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Showing reviews 6-10 of 306
 Much of the negative reaction to FDR now makes better sense.... August 30, 2007
C. Perelli-Minetti (Old Greenwich, CT USA)
46 out of 58 found this review helpful
This is a fascinating book. Most serious historical writing about the Crash, the Depression and the New Deal has been either an essentially adulatory hymn to Roosevelt and his team (think Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.) or critical from a leftist perspective arguing the New Deal was too conservative (think Gabriel Kolko). Criticism of Roosevelt and the New Deal by contemporaries, to the extent it's read much anymore, has tended to seem overwrought (think H.L. Mencken on 'Roosevelt Minor'). Writing by economists has been better, but less approachable by the ordinary educated reader.
Shlaes provides a much needed perspective, a heavily anecdotal history of the run up to the Depression and the Depression which emphasizes the ideas about political philosophy and political economy held by, and motivating the actions of, the key players from Coolidge, Mellon, and Hoover, through Roosevelt and his Brain Trusters (including the execrable Tugwell) and executives and lawyers like Insull and Wendell Wilkie.
What I got from the book was a sense, for the first time, of why the incredible outrage that the New Deal generated in many people was fully justified: the capriciousness of both Roosevelt and his minions, their lust for power, the ineffectiveness of most of their nostrums, and, their indifference to the effect on actual citizens (as opposed to their idealized groups of downtrodden whom they hoped to recruit to keep them in power) that borders on Lenin's guffaw when talking about murdering kulaks (recounted by a horrified Bertrand Russell in his essay Eminent Men I Have Known in his 1950 Unpopular Essays). Those who realized what Roosevelt and his wunderkinder were doing were choleric at their own helplessness in stopping him or making people understand how counterproductive the New Deal really was.
When I first read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, I thought the portraits of the professors and government types ranged against Rand's heroes were almost cardboard caricatures, which was confirmed by my graduate school reading of historical scholarship on the New Deal. Now, after hearing Shlae's portraits, however, I am struck by how much like her cardboard characters the New Dealers actually were, based on their own words and recollections.
One caution: this should not be the only book you read on the New Deal. It's relatively short and not comprehensive. For the reader who has a solid working knowledge of the Depression and the New Deal (say the equivalent of a fresh, but careful, reading to the appropriate chapters in Morison, Commager aand Leuchtenburg's The Growth of the American Republic which is very favorable to the New Deal), Shlaes makes her argument by letting the facts and the protagonists speak for themselves. And a damning portrait it is.
A Revelation July 4, 2007
Aging Boomer (United States)
72 out of 93 found this review helpful
The revisionist view of the Depression, that it was not a crisis of capitalism so much as a crisis of perverse government, has long been persuasively argued and, at least in conservative circles, accepted. Contraction of the money supply instead of expansion, raising tariffs instead of lowering them, and perverse wage and tax policy all worked together to prevent the kind of rebound typical of previous recessions. What this book adds is the human face of this failure. I grew up in an Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. world. I was raised to think of the New Dealers as geniuses and saints. The school books of the 1950s, and college professors of the 1960s, taught me so. That myth is forever shattered by this book, and its depiction not just of the odd cast of characters who made the New Deal, but of the utter intellectual chaos and self-contradiction that underlay it. The New Deal was one failed improvisation after another. (One must remember, however, how much of the responsibility lay with Hoover and his own failed interventions, an aspect of the times that Shlaes emphasizes.)
Much of the entrenched bad policy that bedevils us today had its origins under FDR. Not even the great Ronald Reagan (whom I now see as channelling Andrew Mellon!) could do more than ameliorate it. Yet this sad story makes a great read. The personalities involved, the very texture of the 1930s, come delightfully alive in this book. It remains a mystery how a President as inept and unprincipled, as fundamentally disorganized, as FDR could have defeated Hitler and the Japanese. Or perhaps it's not such a mystery. Some of the qualities that made for a disastrous domestic policy may have served him well as Commander in Chief. The "fog of war" is better suited to the improvisatory approach. Perhaps Shlaes can address this in a book on the 1940s. She, at least, will not succumb to hagiography despite the wartime successes.
The audio version of this book, by the way, is very good, with an excellent reader.
An important book - a must read if you pay taxes. November 2, 2009
Rocky Reynebeau (Golden, Colorado USA)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
The world that I grew up in was a world that loved FDR. Yet, as a conservative, I just could never connect the dots of a government solution to government produced problems. So, this book was like "dying and going to Wisconsin" for me - it was heavenly reading. Amity Shlaes's view of the great depression is similar to how many feel about our current economic problems. The great depression was essentially cause by very bad economic polices by President Hoover and exerbated by equally bad responses promulgated by Roosevelt.
Does this sound familiar. The bad social policies of "The Community Reinvestment act" of the late 1990's was the seed corn of the near collaspe of our financial markets. Now, policies similar to that of FDR, are suggested to be the solutions. Government caused our current economic drama and the response seems very similar to that of the great depression era. Atlas has Shrugged!
This is an important & wonderful book on a very important subject. A must read for generations that will be left with the bill....
The Best Non-Fiction Book of 2007 August 26, 2007
Beth Fox (Los Angeles, CA USA)
27 out of 34 found this review helpful
"The Forgotten Man" would be categorized as a great work of non-fiction in any year. This year, with a volatile stock market, a contraction of credit, and cries for the federal government to "do something," it is a must-read. The indispensible history lesson is that even well-intentioned government programs can make a recession worse.
Why did the Great Depression last so long? We've all heard of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, but that was not the only example of bad policy in the Hoover years. Hoover is often portrayed as a "let them eat cake"-style, do-nothing President. In fact, Hoover was no Coolidge Republican but a progressive of a different stripe. Through his bumbling efforts to half-heartedly address economic problems (with laws that created different ones), Hoover bears a great deal of responsibility for the early years of the Depression. Read about the hour of the "vallar" and other scrip, when deflation was so terrible that people simply ran out of currency.
The New Deal programs are usually presented as necessary to get the country back on its feet and the New Deal as a whole is often given credit for preventing a turn to fascism or communism in the United States. In fact, the programs lengthened and deepened the Depression and led to a self-fulfilling prophesy: the programs prevented growth in the economy; as Americans became poorer, they suported more government programs; rinse and repeat. The programs were also extremely intrusive. Read the eye-popping chapters on the Schechter chicken case, in which the Supreme Court held the NRA to be unconstitutional. We were taught in school that this case was about "sick chickens"; in fact, it was about the customer's having the right to pick his own chicken while an NRA code required him to take the first one out of the coop!
The problems with the New Deal were two-fold. First, many of its proponents believed in a government-planned economy and attempted piecemeal to put it into place. This led to a waste of money on projects like the collective farm Casa Grande. The stringent taxes (including the tax on "undistributed profits" -- those that a business would use to grow), coupled with increasing wages, led to a steep fall in business investment. Second, however, was that the competing factions within the Roosevelt team (and the mercurial positions of the President himself) led to uncertainty -- no one knew what program was coming next or how to plan for it. This uncertainty itself prevented anyone from investing in business.
One additional note: This work will also be of great value to anyone interested in the growth of public utilities, the battle between government-owned and private utilities, and the electrification of the South.
In its initial conception, when men A and B (politicians) discuss a way to help a suffering X, "The Forgotten Man" is C -- the man whose money is taken for the effort. The 1930s-era men forgotten by history (foremost among them, Wendell Wilkie) come alive in this absorbing work. Amity Shlaes has created a fair-minded, compulsively readable, history of the Great Depression that we and our leaders should learn from today.
Pernicious Socialism Forgotten...Alas. August 5, 2007
Bernard Chapin (CHICAGO! USA)
39 out of 51 found this review helpful
The title of the book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, always makes me think of one thing: the New Deal. Of course, the author of Lies...would assuredly hold a view contrary to my own concerning Franklin Delano Rooselvelt and his era. The New Deal's positive social and economic impact was a consistent canard I heard throughout my schooling as the educational establishment bedecked the entire Roosevelt Administration with accolades of grandeur. In fact, I do not recall ever reading a bad word about Mr. Roosevelt before I was in my mid-twenties. That the New Deal was an economic disaster, and that its policies were nearly as laughable as those of the Soviet Union, is a truth that many college students never discover. Such a view is not the type of intellectual diversity tolerated by our institutions.
After reading three or four glorious reviews of The Forgotten Man I was convinced that I had to examine it for myself. Upon finishing it I must admit that the hype it has received is entirely legitimate. To put it bluntly, this is a sensational book. What author Amity Shlaes offers us here is a non-partisan account of the black days of the late twenties and nineteen-thirties, and one written by a narrator who is content to let the facts speak without embellishment. She does not lobby or distort, but maintains an objective approach to her material.
I was not familiar with Ms. Shlaes before picking up this text, but am incredibly impressed by her skills. This is a tale of the Great Depression as told through its actual events and in-depth portraits of the persons involved. I have no doubt that most readers will find Ms. Shlaes narrative quite convincing. It is nearly as authoritative as Jim Powell's FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression while being stylistically far superior. Clearly though, both works excel in their description of a government perpetuated debacle which should never be regarded as a "deal." Fraud is a better word by which to characterize the Leviathan's morphing of an economic downturn into a contraction of amazing proportions.
The folly of socialism is The Forgotten Man's unspoken theme. The misguided nature of economic collectivism is dispassionately evident in these lucid and illuminating chapters. Sadly, however, the lessons of FDR's ignoble era have not been internalized by the American people. The great majority of our politicians have only one remedy for whatever "problems" supposedly plague the citizenry...more government. The phenomenon is not unlike a Chicagoan going to see his doctor because of strep throat in January and being told that the cure for his ailment is to begin sleeping outside at night. Despite a calamitous and misbegotten record, a bigger and more bloated state is perpetually proscribed to our polity in response to whatever unnerves them.
In the thirties, the bureaucracies manipulated the gold market and systematically liquidated livestock; whereas, now they are on a quest to provide "free" health care and fixed wage levels. The means may be different but the ends will remain the same. If the polls can be believed, people yearn for even more state-financed ventures, and our self-promoting legislators will be only too happy to give it to them. After seven years of George W. Bush's Grand Old Spending party, our voters appear more receptive than ever to the idea of perpetual government expansion; an outcome which is as depressing as it is disastrous.
Showing reviews 6-10 of 306
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