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Loading... The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depressionby Amity Shlaes
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  YaacovLozowick | Oct 21, 2009 |  This book was not what I expected. From seeing Shaels on TV, I expected a book about economics. Actually, the economic analysis tended to be rather shallow, and sometimes wrong. Instead, the book turned out to be mostly about the political thinking and politics of the time. The book was worth reading to add texture to my knowledge of the FDR years. (  ) realistTheorist | Sep 25, 2009 | I purchased this work in the form of audiotapes for consumption during my travels. I found it to be a comprehensive and moderately entertaining look at the Great Depression, the political figures involved during the period and the various programs rolled out in an effort to stem the rampant economic meltdowns of the period. Much of the story centers on the Roosevelt administration’s development of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and its clashes with private power generators and distributors (primarily Commonwealth and Southern, headed by Wendell Wilkie). As perhaps the largest example of government intrusion into the private sector (a novelty at the time), the long running battle is a good prism through which to see the developing politics of the era. Much of the book also documents Roosevelt’s all out warfare with the wealthy, again focusing on the highest profile example, Andrew Mellon. Living during a time when tax rates are thought to be too high, at or near 40%, it is difficult to imagine living in an era when rates exceeded 80% at the highest income levels. It is easy to see how such confiscatory rates smothered the incentive for economic growth and investment. Largely unknown is the ineffectiveness of New Deal programs to spur economic growth or cure near 20% unemployment. Only the coming of World War II did that. All in all, a good overview of the politics and economy of the decade of the 30s. Recommended, especially in light of current events. ( )1  santhony | Aug 12, 2009 | While a very interesting read, as a non-American, I can't help feeling that the book rather misses the point: The Great Depression lasted for years, and the policies of FDR, as split-personality as they might have been, managed to avoid bread riots and starvation on a national scale. In a time period when a job loss could last for years, and considering that starvation sets in after 30 days, glossing over the immediate needs of the population in favor of the grand scale debates and the business battles of the top 10%, while interesting, leads one to suspect that the author has never had to actually keep a family going when all bread-winners are out of work. (  ) GreyGhost | Jul 31, 2009 | Its uncanny what FDR did to expand (  ) rayme52 | Jun 24, 2009 | 
 This new book is the finest history of the Great Depression ever written. Hold on — this is supposed to be a review, not a dust-jacket blurb; but it can’t be helped. Although there are several fine revisionist works about the Great Depression and the New Deal, Shlaes’s achievement stands out for the devastating effect of its understated prose and for its wide sweep of characters and themes. It deserves to become the preeminent revisionist history for general readers. . . . Those conservatives who lately have inclined to some sentimental affection for FDR (this includes Conrad Black and, occasionally, this writer) will be roundly disabused by the damning portrait Shlaes offers. “Roosevelt was not an ideologue or a radical,” she judges, but his affinity for experimentation and improvisation yielded inconsistent and destabilizing economic policy at a time when certainty was the most needful thing. FDR’s intellectual instability was terrifying in its fullness. . . . When presidential candidate Ronald Reagan remarked that “fascism was really the basis of the New Deal,” liberals and the media hooted; the Washington Post huffed that “several historians of the New Deal period questioned by the Washington Post said they had no idea what Reagan was referring to.” Thanks to Shlaes’s book, journalists in the future will not be able to plead such ignorance. . . . We are now so far removed from the economic ruin of the New Deal’s ill-considered economic interventionism that resistance to grand central fixes for health care, global warming, or outsourcing may be on the wane. With this prospect in mind, Shlaes’s book could be called The Forgotten Lesson.
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0066211700, Hardcover)It's difficult today to imagine how America survived the Great Depression. Only through the stories of the common people who struggled during that era can we really understand how the nation endured. These are the people at the heart of Amity Shlaes's insightful and inspiring history of one of the most crucial events of the twentieth century. In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes, one of the nation's most respected economic commentators, offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depression. Rejecting the old emphasis on the New Deal, she turns to the neglected and moving stories of individual Americans, and shows how through brave leadership they helped establish the steadfast character we developed as a nation. Some of those figures were well known, at least in their day—Andrew Mellon, the Greenspan of the era; Sam Insull of Chicago, hounded as a scapegoat. But there were also unknowns: the Schechters, a family of butchers in Brooklyn who dealt a stunning blow to the New Deal; Bill W., who founded Alcoholics Anonymous in the name of showing that small communities could help themselves; and Father Divine, a black charismatic who steered his thousands of followers through the Depression by preaching a Gospel of Plenty. Shlaes also traces the mounting agony of the New Dealers themselves as they discovered their errors. She shows how both Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt failed to understand the prosperity of the 1920s and heaped massive burdens on the country that more than offset the benefit of New Deal programs. The real question about the Depression, she argues, is not whether Roosevelt ended it with World War II. It is why the Depression lasted so long. From 1929 to 1940, federal intervention helped to make the Depression great—in part by forgetting the men and women who sought to help one another. Authoritative, original, and utterly engrossing, The Forgotten Man offers an entirely new look at one of the most important periods in our history. Only when we know this history can we understand the strength of American character today. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:02 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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It's a provocative thesis, and yes, it's oh-so-very-relevant. Alas, however, she doesn't do much to prove it. She's a fine storyteller, she consistently keeps us engaged in her flowing descriptions. She's convincing that Roosevelt was a master politician, but we already knew that, just as we knew the New Deal wasn't a careful application of a fully consistent economic world view. She likes Wendell Willkie, the head of an electric company who eventually ran against Roosevelt as a Republican in 1944, and she positions him as a counter-Roosevelt figure. (Interestingly, Willkie was almost the last Republican presidential candidate ever to be endorsed by the New York Times, but that's a different story).
The problem is that for her thesis to carry weight, not merely to intrigue, it would have had to offer a lot more economics than it does. The book probably would then have been a much slower read, and less fun, but it would have been more convincing, or at least more challenging. As it is, it's more a book of jounalism than economic history. I do recommend it though, for its interesting perspective and cast of fascinating characters and events. (