Cohen, Robert, ed. Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Letters From Children of the Great Depression. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
The main thesis of this edited compilation of letters from children to Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt during the 1930s is that Americans of that period thought that the US government was willing to help the least advantaged of its citizens and was predisposed to doing so. Although evidence of the first lady's direct engagement with the plight of the children of America's systemic poverty is sparse and though her correspondence was undoubtedly staffed out either to her secretaries or to various federal, state, and local relief agencies, it appears that Mrs. Roosevelt sought to influence federal policy in ways that would structure New Deal programs for the benefit of young people. Even so, the author concludes that the well of need was bottomless in the Great Depression, and New Deal philosophy and good intentions, which as a matter of public policy raised material expectations of the lowest socioeconomic demographic, were far from equal to the task of meeting it in practical terms. The book's most important message, despite the author's mixed evaluation of the FDR administration's response to entreaties from its poor, is one that may not have been intended but that comes into specific relief in the context of the role the US government has assumed in the 21st century: that the extent to which the national government has a stake in the well-being of all of its citizens is less a function of mere perception of inequality or government declaration that inequality is imaginary than of experience of policy consequences. Just because the underclass may have unrealistic expectations of its government does not prove the underclass does not face special problems.
This book adds to the understanding of US history because it vividly demonstrates that personal experience is implicated in the political cha...