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According to Aurthur M. Schlesinger,jr. , in his book "Crisis of the Old Order," he points out that before the New Deal of FDR, the United States experienced a severe depression about every twenty years, including 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1907 and 1929. But in the seventy plus years since then, there have been no major depressions. But wait you say, what about the Savings and Loan Scandal in the 1980s during the Reagan administration? According to Arthur Levitt, the former chairman of the SEC, as he addressed Congress, he said, "what has failed is nothing less than the system for overseeing our capital markets." The system failed because the regulatory commissions were too often taken over by the very business interests they were supposed to regulate. This has been one of the great gifts of Reaganism and Bushism, to put control of the regulatory commissions into the hands of the very people who detest regulation and whose business concerns and business colleagues benefitted from their absence. But the Democrats, the modern ones, are not without complicity in this transition to an unregulated business economy and environment.

John Kenneth Galbraith, in his famous book, "The Great Crash" (regarded by many as the most authoritative account of the 1929 crash) remarked that "the memory of the financial mind lasts about ten years," meaning that it only takes a short time before the financially minded who have political interests want to once again pursue the very kinds of business models that produced the previous depression. Before and during WW I, progressive liberals imagined a world in which business would serve the public needs and not the private interests of a few. There was broad discussion of nationalizing important industries like electric power and the train system which was put under government regulation during WW I. This progressive movement was stirred by the great social workers, like Jane Addams of Hull-House in Chicago and other centers like Henry Street in New York, staffed by women who were powerful forces in drawing national attention to conditions of poverty and homelessness. National disgust with poor pay, childhood labor, substandard housing and the writings of muckrakers like Sinclair Lewis, all converged onto political leadership who listened to these stirrings and responded by shaping new political movements. Great progressive liberals like Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, Charles Evans Hughes of New York, Hiram Johnson of California were all notable progressive governors who emphasized government’s responsibility to elevate and protect the middle class. La Follette was unflinching in his commitment to a democratic form of socialism. In Wisconsin he established the first modern income tax law, the first effective workmen’s compensation law, modern labor legislation, He talked of increased inheritance taxes, excess profits tax, public ownership of railroads and water power and abolition of all labor injunctions. He even wanted Congress to enact legislation to overturn Supreme Court rulings that went against a more progressive viewpoint about government. The greatest of them all in terms of visibility and action was Theodore Roosevelt of New York, who was steadfastly committed to conservation, in addition to reducing the dominance of corporate America. The idea that business should function to serve people rather than exploit them was new and flourished right up until the time that Russia pulled out of WW I and the war ended. Up until that event, the threat of communism was not taken very seriously, even though it alarmed some lawmakers. But, for an imperial country like Russia and an ally against the Axis to boot, to be subdued by the Bolsheviks seemed more threatening to business America than any ofther force imagineable. So we invaded Russia and fought on the side of the White Russians, killing thousands of poor Russians who were rising up against the conditions that led to massive public starvation and deprivation. For the American business model makers, the revolution in Russia elevated communism from a nuisance to a palpable threat. It was that event, more seismic than any other, which changed the progressive liberal talk of nationalization of key industries into perceived threats from the "Bolsheviks of America." As a result, the business model for America seemed like a safer bet as it began to emerge and dominate as it had never done before. The old suspicions about business motivations began to fade away. The 1920s saw a complete reversal of fortune for the progressive liberal party and the stunning defeat of Al Smith by Herbert Hoover in the 1928 election seemed to seal the fate of the progressive liberal movement as irrelevant, going the way of the dodo bird.

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Ordinarily, commenting on a book about a bygone era and a long forgotten player who emerged from the WW II scene, might seem oddly out of context, given the current circumstances of our economy, the war, soaring energy costs, declining values of our homes, foreclosures, huge public and private debt and of course an administration unlike any other in history for dealing with these problems. As Kevin Phillips has said in his recent book, "not in recent memory have we seen so many sharks in the tank all at once." Yet, did you notice that in the current climate of uncertainty and anxiety, where there are so many sources of angst, no one except Ralph Nader and Howard Zinn have dared bring up the policies of FDR for discussion. No one has asked what FDR would do and no one has suggested that maybe it’s time to do it again. If you think the problems we are facing today are not directly the result of complete regulatory failure, created by rewarding incompetency and the rich, then you have little hope of ever coming to grips with our current dilemma(s).

The topic of this book goes right to the heart of why we find ourselves in our current dismal condition, as we continue to tolerate these newly emerging crises while in a state of national paralysis. Indeed, this topic has never been more appropriate for understanding contemporary America. The origins of how we got to where we are today and why we seem so paralytic, have everything to do with what we did during the period that began immediately after WW II, when we were forced, without our knowledge, without our approval or consent, to take a hard right in our foreign policy, as we turned on the military spigot by formally adopting the "bomb." We were in fact seduced by the bomb. It seemed so lovely and decisive at first. First it was the Atom bomb, but that was followed by the much more powerful hydrogen bomb (thermonuclear). Indeed, the present state of our militarism, in which we spend $ 1.1 trillion on defense each year, directly and indirectly accounts for our deficiencies in having a decent health care system, the skyrocketing costs of energy, the growing population of homelessness in America, the diverging disparity in personal wealth, the high cost of services, like internet access, that are far less expensive in other countries and our failing infrastructure which allows major bridges to fall down with barely a ho-hum from the public. These realities of today and our complete ignorance about their root causes, had their origins in the events that began immediately after WW II. Yet almost no one understood, except a small cluster of perpetrators, what the objectives were and why so much energy was spent on moving our culture so dramatically to a different point. The country was exhausted at the end of WW II, but it was this state of exhaustion and distraction that the right was busy making sure it would undo the FDR administration and their seduction by the "bomb" would begin the process. Although most Americans do not realize it, since the WW II, we have become the bomb culture, identified with the development and use of atomic weapons. As E.L. Doctorow observed, "it was our first weaponry and then our diplomacy and now it’s our economy."

One person, J. Robert Oppenheimer tried to steer us clear of the bomb culture and economy and in appreciation for his efforts, we destroyed his career, and removed him from public influence and visibility. But the larger price of destruction for this transgression is yet to be paid. It is the one that now lies ahead of us, the one just now coming into view. The one that finds us incapable of dramatic re-investment in America because of the "bomb." With that introductory disclaimer–to the book!

Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin have co-authored "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the new gold standard for the history/biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the famous WW II scientist who successfully took control of the Manhattan Project and created the atomic bomb. Many books have been written in the past about Oppenheimer, but they have only looked at sectors of his life or his role in limited issues of history. This book, for the first time, covers the entire life of Oppenheimer and it doesn’t fail to richly reward us for absorbing it. The book has earned a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 and has received a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Greek mythology holds that Prometheus stole fire and gave it to man, after which Zeus had his body nailed onto Mount Caucasus, where an eagle swooped and devoured his liver by day, which grew back by night (From the introduction). In September, 1945, one month after atom bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed by Japan’s prompt surrender, Scientific Monthly declared that "Modern Prometheans have raided Mount Olympus again and have brought back for man the very thunderbolts of Zeus." Although the development of the atom bomb required a massive effort with 3000 physicists, chemists, engineers and technicians housed in newly created Los Alamos, New Mexico, and a few other key sites, one Promethian stood head and shoulders above all others and that was Oppenheimer. He became an overnight hero and an instant legend. As the Truman administration sought to defend the use of the bomb on Japan as a life-saving act, by preventing an invasion of the mainland, thereby saving thousands if not millions of lives (WW II in the Pacific stopped in Okinawa, a few weeks before the two atom bombs were dropped), Oppenheimer’s reputation grew into a larger than life figure, admired by everyone and celebrated as a new kind of American hero. He was on the cover of Time in 1948 and was one of the most recognizable faces to emerge from the war, with his porkpie hat and the inevitable cigarette dangling from one side of his mouth, looking at you through an intense fixation, as if to warn that if you want to say something, it’d better be good. His prodigious smoking habit, said to be four to five packs a day, would eventually cost him his life, as he died of throat cancer at the age of 62 in 1967.

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During the early 1930s, with the depression deepening, and as FDR was trying to implement his array of new federal programs, a group of wealthy individuals and major corporate leaders formed an anti-FDR political action organization, the "American Liberty League " (ALL ). The ALL was heavily funded but oddly out of step with the times, as they wanted to promote a return to the old days before income tax, where government was restricted to delivering the mail: they wanted a return to the first Gilded age of the late 19th Century (too bad they didn’t live long enough to enjoy the one we are in now). The primary focus of this group was to resist the increased federal regulations that FDR was trying to implement, such as Social Security, which they oddly labeled (simply to put fear into the opposition) as the end of Democracy and the first step towards Fascism in America. The group was not exclusively Republican, as Democrat Al Smith (Democratic nominee for Presidency in 1928), is credited for organizing it, but it was very heavily funded by industrialists, including Dupont, U.S. Steel, General Motors, U.S. Rubber and among the figures supporting this organization was Prescott Bush , grandfather of our current president. It’s estimated that the ALL funneled from $500.000 to $1.5 million to resist FDR’s policies, though many feel this group was sufficiently out of step with reality that they aided rather than impeded the programs of The New Deal .

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