Scorpions

Noah Feldman

Unprecedented in its global impact, the Great Depression sounded the death knell of unfettered capitalism. Four men - all from wildly different backgrounds, all with decidedly disparate temperments and all equally devoted to FDR - were the primary authors of what would essentially be America's new Constitution. Scorpions is the story of their personalities, their relationships and above all their ideas in the crucial years of depression and war - years in which these men created the national game plan that would save the country by rebuilding the economy and defeating the Nazis and the Soviets in turn.
It is also the story of how these men - Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, Robert Jackson and William O. Douglas (a Jew, a Klansman, a Yankee, and a Westerner) - advised, cajoled, used and were used by the man who brought them together and whom they all revered: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.