Describing the famous first one hundred days of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency, humorist Will Rogers was struck by how eagerly Congress acted to support FDR's agenda. “Congress doesn't pass legislation anymore – they just wave at the bills as they go by,” Rogers joked. The amicable relationship between FDR and Congress changed, however, particularly in Roosevelt's second term in office. Stung by the defeat of his ill-advised plan to “pack” the Supreme Court with additional justices, as well as by obstacles blocking other parts of his legislative program, FDR set out in 1938 to reshape the Democratic Party by removing conservative opponents of the New Deal from Congress. Roosevelt's plan, quickly labeled a “purge” by critical observers, failed. In her lively account of this episode, Susan Dunn provides a thoughtful and perceptive history of the political jockeying that unfolded during this year.

Drawing on the work of James MacGregor Burns, Dunn attends to the evolution of FDR's leadership strategies in her narrative. Roosevelt, whom Burns has famously described (in the mode of Machiavelli) as being strong like a lion and shrewd like a fox, comes across in Dunn's account as a highly skilled politician who ultimately fell short in his attempt to remake the Democratic Party. FDR, Dunn argues, put aside the reputation he earned as a nonpartisan leader during his first term as President and looked instead to rely on his considerable popularity in order to recast himself as a partisan advocate for the cause of reform. Although this transformation might be overdrawn, throughout her story Dunn does a marvelous job in recovering the texture of American political debate during the 1930s. This book is full of rich portraits of FDR on the hustings, traveling the country, delivering speeches, and attempting to persuade voters of the merits of his position. Dunn follows FDR around the nation, chronicling his efforts in such states as Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Nevada, and California, to name but several.

Ultimately, Dunn concludes, Roosevelt's purge failed because of a number of factors. First, FDR's advisers were “all administration insiders who, unlike the president himself, had no experience in grassroots politics” (224). FDR, too, was to blame, for mistakenly assuming that his personal popularity would easily trump the influence of local organizations and newspapers. Finally, FDR and his advisers failed to anticipate “the indignant backlash the president would fuel by intruding in local elections,” a failure compounded by what Dunn terms the administration's “most obvious blunder”: its inability to recruit compelling candidates to run against the conservative incumbents they were attempting to oust from office (224, 225). In Dunn's analysis, FDR's purge “resembled, in part, a personal vendetta” (226). Roosevelt failed to carefully build an alternative vision of the Democratic Party in 1938. With the attempted purge, as with the Court-packing episode, FDR simply tried to eliminate his opponents, failing to “demonstrate the kind of intellectual commitment that is indispensable for truly transformational leadership” (227). Instead, Roosevelt “allowed pique to control him” (227).

While Dunn attends closely to the political maneuvering undertaken by FDR during his second term in office, at points her narrative gives short shrift to what was happening in the nation's economy. Only several pages make note of how FDR himself caused the “Roosevelt Recession” of 1937–38, which saw the economy plummet more rapidly than it had during the 1929 stock market crash, throwing millions of people out of work. FDR's decision to balance the federal budget led directly to economic disaster, and surely holds implications for historians looking to understand his subsequent attempt to remake the Democratic Party. Similarly, Roosevelt's uneasy embrace of Keynesian thinking, chronicled so memorably by Alan Brinkley in The End of Reform (1995), is largely absent from Dunn's politically focussed narrative.

On the whole, though, Dunn succeeds admirably in what she sets out to do, providing both experts and general readers with a fascinating and authoritative account of an episode that stands as one of FDR's few failures as President. Scholars with interests in the political culture of the 1930s will greatly profit from reading this thoughtful book.