Special Issue: Crisis of the Old Order

WHEN ARTHUR Schlesinger Jr. published the first volume of his Age of Roosevelt series in 1957, he titled it The Crisis of the Old Order. He devoted a considerable portion of the book to a description of that Old Order in crisis, including chapters with such titles as: “The Politics of Frustration,” “Protest on the Countryside,” “The Stirrings of Labor,” “The Struggle for Public Power” and “The Revolt of the Intellectuals.” Together, they rendered a portrait of a domestic status quo under severe challenge. That status quo could not hold, and thus did a new order emerge in American politics based on a far greater concentration of power in the federal government than the country had ever before seriously contemplated.