Boards

The Living New Deal Advisory Board

Advisory Board members are high-profile public figures who believe in the New Deal as a great American legacy and a model for public spirited action today

Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. and has a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan. He writes frequently for newspapers and websites such as the Atlantic Monthly, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Guardian (UK), TruthOut, Financial Times and New York Daily News. He has written several books on the contemporary economy and the failures of federal policy, including The End of Loser Liberalism, Taking Economics Seriously, and False Profits.

John Roosevelt Boettiger is a retired professor of psychology who taught at Amherst College, Hampshire College and the California School of Professional Psychology.  He is the son of Anna Roosevelt Boettiger and John Boettiger, and the grandson of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.  As a child, he lived with his mother in the White House during World War II.  Later he lived and traveled with his grandmother Eleanor Roosevelt and joined her in work on behalf of the United Nations.  He is chairman of the board and president of the Christopher Reynolds Foundation.  He lives in the Bay Area and is currently editor of Reckonings: A Journal of Justice, Hope and History.

Sara Boettiger holds a doctorate in economics. She has been a Deputy Director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Senior Advisor at McKinsey, and today serves as Head of Public Affairs, Science & Sustainability for the Crop Science division of Bayer Corporation. She has served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Councils, as Chairman of CIMMYT (an international agricultural research center), and on the board of the Summit Community Institute. She is co-founder of a number of non-profits applying technology to meet the challenges of global poverty.  She has taught at UC Berkeley, where she received her Ph.D., and been a faculty fellow of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.

Lizabeth Cohen is Professor of American Studies and History at Harvard and former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her books include Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, and Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age. Cohen has won many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship; and she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former president of the Urban History Association. 

Robert Chlebowski is Executive Vice-President for Distribution Strategies and Services at Wells Fargo Bank, San Francisco.  He has a BA from Fairfield College CT,  an MA from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and an MBA from the Stanford Business School.  A former economist with the US Treasury Department, Bob serves on the board of the Council for Economic Education and other charitable institutions.

James Galbraith is Professor of Government at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin, a member of the executive committee of the World Economics Association and director of the UT Inequality Project.  He has authored several books on economics and policy, including Inequality and Instability, Created Unequal, and The Predator State.   He is the son of New Deal economist John Kenneth Galbraith.

Nina Roosevelt Gibson is a granddaughter of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt through their youngest son, John and his wife Anne Clark.  She spent much of her youth at Val-Kill and was close to Eleanor.  She is works as a psychologist with the children of abused and addicted parents.  She lives in Vail, Arizona.

Janet Roosevelt Katten (deceased 2020). Jan was the youngest daughter of G. Hall Roosevelt and Dorothy Kemp Roosevelt, and was Eleanor Roosevelt’s niece.  As a child, she was a frequent guest of her aunt and uncle at the White House and at Val-Kill. She finished her life in San Francisco and was the first advisor to sign on with the Living New Deal. We will miss her dearly.

Ira Katznelson is Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University and former Dean of The New School for Social Research.  He is currently president of the Social Science Research Council, and has previously served as president of the American Political Science Association and Social Science History Association.  He is the author of more than a dozen books on American cities, race relations and government, such as City Trenches, When Affirmative Action Was White, and most recently Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time.

William Leuchtenburg is the dean of New Deal historians, known best for his books on Franklin D. Roosevelt, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (1963), The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (1997) and In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan (1989). Bill is professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is still active as he nears the century mark.

Nelson Lichtenstein is Professor Emeritus of History at University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a leading American labor historian, author of such works as Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor, and A Contest of Ideas: Capital, Politics, and Labor.  He is also a co-editor of two essential books on the New Deal’s legacy, Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great Recession and Capitalism Contested: The New Deal and Its Legacies. 

William Leuchtenburg is widely regarded as the dean of New Deal historians for his the classic books, such as The Perils of Prosperity, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, and The FDR Years: Roosevelt and His Legacy.  He taught history at Columbia University for thirty years and served as president of president of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society of American Historians.  Today, he is William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina and frequent advisor to Ken Burns, including the PBS series on the Roosevelts.

Touré Reed is Professor of History at Illinois State University and holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He is author/co-author of three books on African American history: Not Alms But Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910-1950, Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of Black American Thought, and Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism. Dr. Reed is currently working on a new study, to be titled New Deal Civil Rights: Class Consciousness and the Quest for Racial Equality, 1933-1948, for which he received a Kluge Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Library of Congress.

Robert Reich is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, and a former United States Secretary of Labor (named by Time Magazine as one of the ten most successful cabinet secretaries of the century).  He is the author of many books on public policy and the economy, including Beyond Outrage, Tales of a New America, Supercapitalism and The Work of Nations.  His latest book is Saving Capitalism: For the Many Not the Few.  He writes a widely-read blog on current politics and economic policy, appears weekly on NPR’s Marketplace, and recently filmed a documentary, “Inequality for All”.

Christina Romer is the Class of 1957 – Garff B. Wilson Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.  She served as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers for the Obama administration in 2009-10 and is widely known for her research on the 1930s and monetary policy.

Curtis Roosevelt (deceased 2017).  Curtis was the eldest grandson of Franklin and Eleanor and wrote many essays about them and his experiences growing up in the White House. A memoire,  Too Close to the Sun: Growing Up in the Shadow of My Grandparents, Franklin and Eleanor, was published in 2008.   He held a Masters Degree from Columbia University and worked as an administrator at the New School for Social Research and Columbia.  After that, he held posts at the United Nations and was head of Dartington College of Arts in England.  In retirement he lived in Mallorca and southern France with his wife, Marina.

Frank Roosevelt is a grandson of Franklin and Eleanor and son of FDR, Jr.   He is a graduate of Yale, Columbia and the New School for Social Research, where he earned a PhD. He served in the U.S. Navy, taught at Vas(sar and spent most of his career as professor of economics at Sarah Lawrence College – where he garnered the Lipkin Prize for ‘inspirational teaching’. In 2010, the New School conferred on him its Distinguished Alumnus Award. Roosevelt is widely published in economics journals and edited books,  and he is co-author of Understanding Capitalism: Competition, Command, and Change (2005). Roosevelt and his wife of over 50 years live in Manhattan, have three children and eight grandchildren, and enjoy spending summers in Maine.

David Rumsey holds a BA and MFA from Yale University and was lecturer at the Yale School of Art for years.  After moving to San Francisco, he began a new career in real estate, working with the General Atlantic Holding Company of New York. General Atlantic eventually became the Atlantic Philanthropies foundation.  In the 1980s, he began collecting maps of the 18th and 19th-century Americas and created one of the premier collections in the world, numbering some 150,000 maps, most of which have been digitized and are available for viewing on-line. He recently gave his collection to Stanford University and endowed the David Rumsey Map Center in the Green Library.  Rumsey lecturers widely about online libraries and archives.

Dana Walker is professor emerita of Education at the University of Northern Colorado and lives in Boulder. She has worked extensively in Latin America and with multilingual youth in the U.S., Mexico, and Spain. She is the author of A Pedagogy of Powerful Communication: Youth Radio and Radio Arts in the Multilingual Classroom (2014); Constructing Literate, Artistic, and Social Identities After School: Community Cultural Resources in Support of Latina/o Youth (2003); and Ethnic and National Cultures of Resistance: The Subtiava Indians in Nicaraguan History (1992). She is the daughter of the late Jan Roosevelt Katten.

Peter Wiley is former Chair of the Board, Wiley-Blackwell Publishers and now happily retired.  He is author of  The National Trust Guide to San Francisco and co-author of Empires in the Sun. He lives in San Francisco.

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The Living New Deal Research Board

Research Board members are scholars and public intellectuals with expertise in New Deal history and preservation, who advise the Living New Deal team on research and policy questions.

Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 Professor of Political Science at University of California, Berkeley.  She received her PhD from Princeton and has recently been a Senior Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a UC President’s Humanities Fellow.  She is author of many books on politics and governance, including Walled States/Waning Sovereignty, Regulating Aversion and Politics Out of History.  Her most recent book is Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution.

Sheila D. Collins is Professor of Political Science Emerita at William Paterson University and former director of the graduate program in Public Policy and International Affairs.  She is a co-founder of the National Jobs for All Coalition and on the International Advisory Board of the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Studies.  She is the author of several books and many articles on American politics and policy.  Her latest book is When Government Helped: Learning from the Successes and Failures of the New Deal, co-edited and authored with Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg.

William Deverell is Director, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and Professor of History at University of Southern California. He is author of several books, including Whitewashed Adobe and Railroad Crossing, and editor of several more, such as Metropolis in the Making and California Progressivism.

Robin Einhorn is Preston Hotchkiss Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley.  She has a doctorate from the University of Chicago and is author of Property Rules and American Taxation, American Slavery.  She teaches American History and is a recipient of the university’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

Price Fishback is Thomas R. Brown Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona and Executive Director of the Economic History Association.  He is an expert on the economic effects of the New Deal, on which he has written extensively.  He is co-author of Well Worth Saving: How the New Deal Safeguarded Home Ownership and is editor of Government and the American Economy: A New History.   His most recent article is “The Multiplier for Federal Spending in the States During the Great Depression” (co-authored) in the Journal of Economic History, which was awarded the journal’s prize for best article of the year.

Marta Gutman is Professor of Architecture at the Spitzer College of Architecture, City College of New York, and a professor of art history at The Graduate Center/CUNY.  She teaches architectural history and urban history and is the recipient of college teaching and service awards. Her book, A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850-1950, received the 2015 Kenneth Jackson Award from the Urban History Association and the 2017 Spiro Kostof award from the Society of Architectural Historians. She has written about the New Deal, arguing that the WPA pools were democratizing—stages for expanding and enhancing urban citizenship in New York City during the New Deal.

Darrick Hamilton is a leading expert on inequality and racial disparity.  Hamilton hails from Brooklyn, graduated from Oberlin College and earned a PhD in economics from the University of North Carolina.  He is back in New York at The New School, as the Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy and the founding Director of the Institute for the Study of Race, Stratification and Political Economy.  He is a well-known public policy advisor and commentator on national media.

June Hopkins is professor of history at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, with a doctorate from Georgetown University.  She worked as a social worker in New York before becoming an historian.  She is the author of Harry Hopkins: Sudden Hero, Brash Reformer (1999) and ‘Jewish First Wife, Divorced’: The Correspondence Between Ethel Gross and Harry Hopkins (2003).  She is the granddaughter of Harry Hopkins.

Robert Leighninger is currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.  Bob is the author of Long Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal, the first comprehensive study of New Deal public works as a whole, and Building Louisiana: The Legacy of the Public Works Administration.  Bob recently recorded an interview on the PWA in Louisiana for the website, Louisiana Anthology. He serves on the Living New Deal non-profit board of directors.

Stella Lochman is the Manager of Public Engagement at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She coordinates large-scale artist commissions, serving as liaison between the artists, the museum, and history, community, and arts organizations across the Bay Area. Her passion for New Deal projects stems from her years long work with the 1939 Scale Model of San Francisco.

Sharon Ann Musher is Associate Professor of History at Stockton University, New Jersey. Her latest book, Democratic Art: The New Deal’s Influence on American Culture (University of Chicago, 2015), examines the role of the 100,000 artworks produced under the auspices of the New Deal in transforming American society in the mid-20th century.

Alice O’Connor is a Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and director of the UCSB Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy.  She is author of Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in 20th Century U.S. History and Social Science for What? Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside Up.   She also co-edited the important book of reflections on the New Deal: Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great Recession.

Joni M. Palmer is Adjunct Associate Professor in Geography & Environmental Studies at the University of New Mexico.  Her interests focus on reading and writing landscapes; arts, culture and sustainable cities; and the relationship between academia and practice.  Her latest book is Public Art Encounters: Art, Space and Identity (with M. Zebracki)(Routledge, 2017).  She is a member of the American Society of  Landscape Architects and her professional practice experience includes urban park design, campus planning, and arts and cultural planning.

Laura Pulido is Professor of Geography at the University of Oregon.  She hails from Southern California and taught for many years at USC.  She is well known for her work on the ways race, class and gender shape the places we live in, the landscapes we inhabit and our relationship to nature.  Her writings include the books Environmentalism and Economic Justice (1996); Black, Brown, Yellow and Left (2006); and A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (2012). She edits the People’s Guide series on American cities for the University of California Press, which highlight the hidden histories of popular communities and their struggles for justice on many fronts.

Eric Rauchway is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis and the author of The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace (2015) and The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction (2008). He is currently writing about the critical period between Roosevelt’s election on November 8, 1932, and inauguration on March 4, 1933.  He received his doctorate from Stanford University in 1996.

Dani Rodrik is Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard’s JFK School of Government. He received his doctorate from Princeton, where he was previously at the Institute for Advanced Study.  He has received many awards and is currently president of the International Economics Assocation. His latest books are Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy (Princeton UP, 2017), Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science (Norton, 2015), and The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy (Norton, 2011).

Jason Scott Smith is Associate Professor of History, University of New Mexico, and holds a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.  He is the author of Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933-1956 and A Concise History of the New Deal (Cambridge UP, 2014).

Nick Taylor is a non-fiction author who writes on a wide range of subjects. His history of the Works Progress Administration — American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA – is the only stand-alone account of the major jobs program of FDR’s New Deal.  American-Made won a Christopher award as a book that affirms “the highest values of the human spirit” and was named a “Notable Book” by the American Library Association.  He lives and works in New York City.

Michael Wallace is Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College and the City University of New York, where he has taught since 1971, and the founder and former director of the Gotham Center for New York City History. With co-author Edwin G. Burrows, he won the Pulitzer Prize for History for Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.  He is presently completing a second volume of that monumental history.

Mason Williams is the author of City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York (2013). His PhD dissertation in History from Columbia University was awarded the Bancroft Dissertation Prize. He has been a Bernard and Irene Schwartz Postdoctoral Fellow at the New York Historical Society and the New School and is presently a visiting assistant professor at Williams College.

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The Living New Deal Non-Profit Board

The non-profit board of directors are past & present leaders of the Bay Area team

Gray Brechin, President
Harvey Smith, Vice-President
Richard A Walker, Treasurer
Rachel Brahinsky, Secretary
Robert Leighninger
Alex Tarr

(For details on these board members, see the project team page)