The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression
Author(s):
Amity Shlaes
Label: Harper Perennial
Publisher(s):
Harper Perennial
Studio: Harper Perennial
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
Binding: Paperback
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Editorial Reviews
Product Description
In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes, one of the nation's most-respected economic commentators, offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depression. She traces the mounting agony of the New Dealers and the moving stories of individual citizens who through their brave perseverance helped establish the steadfast character we recognize as American today.
Customer Reviews
Good Book
Gave this as a gift and haven't read myself, but the reader says it is well worth reading.
a "Must Read"
This is a must read. Buy copies for your parents and for your kids. READ IT and spread the word.
Anti-Roosevelt nonsense
Typical anti-Roosevelt polemic. For people who still think that Herbert Hoover was a victim of circumstance and that 1920's Republicanism had nothing to do with the Wall Street crash of 1929. In short, historical revisionism at its worst.
Timely New Look at New Deal
Polls of historians credit FDR and the New Deal with ending The Great Depression while polls of economists credit World War II, according to Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man. This factoid is a reason while those who like to let data speak will generally appreciate this book while those who continue to hoist The New Deal on a pedestal will see Shlaes as heretical.
This very timely book revisits the 1920s and 1930s through the eyes of both architects of the economy and those who were directly buffeted by that economy. Shlaes details how the 1920s were actually a period of core growth in the economy based on new technologies like the automobile and radio (like the 1990s benefitting from the info technology revolution) and the policies of FDR's New Dealers prolonged and deepened The Great Depression.
While introducing each chapter with key economic indicators such as the unemployment rate, the year ending Dow Jones Industrial Average and GDP, this is no dry academic treatise. Rather, it is policy making told through experimenters and those experimented on. New Deal Brain Trusters such as the architect of the Tennessee Valley Authority are contrasted with Wendell Wilkie, power company executive whose business was run out of the Upper South by the TVA. The managers of the National Recovery Act are set against two kosher poultry butchers whose lawsuit ended with a landmark Supreme Court ruling declaring the NRA unconstitutional. And Rex Tugwell, who attempted a couple of "collective villages" through the Department of Agriculture is set against some of those who had to try and live in his vision of utopia.
The author also covers other personalities such as Andrew Mellon, the longtime Republican Secretary of the Treasury, Father Devine, a televangelist before the age of television, and FDR himself. The Four Horsemen, the conservative block on the Supreme Court who were initially able to thwart early New Deal programs as well as Robert Jackson, Felix Frankfurter and John Maynard Keynes also leave interesting trails through these pages. Through these portraits, she underscores the lack of economic understanding by many of FDR's New Dealers who were, in the main, academics with a fondness for how Stalin was attempting to remake man in the Soviet Union (this is not a snide comment, many of the New Dealers portrayed here undertook a pilgrimage as a group to the Soviet Union in the late 1920's to witness the Soviet New Man model in person - a trip capped by a meeting with Joe Stalin himself. They were buffaloed for years into believing that Stalin had unlocked the key to equality and a just society).
What is most enlightening, given a late 2008 reading of this book and in light of economic conditions at this time, is how senators, bureaucrats and academics mouthed many of the same concerns and solutions from 1929-1934 as we are hearing today. Given the poor track record of the New Deal in actually bettering conditions for average Americans, history appears unfortunately poised to repeat itself. Shleas' very well written and timely book may give you a glimpse of the future through the past.
An Incomplete Analysis
If you read "The Forgotten Man," please make sure that you also read "Since Yesterday," by Frederick Lewis Allen (New York, NY: Harper & Row, first published in 1939) and "Hard Times," by Studs Terkel (New York, NY: Random House, 1970). "The Forgotten Man" is not, as its subtitle says, "A New History of the Great Depression." Instead, it is an argument about what made the Great Depresion worse than it otherwise might have been. That is, it is less a comprehensive history than it is an effort to criticize the New Deal from a modern economic (especially monetarist) perspective. As useful as that criticism may be, you must go elsewhere to begin to understand what the times were really like, and I can think of no better places to go than "Since Yesterday" and "Hard Times."
Thomas C. Hone
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