The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

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The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

3.84 of 5 stars 3.84 · rating details · 2,118 ratings · 437 reviews

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.

Hardcover, 464 pages

Published June 1st 2007 by Jonathan Cape

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May 14, 2013 Camille rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: business, economics, history, politics

This was a wonderful history of the Great Depression from a policy-making/political standpoint. It really illustrates that if the politicians would have stuck to free market principles the Great Depression would not have been so great. But instead, they jumped on the Soviet bandwagon and tried to implement Socialist programs. FDR relied on advisers that visited the USSR and saw the sanitized version of Communism that Stalin wanted them to see; they even visited with Stalin!

It destroys the myth...more

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Nov 11, 2010 Jim rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: history, weep-for-the-trees-it-took, politics-and-society, non-fiction

An examination of the Great Depression by a fiscal conservative. This book has been avidly read within Republican circles, and ideas from the book are lacing GOP rhetoric on the faltering economy. That's a shame, as the book is an example of very sloppy scholarship.

Shlaes's main thrust is that Franklin Roosevelt's policies served to worsen the Depression. She explains that the flurry of New Deal policies, fired by FDR's hostility to business, created a chaotic environment in which business was...more

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Sep 15, 2012 Mike (the Paladin) rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history

I encourage the reading of this book. When I was in school we all came away with a certain vision or narrative of/about the period known as "the Great Depression". It was a fairly simple view. FDR was the "hero" who led us through the depression and out the other end. Frankly I don't know what children/young people today come away with as I'm not that thrilled with what passes for education now. I doubt however it would be that different.

My parents and grandparents having lived through that era...more I encourage the reading of this book. When I was in school we all came away with a certain vision or narrative of/about the period known as "the Great Depression". It was a fairly simple view. FDR was the "hero" who led us through the depression and out the other end. Frankly I don't know what children/young people today come away with as I'm not that thrilled with what passes for education now. I doubt however it would be that different.

My parents and grandparents having lived through that era (as did my great grandparents and others I know growing up) did not hold quite as monolithic an opinion as that...though my dad a "died in the wool" Democrat pretty much did. Being a reader from an early age I knew early on that the view I'd been taught was simplistic. I've recently come to the conclusion it was simply wrong.

This book admittedly can be a bit of a chore to read through at times as it builds on facts, quotes and documented evidence. It covers pretty much the entire period of the "Great Depression" looking at policies, programs, people, plans and events giving a fairly comprehensive view of that period, the people in it and the "New Deal" polices. I don't think today we realize how nation changing the laws enacted and the actions taken during that time were.

The only reason I give this book a 4 star rating instead of a 5 is that the ground it covers and the amount of information it throws makes it difficult to manage. Concentrate on it. See where it's going and where we as a nation have been. It's there.

The events here will at times sound very familiar to you if you follow the political and legal landscape in America. Roosevelt was a president who was beloved by the majority of the press corps. They did by-in-large line up behind and even offer cover for him. They attacked his opponents (and sadly there were few articulate opponents to be found). If you read this and compare the actions taken (and let me say that I know the majority of those actions were taken because the majority of the people supporting them wanted to make life better for the "forgotten men") changed America fundamentally from what it was, at least in some ways.

There's a quote in this book that reminded me of a quote I read elsewhere (and the author here did not point this out it was just something I remembered). There's a quote here from someone who was asked if they weren't "losing their liberty." They answered that if they were, "the liberty they were losing was the liberty to starve."

Have you read William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany ? In it there's a quote from a German worker after Hitler has taken power. He was asked if "they (the German people)hadn't lost their freedom." His answer? He said, "they were no longer free to starve." (less)

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Jan 11, 2009 Brian rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This was a tremendously informative book about the Great Depression. For me, at least, it debunked a lot of the myths about the New Deal and Roosevelt's first one hundred days in office. I felt Amity Shlaes did a monumental and extremely thorough job of researching the economic history of this era.

Having recently read up to 1940 in David Kennedy's "Freedom from Fear," I had begun to understand why the business community greatly disliked the Roosevelt Administration. I had always been curious ab...more

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Mar 25, 2008 Doran Barton rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Alright, I promised before I would deliver a review of the book, The Forgotten Man by Amity Schlaes. You can get this book from Amazon.com.

The Forgotten Man is a look at the events of the Great Depression in the United States during the 1930s from the perspective of policy. I found it to be a fascinating look into the lives and viewpoints of people who were involved in the landmark political events during this decade.

The book begins in 1927. Floods in the midwest caused widespread damage through...more

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Aug 03, 2008 Rebecca rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: voters, history buffs

Shelves: reference-books, books-i-own

Readable but a little dense--it's never taken me 3 weeks to read 400 pages before. This sounds like the kind of book that would only be of interest to a history nerd, but with the current situation it's an absolutely imperative read for all voters. We're all fed one version of the Depression and the New Deal as inevitable and necessary, respectively, and that war was the only thing that shocked us out of it. Reading this book forces you to realize that the Depression didn't have to be either Gre...more

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Aug 22, 2007 ck40579 rated it 1 of 5 stars Recommends it for: few

“[W]hen wages moved ahead, profits narrowed and shareholders lost.” (Shlaes 337) Essentially if capitalism is to fulfill itself, and ‘succeed’, wages must be suppressed. Amazing what you can learn from a conservative screed that simplifies the Depression into Hoover did too little and Roosevelt went over the top. The Forgotten Man also completely forgets to talk about the forgotten man. If you want to read a ton about the minutia of who was involved with a cornucopia of public and fiscal policy,...more

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Aug 09, 2011 Gary Null added it · review of another edition

This book provides a fresh, new look at the events leading up to the Great Depression and the government’s attempts to bring the country back from disaster. The author not only reviews the events, but also the players, on both the government and private sector sides of the story.

Like a lot of issues, the Great Depression was a lot more complex than we are led to believe. And the recovery, too, was a slow and painstaking process, and was not just a matter of “spending our way back to prosperity.”...more

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Mar 18, 2009 Kimberly rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Excellent book. This is not a quick read but it is excellent. Amity Shlaes wrote this prescient book in 2006. It is eery to read about depressed home values, anti-Wall Street sentiment, tax increases, increased government, job loss, and it all takes place in the 1930's.

Shlaes gives interesting details about the personalities of the men and women who influenced FDR. She describes the policies put in place that expanded government and alienated business covering 1927 through 1940 without too many...more

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Feb 08, 2009 Billy rated it 2 of 5 stars

This 2007 history, written by a nut-job libertarian, tells the story of the “forgotten man,” the businessman and workers who were “trying to get along without public relief and has been attempting the same thing since the depression that cracked down on him.” (13) These forgotten men funded government programs through sales and property taxes but struggled as their tax dollars helped to expand the government’s size and influence in the marketplace. Shlaes’ account is informed by libertarian bend...more This 2007 history, written by a nut-job libertarian, tells the story of the “forgotten man,” the businessman and workers who were “trying to get along without public relief and has been attempting the same thing since the depression that cracked down on him.” (13) These forgotten men funded government programs through sales and property taxes but struggled as their tax dollars helped to expand the government’s size and influence in the marketplace. Shlaes’ account is informed by libertarian bend. She argues that many of the problems of the 1930s were extended, and not assuaged, by policymakers who continually interfered with markets. Her analysis is sympathetic with that of Robert Higgs’s Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies of Political Economy, that the shifting New Deal agencies and policies created an air of uncertainty that slowed recovery. She mistakenly equates Keynesian policy with New Deal methods, a comparison made all too readily by many historians; yet the comparison is false. New Deal spending never approached the levels suggested by Keynes—it took WWII for such expenditures to occur. Because New Deal programs were primarily funded by tax revenues—the central argument to Shales’ book—deficit spending remained modest. Shales also vilifies Hoover as an busybody and bureaucratic-perfectionist that would not leave the market to correct itself. His most glaring mistake was the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930. OU’s own Alfred Eckes, himself a self-proclaimed conservative, refutes this oversimplification. Smoot-Hawley did not increase American tariffs to their highest levels (far from it). It did increase tariffs on 1/3 of American imports but for the other 2/3s, this level remained near constant. Macroeconomic pressures, and not the tariff itself, contributed to the Great Depression.
Shlaes’s arguments side with business, not government. Her arguments are persuasive at times. For example, her discussion of Wendell Wilkie’s struggle to grow his electric utility industry in the Tennessee Valley have some merit. The TVA finally bought Wilkie out and in the process provided electricity for the Tennessee Valley, thereby increasing the role of the federal government over individual states. Simultaneously, this move helped to federalize infrastructure. Arguments that Wilkie may have done the same but more efficiently may have some merit, although, of course, bureaucratization—a term often equated with inefficiency—has its roots in the corporate business structure, not big government. Finally, Shales’s economic analysis is in lock-step with a later Conservative leader, Ronald Reagan. Ironically, however, Shales fails to recognize the psychological effect FDR had on the nation, one literally cowering with economic fear. Reagan gave America a similar psychological boost some fifty years later. Noting that FDRs popularity and goodwill may have had more effects on the American populous than can be measured with hard economic data would have made this book more well rounded. To emphasize this book’s clear inclination towards conservative economics, one National Review, er, review, called The Forgotten Man “the finest history of the Great Depression ever written.” Shales’s conservative bend is best on display when taking considerable time and effort to paint a bleary picture of would-be new dealers and brain-trusters as communist sympathizers. This opinion is based on a trip to Stalinist Russia before these ivy-leaguers came into office.
Shales argues with nearly every FDR sympathizer in the academy, of which there are many. Specifically, she contests David Kennedy’s arguments that FDR paved the way for the way American government would look in the near future, and that Roosevelt’s programs increased infrastructure dramatically.
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Jan 25, 2009 Jim rated it 1 of 5 stars

a miserable little book. from its subtitle, you might imagine it has something to do with the great depression. its not actually a history of the depression at all. instead, its an intertwined biography of a set of variably prominent public features from the 1930's. rather than reading about the lives of the millions of jobless, homeless and dispossessed you'll be treated to paeans to the unjust suffering of andrew mellon at the hands of heartless new dealers. rather than learning how new deal e...more a miserable little book. from its subtitle, you might imagine it has something to do with the great depression. its not actually a history of the depression at all. instead, its an intertwined biography of a set of variably prominent public features from the 1930's. rather than reading about the lives of the millions of jobless, homeless and dispossessed you'll be treated to paeans to the unjust suffering of andrew mellon at the hands of heartless new dealers. rather than learning how new deal economic policies effected actual americans, you'll find endless references to businessman who were frustrated by their failure to extend their benificence more widely by overreaching tax policy. the book is nothing more than a collection of disorganized, imprecisely argued, undersupported spasms of disdain directed at the new deal.

as far as i can tell, the cast of characters the author has chosen were selected primarily on whether she was able to select unflattering (although typically insignificant) fdr anecdotes by including them. the book is written in a snide style - constantly sniping at the apparent villains of the new deal - variously demonized as being mean, self-absorbed, communist-sympathizers who were engaged in a monstrous power grab at the cost of all else. funny how they kept getting reelected.

in terms of the author's primary themes, however, her greatest failure is that she doesn't remotely demonstrate that the new deal didn't work. prior to the war, fdr presided over a 50% fall in unemployment and a doubling of the dow all the while the material circumstances of the poor and middle class improved significantly. certainly, 1939 wasn't the greatest of american times, but it was a heck of a lot better than 1931. you might imagine that a book whose afterword bemoans the exaggerated successes of the new deal, would carefully describe the relevant economic changes and point to the temporal relationships between economic policy and output. you would, of course, be wrong. the author's economic analysis instead involves frequent off the cuff comments about how new deal taxes "choked" business, how roosevelt's "experimentation" caused markets to remain unstable and generally how big government kept big business down. those things may or may not be true, but you'll not glean any insight into their truth reading this book.

apparently, modern conservatives have failed to learn the lesson that largely generated fdr's pre-war popularity - economic success and failure is not measured by gdp growth or the dow, instead its measured by the relative well-being of the population. while certainly, numerous new deal policies were either ineffective, counter-productive or constitutionally questionable - their immediate goals of improving lives is what counted both politically and economically. i get the feeling the real purpose of this book was to unearth some new anti-new deal talking points to hold off a grand government revival in the context of our modern reprisal of the great depression.

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Dec 21, 2008 fred rated it 5 of 5 stars

History is not static. Well, the events have happened and that can't change but what we can or have learned from it are as fluid as anyone can relate to them. Viet Nam was a failure, or Viet Nam was a necessary war, I've heard both analysis defended equally strongly. That is just an easy one to use, imagine something as loaded with events as the 20's and 30's. When I was a child the party line was that the depression was caused by the bad 20's and we were merely paying the price from our bad (my...more

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Apr 02, 2013 Darren Sapp rated it 4 of 5 stars

Liberals call this book revisionist history while conservatives suggest this period of history deserves not only a new look but possible revision. True history and evaluation should rely on real data. In fact, we don't know exactly what moved the country out of the depression. Has our country recovered from economic downturns in the past without massive Federal programs? Yes. Can massive programs sometimes influence our economy? Sure. Is it possible that some New Deal programs prolonged the depr...more

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Nov 10, 2012 Ilya rated it 3 of 5 stars

In any high school or college course on American history, the chapter on the Great Depression goes roughly as follows. The late 1920s saw the stock market, devoid of modern regulation, inflate in a bubble. In October 1929 the bubble popped, which caused deflation. In 1930, President Herbert Hoover signed into law the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, disregarding the petition of 1,028 economists to veto it, which ruined the foreign trade of the United States. The unemployment rate quickly rose from aroun...more In any high school or college course on American history, the chapter on the Great Depression goes roughly as follows. The late 1920s saw the stock market, devoid of modern regulation, inflate in a bubble. In October 1929 the bubble popped, which caused deflation. In 1930, President Herbert Hoover signed into law the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, disregarding the petition of 1,028 economists to veto it, which ruined the foreign trade of the United States. The unemployment rate quickly rose from around 5% to nearly 20%; industrial production plummeted; thousands of banks failed. Convinced that Hoover could not deal with the crisis, in 1932 voters elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt President. In a "New Deal" with the nation, Roosevelt rapidly increased the size and power of the Federal Government, and created an entire alphabet soup of government agencies, at first trying to fight deflation by paying farmers not to plant crops or destroying harvested crops (ironically, while people went hungry, though at no time did Americans starve to death en masse like their Soviet contemporaries) or forcing companies not to undercut their competition. Even after this was judged unconstitutional, there were still public works agencies, which hired the unemployed by the million to plant trees, dredge lakes, build dams including the gigantic Grand Coulee Dam. The government also passed several pieces of legislation and created several institutions that ensured a larger role of the government in the lives of the Americans than ever before: the Social Security Act provided pensions for the elderly and the disabled; the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation insured banks against failure; the Securities and Exchange Commission worked to prevent stock market bubbles like the one that triggered the Depression. Except for the blip of the 1937-1938 recession, unemployment was steadily going down and the GDP steadily going up, until Pearl Harbor forced the first almost to zero, and the second almost to double.

Shlaes's book does not dispute these basic facts. It gives them a human face. In 1934, four Brooklyn brothers who owned a kosher chicken butcher shop were arrested for violating the National Industrial Recovery Act; among other things, they were charged with competing unfairly by allowing their customers to pick the chickens they wanted slaughtered. The brothers' lawyer took their case all the way to the Supreme Court, who in 1935 ruled in their favor: Congress had no authority to allow government regulators of the poultry industry or any other industry to write law: if there is a national emergency such as an economic depression, change the Constitution, do not go around it. In 1937 Roosevelt wanted to appoint more justices to the court who would be more compliant, but faced so much public opposition that he dropped the plan. Nowadays of course there is much more government regulation of the economy that was ever dreamed of in the 1930s. At Casa Grande, Arizona there was an attempt to resettle around 50 families to a collective farm. The attempt failed. At a time of deflation, many communities in the United States issued scrip, or private banknotes. Many farmworkers and people in the service industries such as barbers worked for scrip; they would rather work for U.S. dollars, but working for scrip was better than not working at all. There was even a scrip restaurant in Salt Lake City that only functioned in daylight because the power company would not accept scrip.

Shlaes quotes a radio address by FDR that promised that the New Deal would reach "the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid" who may have lost his job and his home. Instead, she says, FDR and his Congressional allies built up several constituencies which have been the mainstay of the Democratic Party ever since: unionized workers were given the Wagner Act, which increased the rights of unions; African Americans were specifically targeted in the work-relief programs (what of Social Security? Nowadays most elderly Americans vote Republican; was it also true back then?); an American who does not belong to any of these constituencies is the real forgotten man. This is the standard American conservative narrative; I was not at all surprised to read it. Did the New Deal really help FDR's forgotten man? At the beginning of each chapter Shlaes gives the unemployment rate and the Dow Jones Industrial Average for each year before and during the Depression. The DJIA was probably not as important in those pre-401(k) days as it is today, and the unemployment rate specifically does not count people employed by the work-relief programs. This is unfair; the Holland Tunnel was dug in the 1920s by the States of New Jersey and New York, and the Lincoln Tunnel in the 1930s by the New Deal's Public Works Administration; what was so different between them that the workers digging the former should be counted as employed, but not those digging the latter?(less)

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May 22, 2012 Michael Connolly rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviewed, revisionist-history

This is a history of the Great Depression written from a pro-capitalism perspective. However, it does not read like a right-wing polemic. That makes it all the more insidious (heh, heh, heh). One of the issues Shlaes discusses is the gold standard. During the Great Depression, the federal government took several actions to weaken the gold standard. The most famous was the order that private citizens were no longer allowed to own gold, except in very small amounts, such as jewelry. Everyone had t...more

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Mar 25, 2011 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shlaes uses William Graham Sumner's "forgotten man" to expose the problems with FDR's New Deal. To paraphrase Sumner, A sees the plight of X and says to B, "Let's pass some legislation to help X," and C gets the bill. Sumner wrote about C: "He works, he votes, generally he prays - but he always pays - yes, above all, he pays." The identity of A is the progressives and B is Congress. It is laudable that A wants to help X but tinkering with the economy at the expense of C only exacerbates the prob...more

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Dec 12, 2010 Scott Martin rated it 4 of 5 stars

A good and objective overview of the times of the Great Depression and the impact of the New Deal. While the New Deal had things that did work, it was not quite the cure all that history can sometimes make it seem. There was a great deal of politics behind it, and it is interesting to get the perspectives on Hoover and Roosevelt. What is interesting about Hoover is that when he was elected, if a Depression was to happen, you would have figured him as a top draft pick to fix that problem. However...more

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Nov 07, 2010 James rated it 1 of 5 stars

Somewhat of a disappointment,
the book is mostly about the political infighting that occurred in Washington DC.
A thousand names of long forgotten bureaucrats.

The title refers to the American people,
but ironically the book is about the "forgotten" bureaucrats.

I did learn that in 1923 the supreme court ruled that minimum wage laws were unconstitutional.
They interfered with the relationship of a worker and his employer.

A latter group of politicians sitting on the high court changed that.
One mo...more

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Sep 05, 2010 David rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: american-history, sociology, economics

This was an interesting if a little unfocused book. Generally it was critical of FDR's erratic attacks on business and his tendency to jump from issue to issue with no clear agenda. The book also attacks the 'Brain Trust' and other intellectuals that were so prevalent in FDR's first term.

The final, vague, conclusion is that academics, anti-business interests (left leaning liberals), and an unfocused administration deepened and lengthened the depression.

Shlaes also acknowledges the issue of tarif...more

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Jul 21, 2010 Clif rated it 3 of 5 stars

I've decided 3 stars for me will mean a book that I enjoy but that I wouldn't pester others to read.

The Forgotten Man is about the Great Depression but not from the standpoint of the average Joe. For that story, see my review of The Worst Hard Times. This is a story of those at the top who either made the decisions on how to handle the Depression through policy or opposed them. The man that the title refers to is the one who is eager to take a risk in order to get a reward, the "adventurer" as t...more I've decided 3 stars for me will mean a book that I enjoy but that I wouldn't pester others to read.

The Forgotten Man is about the Great Depression but not from the standpoint of the average Joe. For that story, see my review of The Worst Hard Times. This is a story of those at the top who either made the decisions on how to handle the Depression through policy or opposed them. The man that the title refers to is the one who is eager to take a risk in order to get a reward, the "adventurer" as the author refers to him.

The New Deal of FDR started out with more than a passing glance to the work of Mussolini in Italy and Stalin in the USSR. Big, powerful, take-charge government was the talk of the world and American entrepreneurial Capitalism looked like a potential failure.

Shlaes shows us how the first attempt of the New Deal to grab control and order everything around that it could was knocked out by the ruling of the Supreme Court that certain methods (such as the NRA, the National Recovery Administration) were un-constitutional. But, creative politician that he was, FDR re-designed things to center on building constituencies such as the farmers and the unions.

The many twists and turns of the New Deal kept the country's attention, providing big action when the nation was groping for any new direction.

Shlaes is fair to all parties. She contends that the New Deal was greatly over-rated in what it did to revive the economy but she doesn't hesitate to praise the leadership abilities of Roosevelt and the liabilities of the Republican party platform of the time.

There are side stories - of the guy who started Alcoholics Anonymous and Father Devine, an African-American leader in New York, but I got the feeling she included these to keep the book from being too dry and focusing too much on the elite. The story of Andrew Mellon and Wendell Willkie show us the rich can be decent folks, too. This non-fiction defense of the freedom of the individual is far better than the beating over the head we get with Ayn Rand and shows remarkable restraint for someone who was once on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal.

The Forgotten Man is an appropriate read after living through the government spending binge that we've seen in the last two years. The same issues are involved. Bernanke's huge government debt increase is a direct result of what he believes were lessons learned from the policies of the Great Depression, so clearly presented by this book.

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Jul 17, 2010 Deedee rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: daily-show-colbert-report

This book is marketed as "A History", when in fact, it is a pro-right-wing set of talking points. The right/conservative wing in American politics has never liked FDR or his policies. They didn't like FDR in 1932 or 1940 or 1950 or 1960 or any day of any year since the day FDR got the Democratic nomination for the presidency. The author, Amity Shales, trained as a journalist. Her job before writing this book was as a Wall Street Journal editorial writer. The book she has written is best seen as...more

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Mar 21, 2010 John rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a somewhat polarizing book, being a more conservative look at the 1930s that does not provide the usual enthusiastic view of FDR and the New Deal that one gets in school and mainstream media. And unlike the rash of "people's histories" that are so prevalent now, it doesn't focus on the "common man" during the depression.

Shlaes looks at the backgrounds and policies of Roosevelt, Hoover, Willkie, and many of the members of Roosevelt's brain trust. I enjoyed the fresh look at the era and th...more

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Dec 20, 2009 Andrew Skretvedt rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The book/audiobook opens with a vibrant vignette from first-person accounts, told from the perspective of the folks living through the events. This very much excited me for the rest of the book, leading me to expect the same, novel first-person perspective throughout. Oh how let down I was when I realized that the book's opening vignette would be the ONLY time such a visceral perspective would be used.
Shlaes proceeds to tell a rather rather tedious tale of the events of the depression from the p...more The book/audiobook opens with a vibrant vignette from first-person accounts, told from the perspective of the folks living through the events. This very much excited me for the rest of the book, leading me to expect the same, novel first-person perspective throughout. Oh how let down I was when I realized that the book's opening vignette would be the ONLY time such a visceral perspective would be used.
Shlaes proceeds to tell a rather rather tedious tale of the events of the depression from the primary figures who were in the positions of power to affect events. I'm not a Depression scholar, but I was left with a feeling that this telling was hardly the "new history" presentation of events it claimed to be.
I persevered through it for the sake of a genuine interest in getting to know my history better, but I found myself feeling very detached from the telling and rather ambivalent toward most of the people involved. That opening vignette led me to believe I was about to experience the plight of more ordinary Americans, through their own eyes, perhaps enlightened by some first person accounts from those famous Depression-era figures the book chose to focus exclusively upon. Instead of experiencing the store and feeling it viscerally through the telling, I was "told" the story by the author of a history book. That's not nearly so much fun.
Shlaes handle on the economics of the Depression and how public policy helped or hurt the situation left much to be desired and was at times infuriatingly misguided from my humble perspective. Since reading Murray Rothbard's, "The Mystery of Banking", I've been an avid amateur scholar of the system of economic theory known as the Austrian-School.
This book, which enjoyed much favorable press from pop-conservative/pop-libertarian media, and Glenn Beck in particular...well, I was expecting it to present the economic picture through an Austro-Libertarian lens. Nope.

For me it begs the question, "Why did Glenn Beck like it so much?"

2-stars for its entirely valid worth as a source of historical information, which could've been more if it had only been fresh, entertaining, or economically sound.(less)

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Oct 23, 2009 Jason rated it 4 of 5 stars

Revisionist history at its best
This is the story of a power struggle, not between good and evil, but between two parts of the United State economy, with a mix of good and evil that affected results and motivation. The struggle was between the public and private sector for an 11 year period between 1929 and 40. By the end, the dominance of the public sector was assured. The Forgotten Man is an new attempt to understand why the 1930’s were an economic disaster for the United States, why the Great...more Revisionist history at its best
This is the story of a power struggle, not between good and evil, but between two parts of the United State economy, with a mix of good and evil that affected results and motivation. The struggle was between the public and private sector for an 11 year period between 1929 and 40. By the end, the dominance of the public sector was assured. The Forgotten Man is an new attempt to understand why the 1930’s were an economic disaster for the United States, why the Great Depression lasted 11 years, and why it was great in the USA, when it was a mere Depression in other parts of the industrialized world. It is also the story of over 20 characters whom played a role in this power struggle, who range from mere innocent victim, to a twisted actor in the struggle.

Amity Shales, an economic historian and writer, has attempted a revisionist history of the best sort. Her aims are to reassess the assumptions that have gathered around the Great Depression time period, including ideological motivations that are themselves revisionist history. Her method, focusing on individual characters like Mellon, Tugwell, Ickes, Wilkie and Roosevelt in order to show how a thousand small choices, often barely understood at the time, led to events that were really unforeseen. What Roosevelt understood was the power of government to systematically reorganize people and economy. What his opponents did not really grasp was how to appeal to people outside of individual self interest.

Shales hammered home in this book the high unemployment rate that never went down, throughout the 1930’s, and that the stock market did not go back to 1929 levels until the mid 1950’s. Economic downturns building on themselves, and the power of government intervention to suck out available capital from businesses that wanted to grow greatly slowed any attempt for investors, small and large. The rise of the TVA, and how it effectively shut down the nascent private power distribution and generation, and why that became publicly popular in the Southern states demonstrates as well as anything else in this book why time after time, the public came to believe that centralized government direction was better than decentralized action, even on the state level.

The rise of appealing to special interest groups, from seniors, to ethnic minorities, to certain economic workers, in a systemized way from the top level of government, was something new and radical in American history. This is where the forgotten man came from, that the very idea of liberal changed from an individual out on his own, to groups, which needed centralized government planning to survive.

What really sets this book apart is the way it emphases not necessarily the struggle between the public and the private sector, but its effects on the forgotten ones, the members of society who had no political constituency, who had no real work, but became largely pawns. The American economy was truly nationalized at this time, so instead of forgotten people being part of a local community’s struggle, their numbers seemed to increase, and they always increased, exponentially.

The writing here is engaging, and it does flow well. Some have criticized the side characters of the book, people like the Al Sharpton-like Father Divine, or the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, but those characters are the point really, beyond the machinations of Roosevelt. How leaders arose, usually unsuccessfully, to speak for the forgotten men, is really the story of this book. The central representative of the forgotten men was Wendall Wilkie, a power company executive who grew to oppose Roosevelt and the New Deal. Wilkie’s role, and why it failed, across the 30’s could have been fleshed out a bit more, but otherwise the point was made. Shales’s work is highly recommend for anyone, especially in 2009, who is trying to understand the role that an experimental public sector has on forces that a centralized state cannot possibly understand.
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Jul 31, 2011 Dan Walker rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

What I learned from this book was how FDR's "braintrust" was primarily made up of "fellow travelers" - people who were sympathetic to Communism and admired Stalin. These people were the source of so much of the "New Deal." Ideas such as shareholder value were ephemeral to them - they destroyed an estimated $500M by expanding the TVA and stealing market share from the shareholder-owned utilities. Fortunately the Supreme Court invalidated much of what was done and people began to recognize the los...more

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Dec 07, 2009 Paul Aslanian rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a timely book to read. The author takes us by the hand through the late 20's, the 30's and spills into the 40's. Each chapter starts out with the date, the unemployment rate, and the Dow Jones average. Laced into these chapters in a facinating story of the actions and thoughts of the policy makers, advisors, and the presidents (Hoover and Roosevelt) during this awful time. One learns that cynisism was not invented in the 60's. If one is interested in macro economics, policy tools, populi...more

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Sep 30, 2009 Peter Namtvedt rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: student of economics and of American history

I begin with clues about the title.

Seven months before the presidential election of 1932, the man who would turn out to be the winner spoke these words:

These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.
-Gov. FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT OF...more

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Jan 03, 2009 Brendan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: american-history

This book had the potential to be great, given the subject matter and the timeliness. The thesis is that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the New Deal did not end the Great Depression and in fact did much to exacerbate it. The first part is uncontroversial. I think everyone agrees that WWII, not the New Deal, ended the Depression. the second part is interesting: Shlaes does show how some programs were harmful and ideologically driven, and probably did more harm than good in terms of ending...more

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Nov 13, 2012 Mick rated it 1 of 5 stars

Whenever George Will calls any book a must read, I know exactly what to expect. As an alternative narrative to the Great Depression, it's worth the read. The "Forgotten Man" is still overlooked, however. The critiques of liberalism are noteworthy and worth pondering; but the underlying argument - which casts a pall on intellectualism (ironically using a high academic tone that does a poor job of trying to sound unbiased) and relies on the same old Randian stereotypes of poverty, the poor, and th...more

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Apr 10, 2011 Marks54 rated it 2 of 5 stars

I was very disappointed by the book, but is based on a play on words between a reference to the poor or the middle class in the name "forgotten man". There are, of course, bases for both references. The point here is to argue that the policies of the New Deal made what would have been a typical recession much worse and turned it into a depression. A highlight is that retrenchment and budget balancing of 1937, which appeared to lead to a double dip depression that was not relieved until WWII. The...more

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About Amity Shlaes

Amity Shlaes graduated from Yale University magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1982.

Shlaes wrote columns for the Financial Times for five years, until September, 2005. Earlier, she worked at the Wall Street Journal, where she was a member of the editorial board.

Presently, Shlaes writes a syndicated column for Bloomberg News. She is a senior fellow in economic history at the Cou...more

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“Who is the forgotten man...? I know him as intimately as my own undershirt. He is the fellow that is trying to get along without public relief... In the meantime the taxpayers go on supporting many that would not work if they had jobs.” — 3 people liked it

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