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The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

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The Oxford University Press publishes a series called "Very Short Introductions" written by authorities in their fields. The series helps to introduce busy and curious readers to a wide variety of subjects. The series numbers nearly 200 volumes and includes subjects from history, philosophy, religion, science, and the humanities. This series constitutes an admirable way for any person to learn something about new matters and to expand his or her intellectual horizons.

Eric Rauchway's recent contribution to the series, "The Great Depression & the New Deal" (2008) offers, in 130 pages, a succinct, thoughtful overview of a pivotal and controversial period of American history. Rauchway is Professor of History at the University of California Davis. His books include ""Murdering McKinley: the Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America" and "Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America." In his "Very Short Introduction" to the Depression and New Deal, Rauchway makes no pretense of offering a complete or a definitive account. Instead, he offers "some basic ideas for a first understanding of this profound crisis and America's still-influential legislative response." (p.2) Rauchway includes a good bibliography "on the principle that you will go on from here if you wish to fully appreciate the period." For the briefness of its approach, Rauchway's book offers good insight into the Depression and New Deal.

In his opening chapter, Rauchway traces the origins of the Great Depression to the world-wide collapse of the economic order following WW I, with the tensions between the creditor nation, the United States, and the debt-laden rest of the world. He discusses the uncontrolled expansion of credit in the United States and the speculation-driven rise of the stock market. On October 24, 1929, the stock market crashed and the Depression soon followed. Rauchway offers a good discussion on the relationship between the crash and the Depression.

Rauchway follows the onset of the Depression with a discussion of the steps the Hoover administration took in response. Rauchberg points out, contrary to some opinion, that Hoover took measures, particularly late in his administration, designed to get the Federal government involved in combatting the Depression. Rauchberg remains,however, highly critical of Hoover.

The bulk of this short book describes the pervasiveness of the Great Depression and the actions of both Roosevelt and Congress to both end the Depression and to try to correct structural deficiencies in the American economy to prevent such a catastrophe from happening again. Rauchberg thus divides New Deal programs into those designed to end the Depression and those designed to prevent another. He also tries to assess those programs which succeeded and those which failed. For a short book, he considers the interplay of Roosevelt's New Deal with the activities of Congress, the Supreme Court, State and local governments, businesses, and ordinary people. Rauchberg argues that as the New Deal progressed it moved to a system of strengthening outsiders to economic or political power as a means of combatting the Depression and as an alternative to statism.

Many people argue that the New Deal did not work to end the Depression. They point out that the economy exceeded its pre-1929 level only with the advent of war in 1940. Rauchberg acknowledges the crucial role of United States entry into WW II in stimulating the economy. But he argues as well that the New Deal was successful. He points out that the economy improved markedly in every year between 1932 and 1940, with the exception of a short recession in 1937. He gives Roosevelt and his programs a great deal of credit for the economic revivial and for making necessary changes which preserved the American way of life.

Rauchberg concludes that the New Deal was a collection of many different programs and ideas some of which conflicted with each other. The New Deal did not effect a radical change in American life but rather proceeded in a haphazard, improvisatory manner. Rauchberg concludes that "the openly experimental, obviously fallible, always compromised quality of the New Deal programs and their progeny reflected the imperfect democracy that gave them birth.... The New Deal's evident imperfection invited criticism and further tinkering, making way for improvements to the American democracy in the years afterward and yet to come."(p. 131)

Both the causes of the Great Depression and the remedies offered by the New Deal raise complex economic questions that cannot be fully described in a book of this brevity. Yet, Rauchberg has fulfilled his purpose of writing a good "very short introduction" which will encourage his readers to think further about the economic and social change wrought by the Depression and New Deal.

Robin Friedman

As a concise overview, this book is excellent. Rauchway covers the background of the Great Depression, its onset, and the major features of the New Deal in less than 130 pages of this small book. Rauchway presents the Great Depression as essentially a vicious downward economic cycle made possible by the destruction of the pre-WWI economic system, the nature of the postwar political/economic settlement, and American refusal to play the needed leadership role in postwar international affairs. This is followed by a concise description of the consequences of the depression and the inadequate response of the Hoover administration. Following the work of quite a few other historians, the New Deal is presented as a series of sometimes contradictory experiments to resuscitate the American economy, and in particular, maintain the major features of a capitalist economy. Rauchway in particularly good on the interaction, and sometimes synergy, between the economic and political goals of the successive Roosevelt administrations. Eventually, the New Deal would develop a 'countervailing power' strategy with significant regulation of the economy and use of Federal authority to empower individuals and interest groups who could oppose the power of business. With later success of the Roosevelt administrations in WWII, this approach became the basis of post-war liberal policy.
Rauchway is appropriately critical of the failings of the New Deal, some of which were unavoidable and hence inherent in the nature of the American political and social system. A important point that Rauchway omits is the background of many New Deal reforms, which were rooted in an earlier generation of Progressive era thought and reformism.
This book is written clearly and has an excellent bibliography.

The Great Depression and The New Deal is a new title from Oxford University Press in its terrific series of Very Small Introductions. This topic will draw considerable debate from those interested in the factional aspects of economic theory but the author (and I) leave that for the reader to judge for themselves.

Eric Rauchway is a Professor of History at the University of California, Davis and has done a remarkable job of putting together an interesting little book which, without pretending to present everything, covers this remarkable period with both old an new perspectives.

Starting with the end of The Great War, Rauchway goes into the boom time of the Roaring 20's and into the Wall St Crash of 1929. He points to excessive levels of cheap credit and high levels of debt as a major factor in the impact the Crash had on America, which parallels the present Global financial Crisis.

Efforts by the Hoover administration to contain the effects failed and by the time Roosevelt took office in 1933, unemployment stood at around 25%. With a clear mandate and a major crisis on his hands, Roosevelt and his crew acted swiftly and instituted a series of reforms to stabilise the problem in order that it could be acted upon. To do this he took on the banks and brokers in defiance of those who considered him a traitor to his class. Many would have seen it the other way around but it was a brave move anyway you look at it and it had to be done.

The book goes on to describe many of the programs such as the CCC and CWA which took on so many of America's unemployed. Purists will argue that this didn't solve any problems but that point of view fails to take into account the fact that these programs had three positive effects. Firstly, they helped to prevent the population from starving. Secondly, they prevented many people from turning to crime and thirdly, they built an enormous amount of infrastructure, ranging from dams to dog pounds.

Rauchway doesn't argue that these programs were without their shortcomings and illustrates how some were directly open to corruption but he does argue - and for what it's worth, I agree - that the US was better off for having them, even if they could only ever be temporary. Unemployment fell from 24% to 9% in five years, only spiking again for the 1938 recession. The truth of it is that the economy didn't recover until wartime production took up the slack and money started moving again.

Anyone who doubts how severe the conditions of the time were would do well to think of the small shanty towns which grew up around major cities as homeless people moved around looking for work. A quarter of the population was without support. People starved to death.

This is a great little book and as good an introduction to the subject as I can imagine.

In reading this book what stands out most for me are the author's explanations of the causes of the Depression. Particularly when he talks about the fact that people were carrying a large amount of debt just before the depression. It reminds me of today and makes me wonder how we're going to get out of the present mess without WWII to bail us out.

I also found it interesting that the New Deal was a continuing series of experiments not just one project. There's a great deal here that I found new.

... or slide it into your laptop case! It's that small, and though the print is also small, it's a marvel of concision and coherence. I picked it up from a revolving rack of "Very Short Introductions" at a university bookstore, and read it just for curiosity. I was a history major, once upon a time, and I did teach history at the college level very briefly, so I didn't expect a plethora of new information or an epiphany of new interpretation. In fact, I didn't expect to be favorably impressed, but I was!

Author Eric Rauchway discusses, inter alia:
* the origin of the Great Depression in runaway debt, governmental and personal, among other causative and cyclical factors.
* the inadequacy of the initial response to the crisis, particularly by the Hoover Administration.
* the curious demographics of pre-Depression America that contributed to the problem.
* the trial-and-error "evo-devo" development of what has come to be called The New Deal. Rauchway argues that the ND was never a blue print or a "ten-year-plan" - never in fact a single plan in anybody's mind. Rather it was the outcome of often conflicted and compromised contingent responses by all branches of the government, only perceived as a whole in retrospect.
* Roosevelt's "new deal" measures did not completely END the Great Depression; it can be said that the Depression only ended when wartime preparations heated the economy to pre-depression levels. However, and importantly, the New Deal DID alleviate the distress of significant portions of the America public, especially the white 'working class', as unemployment gradually but significantly decreased from 1933 to 1939. Furthermore, the American economy grew an average of 8% per year from 1933 to 1939. Rauchway therefore argues that Roosevelt's measures were on the way to ending the depression before the war preparation kicked in.
* restoring the economy to pre-1932 levels, and particularly to pre-1932 styles and habits, was NOT the goal of Roosevelt's administration. That administration had an assortment of voices calling for changes in the economic structures of America - voices that didn't all agree - but the consensus of "New Dealers" was that change had to occur. In fact, huge changes had already occurred in the age-old structures of business -- all kinds of business, from finance to farming, and especially in the relationships of employers to employees -- during the decades before and after WW1, and the government had a stern duty to catch up with those changes.
* the key concept that evolved in FDRs New Deal was "countervailing power", principally the combination of empowerment of workers through unionization and the intervention of government on behalf of society rather than, as had always been so, on behalf of 'property'.
* the long term effects of the New Deal have been of far greater significance than the short term relief of distress.
* in stark and overly rhetorical terms, the New Deal "saved capitalism". It was quintessentially a 'conservative' patchwork, some parts of which succeeded and some of which failed utterly, but because it was an organic, evolutionary program that re-employed existing 'bits and pieces' specific to America, it emerged from WW2 as the dominant consensus of economists and politicians, a consensus that facilitated roughly 40 years of unprecedented prosperity distributed more fairly between rich and poor, urban and rural, East and West than ever before.

Okay, there's my short introduction to the Very Short Introduction. If you've not yet studied much about the 1930s, Rauchway's little book WILL get you off to a good start. If you've studied the Great Depression persistently over half your life, until you are greatly depressed by the subject, Rauchway's little book will serve you well as a review, much like sorting your old hand-written notes into a new computer format. If you are an anti-New Deal ideologue, Rauchway's little book will give you something to rant about, perhaps here on the amazon, from now until Christmas ... of 2012!

I've become completely addicted to Oxford University Press's Very Short Introduction series. I primarily get them to read at lunch (I usually read heavier books on my commute, but as I walk around doing my lunchtime chores -- yes, I read while I walk -- I like to carry these lighter books, and they make great back ups to my main book if I finish them). Just about every book that I've read in the series has been good and several of them very good. Only one or two have been bad.

This book provides a solid survey of the Great Depression and the New Deal. There have recently been a couple of exceptionally silly books that have argued that the New Deal actually extended the Great Depression. These books have done this by ignoring many of the facts and falsely attributing the 1937 recession to the New Deal rather than dramatically decreased federal spending. Rauchway neither ascribes more to the New Deal than it deserves nor denigrates it in ways that the fact will not support. He also presents a very balanced portrait of FDR. Roosevelt is perhaps my favorite president; over the years I've read nearly 30 books on his life and presidency. One of the most closely guarded secrets is that FDR was not a particularly liberal president, at least on economic matters. He had liberal ideals, in that he did not believe in trickle down theories and felt that public policy had to be crafted to benefit all Americans and not merely just a few at the top. He was actually an economic conservative, though he was also a pragmatist instead of an ideologue, which meant that he had no preconceived notions of what had to be done to help America get out of the catastrophe that has beset the nation.

The book does a fine job of highlighting many of the causes of the economic meltdown, explaining the international situation better than many such books. I think he was a bit stronger on the non-Wall Street causes, but perhaps that was intended as a corrective to many accounts that focus too heavily on the stock market. The book also does a very fine job of chronicling the alphabet soup of New Deal programs and the rationale behind each one. He also excels at explaining the nonideological character of the New Deal. In fact, the biggest opponents of the New Deal from both the Right and the Left were ideologues, who felt that on principle the crisis should be dealt with in one way or another. Roosevelt took a practical approach, trying a wide variety of things in order to ease the situation. If something didn't work, he abandoned it and tried something else. But he also strove to put into place a number of changes in our government and society that would safeguard the country from future catastrophes. Rauchway is very evenhanded in his treatment. He accurately shows Roosevelt as a president who resisted some of the larger changes instituted by Congress -- the FDIC is the most famous example -- while explains the context of some of FDR's least distinguished moments. For instance, he does a better job of explaining the context for FDR's court packing attempt, something rightfully regarded as one of his largest miscalculations. He doesn't exonerate FDR, but situates it historically and explains that other presidents, including his cousin Theodore, had contemplated similar alterations to the court. He also explains FDR's conservatism, something that many overlook. This came out in the particular way in which Social Security was funded; instead of a national pension as in all other advanced economies, we have something akin to insurance program into which we pay. He does not go into much detail into the so-called "Roosevelt Recession," which was caused when Roosevelt overestimated the health of the American economy and attempted to balance the budget too soon. As a result, the recovery was slowed down when federal spending was dramatically cut.

Many have correctly pointed out that the New Deal did not correct all of the problems created by the collapse of the economy from 1929 through 1932. Critics have usually missed the point, however. As Rauchway points out, the economy grew by between 8% to 10% nearly every year after FDR became president, a spectacular performance by any standard. The mood of the country improved dramatically with the programs that were enacted and citizens understood that the government was going to do all that it could to prevent the country from going to ruin. Unemployment, which did improve under the New Deal, would not completely recover until World War II, but there is little question that the New Deal was an effective response to the dire situation in the country.

This is a very fine introduction to the issues concerning the United States in the thirties. If one wished to delve more deeply into the subject, I would recommend William E. Leuchtenburg's FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT AND THE NEW DEAL 1932-1940. It provides a marvelous introduction to the period and the major issues involved, in greater detail than Rauchway is able to. There are also many superb biographies on FDR. There are two superb recent one-volume biographies, one by Jean Edward Smith and one by H. W. Brands. My favorite FDR biography is the stellar two-volume biography by James MacGregor Burns. There is also a superb three-volume history of the New Deal by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Of the making of great books on FDR and the New Deal, there is apparently no end.

One of my only complaints with the book is that it does not contain an annotated bibliography. One of the things that I love most about the books in this series are the bibliographies. I've bought and read a substantial number of books based on the various bibliographies in this series. I want to know the author's opinion on what I should read next. A bare list of books tells me little. This is a subject I know pretty well so I'm already familiar with a large number of the books on this subject, and David M. Kennedy's FREEDOM FROM FEAR, the Oxford History of the United States volume on this period, has a tremendous annotated bibliography. But I would have dearly loved Rauchway's opinion on what I should read next.

In 1928 the stock market crash occurs. A crisis is looming. Many see it coming but don't agree with how it should be dealt with. President Hoover wants business to cooperate and private institutions to offer charity and relief. Congress wants to pass tariffs and does, and the Federal Reserve Board restricts the money supply. All three hasten the crisis that looms by the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt becomes president.

He offers the country a New Deal that amounts to a stimulus of work projects and federal relief in the form of the FDIC, the National Labor Relations Board, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Social Security Act, and other ambitious laws and programs. Roosevelt was even skittish about so much government intrusion, but he was trying to hold the reins onto a Democratic Congress that was far more willing to go further than Roosevelt in implementing new policies. The irony is that these socialistic programs, in nature, did more to preserve capitalism rather than destroy it, according to the author.

Roosevelt was not without his antagonists and critics. Born a patrician, people in his class feel betrayed. Southerners see African Americans getting jobs in many of the work projects. They fight back with the American Liberty League declaring that the country is being overrun with communists. They sue against New Deal projects, and the Supreme Court takes their side, abolishing New Deal laws. Roosevelt fires back threatening to pack the Court with more members. While his threat backfires, the Supreme Court is sobered enough to start rendering more favorable decisions.

The New Deal ended when Roosevelt realized that the U.S. would be entering World War II. It was time to turn to building armaments, but the New Deal had a profound effect on our culture. "...Roosevelt did attempt to redistribute wealth, just not through tax policy. Instead [he] wanted the market to work more equitably, to allot to consumers and workers higher wages without government intervention." The New Deal was not a macro policy but rather incremental changes made to meet specific injustices and economic maladies. Its effects are far more reaching and lasting than its creator and advocates imagine.

The New Deal and the crisis also brought a change in attitude toward the poor and the unemployed. Poor people in this country die of starvation and exposure in ramshackle shacks built wherever they can squat. The middle class no longer sees these people as lazy or shiftless. Labor unions and collective bargaining become the norm. Yellow Dog contracts become illegal. The middle class identifies more with the poor who are no longer seen as beggars. Our cultural values shift. The Gilded Age is history.

Eric Rauchway presents information that sounds exciting; he presents it with passion when he asks the reader to imagine the number of unemployed as the same as the entire population of the New York, by 1932. This book was easy to read, and only the word "adumbrates" sent me to the dictionary. Its portability allows it to be carried easily in pocket or purse, and it is ideal for the commute. There is a handy index for ready reference. A table of all the major acts of the New Deal are listed with a citation, date and description.

This book is a great deal about the New Deal.

This book is good at briefly telling an unbiased history of the Great Depression. It summarizes the research into the causes of the Great Depression and the various aspects of the New Deal. I have read many books on the Great Depression and World War II era, and this book summarizes the literature of the Great Depression exceptionally well. There is no other book like this. If you want to briefly learn about the Great Depression, then read this book.

I learned several things about the Great Depression, especially the start of the Great Depression, by reading this brief book.

A flawed financial system, ballooning debt (and associated credit), and other economic factors in the post-WWI era led to the Great Depression. After WWI, the world outside USA became mired in massive debts to pay for WWI. USA became creditor to Europe. The debts incurred for WWI were not investment debts; the spending did not have long-term investment pay-offs as you would with taking out a loan to make a capital investment, and the huge scale of the debts made the world financial system leveraged with risk.

Loose credit in the United States during the roaring twenties chased paper profits, which caused more creative ways of creating loose credit. This speculation finally ran out of money to push the mania higher, and the stock market crashed. President Hoover repeated his belief that private organizations should respond to the high unemployment that resulted and not government, and that exhausted the ability of society to cope with the economic disaster. One failure after another occurred, and it got worse and worse. Most people probably did not realize how bad the economic collapse was, other than the mushrooming unemployment, because government was so insignificant back then that economic statistics were not even kept.

The Fed should have responded to the economic meltdown with easing of the money supply, but such policies had not yet been predefined for dealing with an economic disaster. Since economic measurements were not even made by the government, the Fed did not know the economic collapse was as bad as it was. Plus, the bankers in the Fed thought that the ruthlessness of the markets would eliminate weak businesses and make the economy stronger with the weaklings weeded out, but they did not understand that an economic downturn of that massive size was not normal and would destroy many good businesses causing an economic multiplier effect of bringing down the entire economy in the greatest economic collapse in world history.

Republicans controlled Congress and 90% of them voted to raise tariffs sharply in the Smoot-Hawley Act (named after two Republican leaders), while 90% of Democrats voted against it. The tariffs caused imports and exports to plunge, and other nations responded by raising tariffs. Sales of products around the world plunged further.

The banking system in the United States was an antiquated system with few regulations, such as deposit insurance, and conflicting state regulations that did not allows bank branches in some states. Banks failed, which made loans for business not available. Hoover with his philosophy of rugged individualism and use of slogans did nothing. Then, as a consequence of the flawed version of the gold standard, he money supply was tightened by the Fed. The economic downturn was a global disaster with widespread effects in society. People today may not understand how bad it was for many people.

The New Deal relief programs, such as the CCC, temporarily eased the suffering and calmed society. The New Deal was a conglomeration of pragmatic experiments, sometimes contradictory, the product of the American political system. A nice table at the end summarizes the New Deal laws and initiatives. You will get a good basic understanding of the Great Depression and New Deal by reading this very brief book.

The New Deal's greatest legacy was to create a more secure financial structure that promoted long-term economic stability. That led to a stronger capitalism and prosperity for a greatly-expanded middle class in the decades that followed in the post-WWII era. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal reversed the economic contraction, reduced unemployment somewhat, boosted GDP upward, and made long-term investments in the economy, but World War II is what finally fully restored America's economy, the book argues. Charts and graphs illustrate that. Roosevelt never fully embraced the Keynesian idea of massive deficit spending to stimulate the economy during downturns, but WWII finally did that and restored booming GDP growth.

Calls for reform from farmers for decades led to the AAA with efforts to control farm production so prices of farm products would no longer be depressed. Overproduction had led to depressed prices. Because farm products are commodities and cannot be differentiated with branding, pure competition of supply and demand is determined by the supply of the product produced. Industrialists had long controlled markets and influenced government to make their markets profitable, and so the farmers finally got their reforms, which FDR and Congress enacted.

Following the global military catastrophe called World War II, Roosevelt created a post-war vision of security and human rights, which unfolded in the years and decades following his death.

There are many great books from that fascinating era. I recommend a good biography of President Franklin Roosevelt. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World is also an informative read about the causes of the Great Depression. The Great Crash 1929 is an entertaining read (but the Great Crash was not the main cause of the Great Depression). There are many great books to choose from. However, The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction is exceptional for what it is -- and cheap.

Had this book appeared slightly later in 2008, it may have included an additional section entitled "the Second Great Depression." Though our current slump doesn't seem to have left quite as deep of an impact crater as its 1930s predecessor, this book reveals that the causes of both meltdowns were similar. Early on this book quotes John Maynard Keynes' 1931 summation of the Depression's cause: "extraordinary imbecility." Some could claim the same for our current situation, as the title of Chapter 1 suggests, "The World in Debt." Following the slaughter of World War I nearly everyone was in debt apart from the United States, who became the world's "great creditor." How times change. Unfortunately, credit became widely available in the 1920s and people, bathing in the prosperity, used it, often with reckless abandon. To top that off, the era of freely flowing markets that spurned pre-war economic growth was stunted by isolationism and high global tariffs. As an even further squelch, legal "cheating," in the form of "pools," on Wall Street was widespread and even publicly acknowledged. As the markets rose, so did wild speculation. Many commentators prophesied the events of October 24, 1929 well in advance. Unfortunately, many Wall Street players did not. The subsequent economic kaboom was felt the world over. Hoover was president and, though the book claims he did more than "nothing," it also claims that he didn't do enough, either. Franklin Delano Roosevelt easily grabbed the presidency from the man who soon had cities of squatter shacks named after him ("Hoovervilles"). Chapter 2 covers "The Hoover Years" from his easy 1928 win over a Catholic candidate to his perceived successes with the 1927 Louisiana flood (though some thought the successes broke down on further analysis). Following the crash he worked mostly as a cheerleader. He apparently thought people would just "fix it" so he took little Federal action as the US economy rotted away. To the Bush Administration's credit, and to much of the right's dismay, they took fairly immediate action when the economy began to crumble. Perhaps Hoover served as a historic counter-example, although they could also have learned more from the Hoover Years to avert a crash altogether. Eternal Recurrence arises from poor memory, it seems.

In a landslide of epic proportions, FDR grasped the presidency, as everyone expected, in 1932. Congress was already in the hands of Democrats following the 1931 elections. One of Hoover's final PR blunders was calling out troops against veterans (the "Bonus Army") who were camping en masse in Washington D.C. They were hoping the US government could advance them money earmarked for 1945 payment. The government apparently didn't agree and instead sent out tanks and troops to scatter the down-on-their-luck Americans. Douglas MacArthur helped lead the charge with tear gas, tanks and troops armed with bayonets. Though Roosevelt would later veto a bonus bill, he nevertheless used this catastrophe to his advantage. He inherited a shattered country. Having already promised a "New Deal" for the American people when accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, he started the rescue attempt exactly where the Bush Administration did: with the banks. Following this swift action, one commentator later noted that "capitalism was saved in eight days." This book emphasizes repeatedly that FDR's "New Deal" had fundamentally conservative goals: to make the American system more stable and fair, while preserving its principles nearly in total. FDR never wanted to convert the US to a socialist system." After all, he, somewhat paradoxically, came from the aristocratic class that most benefited from the system. Some would even claim that he "betrayed his class." In truth, he kept the US capitalist system more or less intact until the landscape changed with World War II. Nonetheless, he did want to make the system more fair as he stood up for the working class against what he called business excess. The New Deal gave the US institutions that persevere to this day, despite the recent resurgence of neoliberalism, such as FDIC, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and a suspension of the Gold Standard (in 1933 gold even became illegal for Americans to own in large quantities). Other well-known institutions didn't endure, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Public Works Administration (PWA), Civil Works Administration (CWA), Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). These programs put many of the unemployed back to work, though sometimes controversially (the CCC "resisted racial integration" and WPA later helped to intern Japanese-Americans during WWII). In addition, to control prices for commodities, cotton and food crops were deliberately destroyed and animals slaughtered. This had the desired effect but also inspired horror in those who saw a government obliterating goods that many people desperately needed. This action alone should quell any suspicions of "socialism" on FDR's part (though it also says volumes about the morality of capitalism). Not to mention that social security is based not on income taxes, such as in some European countries, but on contributions, though largely involuntary (so calling it "welfare" isn't technically correct, and it didn't reach all Americans in FDR's time due to fiscal concerns). Roosevelt's second term saw a slight withdrawal from the "New Deal" as he met with some resistance from the Supreme Court. The 1936 election saw another absolute FDR landslide anyway (he lost only Vermont and Maine). Though somewhat diluted, the New Deal never left American consciousness. This book claims that it largely worked, though not all of it did. Nonetheless, the war provided shock treatment to the economy that policy could not, but that does not mean the New Deal was not working. The economy picked up steadily, apart from a dip in 1937-1938, right up to the eve of World War II. Hopefully a massive global conflict will not be needed, or even recommended, to fix our current situation. Lastly, FDR tried to implement national health care but he backed down after facing fierce resistance from, of all groups, the American Medical Association. His 1944 second "Bill of Rights" sadly feels like an almost impossible idea today: the right to housing, health, useful work, fair competition, and education.

This brief book ends with an analysis of the New Deal's legacy in the Bretton Woods conference that created the IMF and World Bank. The author sums up: "The openly experimental, always compromised qualities of the New Deal programs and their progeny reflected the imperfect democracy that gave them birth. Considering the costs of this painful process, we might prefer a program of comprehensive change to Roosevelt's caution." But, he adds, perhaps the limits were a saving grace. In any case, the controversy over the New Deal continues and has even come under open attack in our times. The recent financial crash may change some attitudes. We shall see. This book will not make anyone an expert on the Great Depression or the New Deal, as the author clearly states early on. Nonetheless, it provides a great introduction to the causes and effects of its indubitably influential policies. Hopefully it will whet the appetites of a new generation who will learn from both our 1920s forebears and those who suffer under the current economic crisis. If these two generations teach us anything at all, they should teach us the value of history. This short book definitely delivers some of that much needed value.

Several decades after the event, the Great Depression and the New Deal are still as hotly debated as if they were our contemporaries. Not just the ever-elusive relationship of cause and effect are subject to emotional and ideological debate, but even the `plain facts' are not unanimously identified. What brought the depression about is probably more readily agreed upon than the question: what was the effect of the New Deal policies of the Roosevelt government? This is still at the heart of today's political battles. Similarly, Hoover's policies of waiting for the non-government sector's activities to do a Muenchhausen act on the decrepit economy is still very much up to modern perceptions. In other words, Roosevelt has turned into Obama (with his supporters hoping for the same stretch of luck), while Hoover represents the voice of religious belief in the saving skills of the market.

For me, as a `former' economist who decided to switch career, long ago, to management, and who follows economic discussions with less than enthusiasm (like meeting a divorced wife), the debates are more interesting for their psychological aspects than for their economic bases.

This little book (literally a pocket book, at the price of uncomfortably small print) tries to present the facts in a clear and objective way. It is open to critical views on the political side, but all in all it is in praise of the New Deal. Most interesting aspect: the author explains that there was no clear policy package defined upfront, but the New Deal was developed in a trial and error fashion along the way. This would imply that there is still hope for the current administration: hindsight may yet find them wise and skillful. I honestly hope so. The alternative would be terrible. (It seems that Truman also came by his somewhat intact post factum reputation by way of hindsight re-interpretation.)
In other words, it's not over till it's long long over. History gets rewritten all the time.
This little book makes me want to go for a larger exposure.