One of the quiet tragedies of 2006 is the laws that are not being passed in Washington. The rewrite of Social Security. The fix for old labor laws. The defunding of farming. When it comes to domestic policy, Congress seems to care about nothing but scandal and process.

Iraq gets some of the blame for this. But political cowardice is also the problem. To make progress, America needs to revamp the New Deal edifices. Yet interest groups guard these old structures like Rottweilers – the AARP, the unions’ lobbies, farmers. Lawmakers simply lack the guts to touch, let alone torch, any of those old structures, even though every year that passes makes them more difficult to overhaul.

Now along comes a useful book that takes us back to a time when K Street was just the name of another sleepy road in a sleepy city. In “The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope” (Simon & Schuster, 432 pages, $29.95), Jonathan Alter covers Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election and first legislative season as if they were not history but a story for Newsweek, the magazine for which he works. Mr. Alter is a true scholar of politics, and reading “The Defining Moment,” you get a sense that he wrote this book out of impatience. Here is how politics is done, he seems to be saying. Did you forget?

Mr. Alter starts by setting the scene. The trouble with the Depression is that it is now so distant that it seems foreign to our experience – I know, because I’m also writing a book about the period. We can hardly imagine the facts, but there they were: One in four men was unemployed. In Germany, young Hitler was raising his arm to topple the “Father of the Fatherland,” President Hindenburg. To many, the Depression felt as frightening as a war: “It was just as traumatic as Pearl Harbor or the destruction of the Twin Towers,” Mr. Alter quotes the scholar Richard Neustadt as saying. Mr. Alter suggests that America was in danger itself of succumbing “to dictatorship or chaos.”

Inaugurations took place in March in those days. But after the 1932 election, President-elect Roosevelt did not want to wait out President Hoover’s term. Like Mayor Giuliani, who for a few improbable days after September 11, 2001, talked about serving extra time beyond the end of his term, Roosevelt did not believe that the ordinary rules must hold in an extraordinary time. FDR even considered a scenario whereby he might take office early, involving Secretary of State Stimson and Vice President Curtis: “There would be instant pressure on Hoover to fire Stimson, have Curtis resign to the President and then have the President submit his own resignation, whereupon Roosevelt would be president.”

The very mechanics of the notion were flawed, as Mr. Alter notes: The speaker of the House would also have to resign for the president-elect to come up in the succession. And Roosevelt did not act on the bizarre plan. But Roosevelt did, as Mr. Alter shows, intentionally refuse to cooperate with Hoover in the months before the inauguration, notwithstanding the fact that he knew his refusal was increasing bank failures. “If he could acquire more latitude for action – more power – by letting the roller coaster slide further down the hill, he would do just that,” his aide Tommy Corcoran would later note. Once in office, Roosevelt did ask for, and receive, emergency powers.

Then the president indeed acted with vigor. Roosevelt and his men sorted out the banks almost overnight. They made over both the agricultural and industrial sides of the economy through the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the National Recovery Administration. FDR beat up Wall Street, or allowed Henry Morgenthau and Robert Jackson at the Treasury to do it for him. He brought back beer. He began to talk about creating pensions for senior citizens, and he bought out the entire South, more or less, with the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Gold clauses in government bonds in the way of Roosevelt’s plans to inflate? He abrogated the contracts. Deflation? Why not monkey with the dollar price? One of FDR’s favorite projects was the Civilian Conservations Corps, which employed hundreds of thousands of hobos and veterans in 1,300 camps. The camps served as bases from which the corps planted 3 billion trees and blazed 125,000 trails across the country. Waking men with “Reveille” and putting them to sleep with “Taps,” Roosevelt sought to teach Americans that work, and not relief payments, would tide them over through downturns. And it was all planned in those 100 days. “What a man,” Henry Luce blurted as he left the White House.

Mr. Alter gives special attention to the CCC, in part, perhaps, because it’s something we can all relate to, if only through the modern, bourgeois version, a trip on Outward Bound. He is best when it comes to reporting the details of Roosevelt’s polio or his more cynical tactics. Roosevelt liked to blame his secretary for losing politically inconvenient letters rather than acknowledge their receipt. That was how he avoided responding to the desperate mail from Hoover. We don’t know whether President Kennedy knew of this tactic when he ended the Cuban Missile Crisis by ignoring a telegram from Nikita Khrushchev. We do know, however, that JFK learned from FDR that cunning brings success.

Some of that cunning had to do with Roosevelt’s sheer drive to survive. Polio had not merely crippled him, it had also made him ill, so ill that people then could see what we cannot see now: that he was “illumined with pain,” as Will Durant put it. One reason that Roosevelt so disliked Hoover, Mr. Alter suggests, was that the then-president forced him to do something that was too hard for him: stand in his leg braces for half an hour while waiting for the Hoovers to arrive at a conference. The desperation of the ill man can simultaneously break concentration and create great ambition. An ill man moves from impulse to impulse, since it takes all his energy to get past his physical pain.

Knowing this does much to explain FDR’s famous inconsistency. Mr. Alter captures the drama well, in part perhaps because he recently had his own brush with pain and death. While writing the book, he was diagnosed with lymphoma and underwent chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant.

Still, three questions stand out. The first is whether Mr. Alter is correct in suggesting that the Americans lost their heads in 1932, and would easily have accepted a true dictator. The election of 1932 took place three years into the Depression. Yet Roosevelt campaigned for a balanced budget and a moderate trade policy, not revolution. And most voters picked him or Hoover. The two parties that were actually radical, the Socialists and Communists, together polled less than 3% and won no electoral votes. In the 1920s, by contrast, Bob LaFollette won 16% of the vote campaigning for grand reforms.

The second question is whether Mr. Alter gives enough attention to the cost of Roosevelt’s political and economic experiments, which may have done as much damage as good. Action is not always beneficent. This was the thesis of FDR adviser Raymond Moley, later one of Mr. Alter’s predecessors at Newsweek.

The last is whether 1932 truly was the defining moment in our modern political history. My own research suggests that the defining moment was 1936, when Roosevelt campaigned with the support of the interest groups he had fashioned: senior citizens going into Social Security; organized labor, newly strong after the Wagner Act; farmers who received subsidy. Creating those interest groups may have pleased the country. They brought security to the lives of many Americans, at least temporarily. And the voters certainly paid Roosevelt back, giving him 46 of 48 states. But today those voters’ descendants – the AARP, the AFL-CIO, the farm lobby – are obstacles to reform and, in the longer run, to sustaining the sort of growth that has made the Depression seem so impossibly distant.

In other words, Mr. Alter’s “Defining Moment” is strong, but incomplete. There’s a terrible Washington irony here that he may yet address in his journalism. It was Roosevelt who inspired many of today’s members of Congress to come to Washington in the first place. It was Roosevelt who taught them the importance of the political experiment. Yet it is Roosevelt whose legacy prevents them from acting.

Miss Shlaes is a columnist for Bloomberg News.