The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933 was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1957 as the first volume of The Age of Roosevelt. It covers the period from the end of World War I through FDR’s inauguration in March 1933: the false prosperity of the 1920s, the crash, the Depression, Herbert Hoover’s increasingly desperate and ineffectual responses, and Roosevelt’s emergence as the candidate who could offer both hope and action.
Schlesinger’s narrative art is at its peak here. He presents the 1920s not as a golden age but as a period of intellectual exhaustion and moral bankruptcy — the Republican administrations of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover are depicted as complacent custodians of a dying order, incapable of understanding the forces that were about to destroy it. The Depression chapters are devastating: the breadlines, the Hoovervilles, the bank failures, the human cost conveyed through individual stories embedded in structural analysis.
Roosevelt’s entrance into the narrative is handled with novelistic skill — the patrician figure who somehow understood democratic suffering, the polio survivor who brought personal knowledge of catastrophe to the national crisis. Schlesinger does not pretend to objectivity: FDR is the hero, and his arrival in power is presented as national salvation. But the narrative is so well-constructed that even readers who reject the interpretation are carried along by its momentum.
Collecting The Crisis of the Old Order
First edition (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1957): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $60–$150
- Very good: $25–$60
Projected values (2026–2036): Moderate appreciation.
The Roosevelt Project Begins
The Crisis of the Old Order (1957) is the first volume of Schlesinger’s unfinished multivolume The Age of Roosevelt, covering the period from 1919 to 1933 — the boom, the crash, and the Depression that brought FDR to power. Schlesinger argues that the old order of laissez-faire capitalism had failed catastrophically and that Roosevelt’s New Deal represented a necessary democratic response. The volume sets the stage for what Schlesinger intended as the definitive history of the Roosevelt era.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Schlesinger finish the Age of Roosevelt? No — he completed three volumes (The Crisis of the Old Order, The Coming of the New Deal, The Politics of Upheaval) covering 1919–1936, but the Kennedy assassination diverted him to A Thousand Days, and he never returned to the Roosevelt project. The unfinished series remains one of the great incomplete works of American historiography.