Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10859 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-01
• Released on: 2007-06-12
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This breezy narrative comes from the pen of a veteran journalist and economics reporter. Rather than telling a new story, she tells an old one (scarcely lacking for historians) in a fresh way. Shlaes brings to the tale an emphasis on economic realities and consequences, especially when seen from the perspective of monetarist theory, and a focus on particular individuals and events, both celebrated and forgotten (at least relatively so). Thus the spotlight plays not only on Andrew Mellon, Wendell Wilkie and Rexford Tugwell but also on Father Divine and the Schechter brothers—kosher butcher wholesalers prosecuted by the federal National Recovery Administration for selling "sick chickens." As befits a former writer for the Wall Street Journal, Shlaes is sensitive to the dangers of government intervention in the economy—but also to the danger of the government's not intervening. In her telling, policymakers of the 1920s weren't so incompetent as they're often made out to be—everyone in the 1930s was floundering and all made errors—and WWII, not the New Deal, ended the Depression. This is plausible history, if not authoritative, novel or deeply analytical. It's also a thoughtful, even-tempered corrective to too often unbalanced celebrations of FDR and his administration's pathbreaking policies. 16 pages of b&w photos. (June 12)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From AudioFile
Terence Aselford does an excellent job with Shlaess revisionist account of the Great Depression. He narrates in a lively manner and manages to maintain clarity during the authors interesting, but lengthy, digressions. Listeners will meet many men, and some women, who were once household names but are now hardly remembered, including New Dealers Tugwell, Perkins, Wallace, and Wendel Willke, who ran for president against Roosevelt in 1940. Shlaes interweaves informative mini-biographies of these and many of the periods major political characters, forming a reconsideration of the causes of the Great Depression and the relative effectiveness of the New Deal. This is a genuinely interesting story well told. R.E.K. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Its duration and depth made the Depression "Great," and Shlaes, a prominent conservative economics journalist, considers why a decade of government intervention ameliorated but never tamed it. With vitality uncommon for an economics history, Shlaes chronicles the projects of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt as well as these projects' effect on those who paid for them. Reminding readers that the reputedly do-nothing Hoover pulled hard on the fiscal levers (raising tariffs, increasing government spending), Shlaes nevertheless emphasizes that his enthusiasm for intervention paled against the ebullient FDR's glee in experimentation. She focuses closely on the influence of his fabled Brain Trust, her narrative shifting among Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and other prominent New Dealers. Businesses that litigated their resistance to New Deal regulations attract Shlaes' attention, as do individuals who coped with the despair of the 1930s through self-help, such as Alcoholics Anonymous cofounder Bill Wilson. The book culminates in the rise of Wendell Willkie, and Shlaes' accent on personalities is an appealing avenue into her skeptical critique of the New Deal. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Not a teacher.
I found the grammar in this book to be very poor. It was so distracting I had to stop reading. I don't understand how an editor would put a book to print that ends many sentences in dangling participles and others are just fragments that don't even pertain to the paragraph.

In my opinion this is very poorly written.

More Promise then Delivery
I'm a liberal, a believer in the social welfare state and a drinker of the "Roosevelt got us out of the Great Depression kool-aid," from way back but I'm always intrigued by a powerful revisionist theory. Ms. Shlaes presents her argument in the introduction where she states that the question isn't how the Great Depression ended but why it lasted so long. Here she blames Roosevelt for too much intervention in the economy but she also blames Hoover for signing the Smoot Hawley tariff and for tinkering with the economy in an ineffective way. Roosevelt didn't tinker, according her, but employed big public works project modeled on the fascist and communist systems still looked at favorably in the early thirties by many people.

Unfortunately, she doesn't deepen her argument during the remainder of her book but dilutes it with too many asides about Bill Wilson's AA crusade, Father Divine's efforts to end lynching, Andrew Mellon's saintly gift of the National Gallery and many more. As I read these mildly interesting sidebars, I found myself wondering, "what does this have to do with the economics of the Great Depression?" She also weakly covers the political scene without adding much new insight or depth of analysis.

Another weakness is how she describes and discusses the TVA. She is not alone on this front. I have read elsewhere about what a big deal this was and then its described as building some big dams and generating electricity for lots of rural people. Maybe it's the having lived in Central California which is a product of irrigation and re-routing rivers but I need more context for this discussion. Was the TVA the first systematic attempt at this? How many people were employed? How many lives were changed and how? The way Ms. Shales presents it, the TVA is a giant bureaucracy attempting to get ever bigger and more powerful. There is some intimation that this is a bad thing but she doesn't make a strong argument for that either.

I thought her most effective section concerned the Schechter case that went to the Supreme Court which ruled the National Recovery Administration unconstitutional. She does a good job showing both the arbitrary and anti-democratic as well as anti-capitalist nature of the NRA as well as nicely describes the lowly everyman chicken butchers who tamed the New Deal. There is a list of characters at the beginning and we learn what happened to them after the thirties ended. This sums up the problem of this book; a thesis which is macro-focused on American economics and a method where mini-biographical sketches are weaved throughout the text to no particular purpose but to divert and distract from an argument proposed but never proved.

It Takes an Open Mind.
This book succinctly reveals that Socialism does not correct a Depression.

And the Democratics' Policies only makes Depressions deeper and longer.

I know, I lived through and survived the Great Depression, despite the
Socialistic Programs imposed by Roosevelt.