Ira Katznelson's Fear Itself

This introduction for “Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time,” by Ira Katznelson, was quite hard to read. Obviously it is from a scholarly written work, which would be the obvious reason for it being hard to read, but the subject matter was also pretty hard to understand and take in. The New Deal is absolutely a main point of this introduction and the book that follows. One can see that just from the title. Even though this introduction was fantastically long, it was a very good source for information describing the New Deal and other events of that time. Throughout almost the entirety of this introduction, Katznelson gives many different examples of how the country had to make compromises in order to accomplish their goals with the new deal. Near the end of this section he continues to give examples of ways in which congress compromised with the south, while the south took their racist ideals and imbedded them in negotiations of new deal policies; however, many of them seem to get quite repetitive. …show more content…
However, later in this section Katznelson makes sure to point out that the New Deal “ultimately proved Mussolini wrong.” One might agree with Katznelson on this point. Considering that when Franklin D. Roosevelt came into office it was in the height of the Great Depression, he told the citizens of the United States that there would be a new deal for them, thus inventing the New Deal. F.D.R. also, within the New Deal, implanted the idea of so called “3 Rs.” These were set in place to deliver relief, recovery, and