The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

by Amity Shlaes

book data

389 ratings, 3.76 average rating, 190 reviews (more data...)

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4		40%
3		23%
2		7%
1		3%

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published

June 1st 2008 (first published 2007) by Harper Perennial

binding

Paperback, 512 pages

isbn

0060936428 (isbn13: 9780060936426)

description

In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes, one of the nation's most-respected economic commentators, offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depress

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01/23/08

Camille rated it:

(review of isbn 022406312X)

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 advisors that visited the USSR and saw the sanitized version of Communism that Stalin wanted them to see they even visited with Stalin!

It destroy...more

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01/11/09

Brian rated it:

Read in January, 2009

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 ...more

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03/25/08

Doran Barton rated it:

(review of isbn 0066211700)

Read in September, 2007

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 wides...more

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5 comments

03/09/08

Rebecca rated it:

(review of isbn 0066211700)

bookshelves: reference-books

Read in August, 2008

recommends it for: voters, history buffs

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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08/22/07

ck40579 rated it:

(review of isbn 022406312X)

Read in August, 2007

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 fi...more

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03/18/09

Kimberly rated it:

Read in February, 2009

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...more

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02/08/09

Billy rated it:

(review of isbn 022406312X)

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 li...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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01/25/09

Jim rated it:

(review of isbn 022406312X)

Read in January, 2009

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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12/21/08

Drake rated it:

(review of isbn 022406312X)

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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12/01/08

Tim rated it:

(review of isbn 022406312X)

bookshelves: currently-reading

Read in October, 2008

recommended to Tim by: headbutler.com

A fascinating, deeply flawed account of the Great Depression. I bought this on the recommendation of headbutler.com, and while I'm enjoying it, I'm finding myself astonished at its bold partisanship and resultant revisionist history. It seemed a bit odd to read the glowing praise of the 1920s not as a period of speculative excess but of great, misunderstood industrialists. The unease got worse when the future members of Roosevelt's cabinet were collectively referred to as "the intellectu...more

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02/08/09

Matthew rated it:

bookshelves: historical

Read in February, 2009

recommends it for: people who still like to moon over Ayn Rand.

Blech. A free-market fundamentalist screed that, so far as I can tell, condemns every aspect of the New Deal (and even Hoover's presidency) that expanded federal power. I am particularly irritated by this "Forgotten Man" that Shlaes conjures up as the party most hurt by the New Deal, a figure that is one-fifth real small businessman and four-fifths mythological amalgam of Daniel Boone and Howard Roarke.

I dislike the anecdotal and narrative cast to the book, which spends mor...more

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12/26/08

Brendan rated it:

(review of isbn 022406312X)

Read in December, 2008

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 end...more

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04/23/09

Davidmcdonnell rated it:

(review of isbn 022406312X)

Read in September, 2008

Thorough history of the people and events leading up to and throughout the Great Depression. Author argues for free markets throughout book, taking issue with both Republican and Democrat policies that obstructed free trade. These included protectionist tariffs, public utilities where government subsidizes made a public-private cost comparison difficult, and programs involving collectivization. FDR is portrayed as a president with a strong grasp of creating dependent constituencies (farmers, ...more

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04/07/09

Susan rated it:

(review of isbn 022406312X)

bookshelves: advisory-books-08-09

Read in February, 2009

I like the book because it taught me more about people who are policymakers who wanted to fight for a aquedate economy. In this story, the plot takes place during the 1930s around the time of the Great Depression. At the time, many people suffered from poverty and hunger. The narrative of the story talked about how women and men were struggling with maintaining a stability economy in America. Also, in the book, it talked about the situation at the time of the The Great Depression. Many people ei...more

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03/06/09

Roger rated it:

(review of isbn 022406312X)

Read in March, 2009

The Forgotten Man gives a new perspective to the New Deal and Roosevelt's programs and his fights with the business community and the wealthy. Gives you insights on the actions of Roosevelt and his advisors. Was Roosevelt and his advisors really doing social experiments? Did Roosevelt's personality overshadow his programs and made the country feel "better" than what the country was experiencing economically? Ms. Shlaes believes that the New Deal failed in large part because of Roos...more

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01/28/09

Mark rated it:

(review of isbn 022406312X)

Read in February, 2009

This book provides a fresh look at FDR's administration and policies during the great depression. In school I was taught the FDR and the New Deal brought an end to the depression. This book reveals that this couldn't be further from the truth. The economy was arguably in a worse position as a result of the New Deal and did not actually recovery until the beginning of World War II. The author portrays FDR as a tinkerer, surrounded by socialists and idealists, constantly experimenting with the...more

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11/08/08

Craig rated it:

(review of isbn 0066211700)

bookshelves: economics, philosophy, politics

Read in November, 2008

recommends it for: Folks interested in the underlying stakes of today's financial crisis

The subject matter of this book is particularly relevant to the financial crisis facing currently facing the United States and many the world markets.

This book makes a anecdotal arguments not against government involvement during an economic crisis, but against government intervention that destroys private value, efficiency, and initiative in the name of experimentation.

The book focuses on FDRs New Deal experimentation, and how the experimentation held a "throw thing...more

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01/24/09

Melanie rated it:

(review of isbn 022406312X)

bookshelves: non-fiction

Read in January, 2009

A crash course in American history from 1927-1940, this book shows the powerful impact of those we elect to lead our country. As I read about FDR's brain trust, his manipulation of the price of gold and his plan to circumvent the constitution and expand the supreme court, I saw the lasting impact of a chief executive who is set on enlarging the scope of central government. In the opposite corner from the progressives, I read about Andrew Mellon who through his founding of a National Gallery of...more

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02/14/09

Andrew rated it:

(review of isbn 022406312X)

Read in March, 2009

This is a disturbing tale of the impact of big government on the life of a nation. The author argues that FDR and the promulgators of the New Deal not only did not bring the nation out of the depression of the 1930's, they in fact prolonged it. They also laid the foundation for the major role Washington has played in the life of the people of the US since that time. Although published before the onset of the latest economic crisis,this history serves as a powerful critique of the current and pr...more

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02/01/09

Mike rated it:

Read in February, 2009

I was hoping this book would be a little better than it was. It wasn't exactly the broad history of the Great Depression I had hoped for; rather, it was a history of the Depression from the viewpoint of several key figures. I had a hard time keeping up with the giant list of who was who and found myself backtracking often. Though the book is mostly chronological, the writing is almost a little too dense, and I admit to feeling overwhelmed at times. Recommended if you're a history name-droppe...more

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