The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression | Amity Shlaes

The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression | Amity Shlaes | A Real Keeper

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The Forgotten Man:...

	The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression Amity Shlaes HarperCollins, 2007 - 480 pages average customer review:based on 116 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A must read history that is still relevant to current events

Everyone has their own short version of The Great Depression, but those received explanations and stories end up blinding us to what really happened. Amity Shlaes has provided us a magnificent history of that powerful time in our history. We discuss it too little for a number of reasons. It is convenient to believe it was caused by those evil Capitalists and the Crash of the stock market. We also want to believe it was FDR and the New Deal that saved us from both the Depression, Communism, Fascism, and led the world to victory in World War II. Well, this book doesn't cover WWII, but it does begin in 1927 when unemployment was 3.3% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was at 155 through FDR's defeat of Wilkie in 1940.

We see the role of the various government and banking policies in exacerbating a difficult economic downturn and turning it into a catastrophe. Shlaes shows us the blinding lure of Progressive economic policies that were seized upon by opportunistic politicians. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's actions are exposed for what the really were and his political opportunism is absolutely shocking. For example, if you have read Cannadine's biography of Andrew Mellon you already know the viciousness of FDR's prosecution of this man for political purposes. Really, it was persecution. When you learn about who the folks were that FDR put in power and what their aims were for a wholly powerful Federal Government you will either be shocked and dismayed (as I was) or feel sad that they did not succeed more fully than they did (if you are a committed Socialist - er, Progressive). If you were a business owner, you felt the sting not only of higher business taxes, and ridiculously higher dividend taxes, they dreamed up an undistributed capital tax for the money you kept on hand to invest in your business during a downturn. No wonder business didn't grow during the 1930s! When you made a profit, FDR took most of it, but if you made a loss, you had to pay it all yourself. So, why take any risk at all? They even wanted to change the laws so that if you used the laws to LEGALLY avoid paying taxes, they could still find you guilty of breaking the law for not paying the taxes they intended you to pay. How you would know what that was would not be knowable except to the whim of some bureaucrat lining you up for prosecution. Does this sound more like America or some dictatorship to you?

When you died, they not only came up with the estate tax on the stuff you had left over after paying all your other taxes, they wanted the people inheriting it after the death tax was paid to pay an inheritance tax! This is only the tiny tip of the New Deal's radical agenda for America.

The title comes from the idea that at the bottom of all these policies and struggles for power is the man who pays the costs and bears the burdens of these false dreams. It is an image that is used in many ways including justification for suspending our Constitution in order to deal with this or that emergency. We actually had a Relocation Administration. Did you know that? Do you know that history of the collective - er, communal farm - called Casa Grande that was set up under FDR? I found it a shocking story. Nor does the history of the TVA live up to its shiny public relations image. It seems to me, though Shlaes doesn't say it, that FDR actually allowed the Depression to continue because it served his political and social agenda. I would never have supposed that with the legend of FDR as America's Savior that I was taught growing up in the 1960s.

I encourage you to read this history and dig into the reality of the late 1920s and the 1930s. The country and the whole world seemed to be caught up in this strange dream of paradise bestowed by government programs and bureaucratic edicts. No one seemed to wonder what made these government lawyers, politicians, and staffers smarter than anyone in the private sector. And we are still paying the price for these hallucinations.

Shlaes tells the story in a straightforward manger without the conclusions I have drawn. So, please don't blame her book for my views on her book. I think it is a superb read and a must read for anyone who cares to actually know what happened rather than settle for the short-form spin that is foisted on us.

Fabulous and a book I mightily recommended.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

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A Real Keeper

I had the opportunity of attending a lecture by this author in Ellsworth, Maine last summer. When the crunchy types argued about how FDR was God, she calmly refuted their specious assertions. The book is scholarly, complete and without prejudice. Herbert Hoover doesn't come up smelling like a rose, either. A must for history buffs.

The Forgotten Man: A NEw History of the Great Depression

This book shows in great and heavily researched detail how FDR and his policies created the nanny state of the US government. If he had let the economy proceed as normal, the Great Depression would have ended years earlier. Those on the left will not be happy seeing one of their icons being criticized in such a manner.

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Mediocre Scholarship, Party Line Polemic

When does pointing a revisionist finger at Political Correctness become a yet more rigid form of ideology? Read The Forgotten Man and find out!

Author Amity Shlaes is a journalist with extensive credits for work with the Wall Street Journal. By her own acknowledgement, she has added not a whit to the historiography of the Great Depression, but rather a revisionist interpretation that starts from the the desired conclusions and pats the facts in place to make the interpretation appear free-standing. As a journalist, she knows how to divert her readers in both senses - diversion as entertainment and diversion as deception. Thus she regales us with colorful vignettes and sketches of the foibles of the significant figures of the era.

Her conclusion is nothing more than the standard party line of Reaganites, that the New Deal was totally ineffectual and may even have delayed economic recovery, that World War II ended the Great Depression, that FDR's economic advisors were naive idiots, and the FDR's administration leaned toward tyranny. I'd love to read an intelligently written book, based on more than secondary sources, which presented a basis for those conclusions - if there is any basis - but this is not such a book. This is a preachment to the hyper-capitalist choir.

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