Mr. Democrat
Jim Farley, the New Deal and the Making of Modern American Politics
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- $39.99
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- $39.99
Publisher Description
Mr. Democrat tells the story of Jim Farley, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign manager. As party boss, Farley experienced unprecedented success in the New Deal years. And like his modern counterpart Karl Rove, Farley enjoyed unparalleled access and power. Unlike Rove, however, Farley was instrumental in the creation of an overwhelming new majority in American politics, as the emergence of the New Deal transformed the political landscape of its time.
Mr. Democrat is timely and indispensable not just because Farley was a fascinating and unduly neglected figure, but also because an understanding of his career advances our knowledge of how and why he revolutionized the Democratic Party and American politics in the age of the New Deal.
Daniel Scroop is Lecturer in American History, University of Liverpool School of History.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Scroop, a lecturer in American history at the University of Liverpool, launches this biography of the Roosevelt-era political operator Jim Farley with a comparison to President Bush's adviser Karl Rove. Like Rove, Farley helped engineer two electoral triumphs, in 1932 and 1936, and like Rove, Farley was a shrewd political tactician, an expert reader of the public mood and master of the millions of details that make a successful campaign. Unlike Rove, Farley was a master of old-style machine politics whose primary loyalty was neither to FDR nor to the New Deal but rather to the Democratic Party. Thus, when Roosevelt veered from party loyalty to support New York's Republican Mayor La Guardia and the Progressives of the Midwest, Farley was appalled. It led to a break between the two men and Farley's futile bid to capture the 1940 presidential nomination. Scroop gives us a workmanlike study of Farley's role in forging the New Deal coalition and ushering in a new type of politics in which the power of local bosses gave way to that of organized labor, minorities and women a shift that, ironically, rendered Farley himself irrelevant long before his death in 1976. 10 b&w photos.
