Given our preoccupation with American decline, it’s nice to sometimes remind ourselves of the reasons for the country’s rise to superpowerdom. Anthony Badger, the former Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge, has dedicated his life to charting the rise of the United States as the world’s leading economic and military power. His new book is Prosperity Road: America, 1920–1945, from Hoover to Roosevelt. There is, thankfully, no mention of Trump or MAGA in it.
Badger’s interest in the United States came through Huey Long, who he read about as a schoolboy in gray nineteen-fifties Britain. What intrigued him was not Long’s showmanship but his delivery. Plenty of Southern populists made grand promises. But the Kingfish actually delivered on some.
In Prosperity Road, Badger reminds us of America’s astonishing domestic transformation in the first half of the 20th century. In 1920, he notes, most Americans’ entire experience of the federal government was the mailman and the occasional man in uniform, and almost nobody paid income tax. By 1945, all Americans had a social security number, worked under the Wagner Act or drew a price support, and lived within sight of a public works project. And they came to trust it. By 1958 some 73 percent told pollsters Washington could be relied on to do the right thing. That trust, Badger dryly notes, is not something that would go on forever.
On Herbert Hoover, Badger is a revisionist without being excessively sentimental. The most intelligent president America has ever had, he says of the Stanford-educated engineer. But, like Jimmy Carter, Hoover was a technocrat with little political touch and an excessively thin skin. Not exactly Huey Long.
Oddly enough, he is less effusive about Roosevelt. Badger describes him as no intellectual, an actor, a patrician who somehow persuaded working Americans he was on their side. “He’s the first president who understands that my boss is a son of a bitch,” Badger quotes a textile worker on FDR.
I asked what we, in 2026, should make of all this. Hoover and FDR were serious people, Badger notes. And they both had a concept of public service that has proved very difficult to recreate in recent years. That said, he reminds us that the New Deal grew out of the near collapse of the country in 1932. So perhaps Prosperity Road hasn’t quite run out of asphalt. Although Anthony Badger is certainly less optimistic about the United States than he was when he fell under the spell of the Kingfish seventy years ago.
FIVE TAKEAWAYS
1. Badger reconstructs the Hoover–Roosevelt feud as personal before political. They lived near each other in Washington during the First World War and Roosevelt praised Hoover publicly. Then Hoover denied the president-elect Secret Service protection, and at a White House reception Roosevelt was made to stand in a very uncomfortable position while on crutches.
2. Hoover believed in activist government up to a point past which, in his own word, it became fascistic — and nobody but Hoover could locate the point. Badger’s counterfactual is generous: had he served the two terms he expected, we would remember a reforming president.
3. Asked who built the welfare state, Badger does not say Roosevelt. He says Frances Perkins, noting that the experts were women, and Robert Wagner, whose 1935 act guaranteed collective bargaining — a frankly one-sided law he cannot imagine any Congress passing in any other year. Roosevelt’s contribution was to hire such people and give them their head.
4. Asked whether the New Deal was social democracy, Badger says no. What it built was cheap power, water development, the credit that created the Sun Belt, the rescue of American education and the beginnings of a home-owning democracy. On health insurance and housing, America never caught up.
5. Black Americans switched to the Democrats in 1934, not 1932, when Northern cities saw what the programs delivered — programs aimed at poverty rather than race. Some leaders drew the inference that a government able to fix the economy might be made to fix segregation. FDR’s Court appointees handed down Brown in 1954.
ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
04:37 — An army the size of Portugal’s
06:10 — The government was the mailman
10:19 — Why Hoover and Roosevelt fell out
14:18 — The most intelligent president ever
27:12 — “My boss is a son of a bitch”
39:24 — What the New Deal built
46:02 — Why black voters switched
55:14 — What 2026 can take
58:30 — It’s always been dismal
01:00:58 — Closing