simply switched from isolationist to internationalist because of World War II; his thinking and actions were more complex than that.

For Rosen and Republicans, Wendell Willkie represented the road not taken. In 1940, Hoover, Taft, and their allies were determined to head off the attorney from Indiana who until recently had been a Democrat—although one very much in favor of limited government. Nonetheless, Willkie accepted the New Deal's existence and, while hoping to avoid entry into World War II, was an internationalist who “opened the American electorate to acceptance of the need for the United States to play a major role in shaping a postwar order” (p. 101). Yet he, too, failed against FDR. Still, Willkie and eastern allies of New York Governor Thomas Dewey—most notably John Foster Dulles—continued to advocate an American (and Republican) role in the world, with Midwesterners like Taft fighting them. Willkie and his ideas gained more traction in foreign affairs; as Rosen writes, “In domestic matters, Willkie proved unsuccessful in prodding the party toward meeting the complexities of the twentieth century. . . . The failure of Hoover and Taft to advance beyond the strictures of the interwar era left an indelible imprint on not-so-modern thought” (pp. 179–80).

Rosen's study opens a window into the Republican mind-set at that time, but it falls short in a few ways. He might have done more to situate the New Deal–era party in the context of even broader Republican history. Heather Cox Richardson recently argued, in To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (2014), that Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower kept the party clear of the kinds of approaches advocated by Hoover and Taft; it would be helpful to know whether and how Republicans in the Age of Roosevelt were the rule or the exception. Rosen never reckons with the businessmen, mostly Republican, who plotted to overthrow Roosevelt early in his tenure. More crucially, Rosen begins, “This book situates the genesis of the Tea Party movement in the Age of Roosevelt. It suggests that determination by Republican Party conservatives to undo major components of the New Deal originated with Herbert Hoover's Ark of the Covenant (1934), resumed with the Goldwater phenomenon and Reaganomics, and culminated with the Tea Party movement”—but he never sufficiently addresses whether or how religious and cultural conservatism shaped the response to the New Deal and World War II (p. 1).

But these are comparatively minor quibbles in comparison with Rosen's achievement. Franklin Roosevelt dominates his era, and Republicans are all too often seen in that light rather than in their own right. Rosen shows they were indeed reacting to “that man in the White House,” but also that their reactions were part of a broader ideological and political debate with long-term implications for their party's domestic and foreign policies that he has done much to illuminate.