The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression [Hardcover]

Amity Shlaes (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 12, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0066211700 | ISBN-13: 978-0066211701 | Edition: 1

It's difficult today to imagine how America survived the Great Depression. Only through the stories of the common people who struggled during that era can we really understand how the nation endured. These are the people at the heart of Amity Shlaes's insightful and inspiring history of one of the most crucial events of the twentieth century.

In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes, one of the nation's most respected economic commentators, offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depression. Rejecting the old emphasis on the New Deal, she turns to the neglected and moving stories of individual Americans, and shows how through brave leadership they helped establish the steadfast character we developed as a nation. Some of those figures were well known, at least in their day—Andrew Mellon, the Greenspan of the era; Sam Insull of Chicago, hounded as a scapegoat. But there were also unknowns: the Schechters, a family of butchers in Brooklyn who dealt a stunning blow to the New Deal; Bill W., who founded Alcoholics Anonymous in the name of showing that small communities could help themselves; and Father Divine, a black charismatic who steered his thousands of followers through the Depression by preaching a Gospel of Plenty.

Shlaes also traces the mounting agony of the New Dealers themselves as they discovered their errors. She shows how both Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt failed to understand the prosperity of the 1920s and heaped massive burdens on the country that more than offset the benefit of New Deal programs. The real question about the Depression, she argues, is not whether Roosevelt ended it with World War II. It is why the Depression lasted so long. From 1929 to 1940, federal intervention helped to make the Depression great—in part by forgetting the men and women who sought to help one another.

Authoritative, original, and utterly engrossing, The Forgotten Man offers an entirely new look at one of the most important periods in our history. Only when we know this history can we understand the strength of American character today.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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

From Booklist

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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1 edition (June 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0066211700
• ISBN-13: 978-0066211701
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (463 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #105,617 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Amity Shlaes is author of COOLIDGE, for HarperCollins, out in February, 2013, in hardback and audio. COOLIDGE is a highly researched full biography of the thirtieth president. "Coolidge's story was always told as one of failure -- 'yes, but," Miss Shlaes said recently. "But research shows us that his story was one of prevailing: 'but, yes."" Coolidge's principles of thrift and old-style federalism couldn't be timelier today.' Coolidge was a paradox, a thrifty leader who begat plenty.
To research COOLIDGE, Miss Shlaes spent five years combing archives across New England, especially those of the Forbes Library in Northampton, the Vermont Historical Society in Barre, Vermont, and the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation, on whose board she now sits.
She is also co-author of the forthcoming FORGOTTEN MAN GRAPHIC, a graphic version of her national bestseller about the 1930s, THE FORGOTTEN MAN. The artist for this 270-page treatment is the renowned cartoonist Paul Rivoche. Some samples of this cartoon book are on Miss Shlaes's facebook page.
Miss Shlaes directs the Four Percent Growth project at the George W Bush Center, which seeks to advance knowledge of economics, free markets and growth. She is chairman of the Hayek Prize, a prize for free market books given by the Manhattan Institute.
Bloomberg has syndicated Miss Shlaes's column for the past six years. Readers also know her work also from the Financial Times, which carried her column before Bloomberg, and the Wall Street Journal, where she edited op eds and served on the editorial board, eventually concentrating on economics (1983-2000). Over the years Miss Shlaes has appeared in a variety of other publications, from Commentary Magazine, the American, and Foreign Affairs to the New Republic, Forbes, Fortune, the (London) Spectator, the American Spectator, Cosmopolitan and the New Yorker. Since 2008, Miss Shlaes has taught economic history at New York University's Stern School of Business.
Miss Shlaes started her career in the foreign policy area, writing about Germany and East Europe. Her first book, GERMANY: THE EMPIRE WITHIN appeared in 1991 (Farrar, Straus and Jonathan Cape). In the later 1990s, while at the WSJ, Miss Shlaes penned a national bestseller on the tax code, THE GREEDY HAND (Random House). In 2002 Miss Shlaes was J.P. Morgan fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, where she undertook work on THE FORGOTTEN MAN. THE FORGOTTEN MAN first appeared in 2007 (HarperCollins/Jonathan Cape). The paperback edition (HarperPerennial), published in 2008, contains a timeline and other material for teaching. Both editions are national bestsellers. In December, 2008, the Japanese edition of TFM was published by NTT. TFM appeared in Chinese in 2009. THE FORGOTTEN MAN has also appeared IItalian and German.

Miss Shlaes is the recipient of the Frederic Bastiat Prize of the International Policy Network, the Warren Brookes Prize (2008) of the American Legislative Exchange Council, as well as a two-time finalist for the Loeb Prize (Anderson School/UCLA). In 2009, "The Forgotten Man" won the Manhattan Institute's Hayek Prize. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Yale College and did graduate work at the Freie Universitaet Berlin on a DAAD fellowship. She and her husband, the editor and author Seth Lipsky, have four children.

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

909 of 1,028 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Brings You Back to the 1930's June 15, 2007

By Arnold Kling

Format:Hardcover

The Forgotten Man (TFM for short) is not a polemic. It is not an argument for a particular theory or economic interpretation of the Depression. Instead, the author steps back and lets the story tell itself. She has sifted through memoirs and contemporaneous accounts in order to carry the reader back into the mindset of the 1930's. She focuses on a diverse selection of protagonists from that period, including opponents of Roosevelt like Andrew Mellon and Wendell Wilkie as well as members of Roosevelt's "brain trust" like Paul Douglas and Rexford Tugwell. Note that in the context of that time, "trust" meant the same thing as cartel (as in anti-trust laws). Roosevelt was claiming that with his advisers he had cornered the market on brains. If so, then after reading TFM, my sense is that there was not much value in this particular monopoly.

I came away with three major conclusions.

1. For better or worse, much of the country saw the Depression as something akin to a natural disaster, and people accordingly lowered their expectations for their standard of living.

2. Economic ignorance among policymakers was much worse than I had realized. I was steeped in the myth that the reason the Depression was so bad was that only Keynes had the answer, and he had to overcome the resistance of "the classical economists," such as Irving Fisher. But the differences between Fisher and Keynes seem small when compared to the differences between the policymakers and both economists. In physics, it would be like watching an academic debate over the meaning of quantum mechanics while policymakers are unable to grasp the simple concept of gravity.

3. The struggle over economic policy in the 1930's was really an episode in the long, historical conflict between business participants in the market and anti-business academics. Roosevelt gave free rein to the professors, until the start of the Second World War led him to realize that he would need the tycoons to help mobilize to defeat Hitler. I suspect that one reason that Roosevelt and the New Deal come off so well in the conventional wisdom is that history books are written by professors, not by entrepreneurs.

I should stress that these are my own views, and that TFM is much less prone to making generalizations and drawing conclusions. Readers with a variety of backgrounds and predispositions can appreciate the book and learn their own lessons.

76 of 86 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Recipe for An Economic Depression August 16, 2007

By J. Aubrey

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Tariffs, tax rate increases, wage and price controls and tight money. Government vacillation and unpredictibility. That these policies undermined business confidence and blocked economic recovery was lost on Hoover, FDR and their elite advisors. Ms. Shlaes makes a compelling case that but for those policies the 1929 downturn would have self-corrected by the early 30s, rather than drag on through the remander of the decade and into the next.

Another major theme of the book is the vast growth of government under FDR, including goverment subsidized and controlled projects (mostly utilities) that unfairly competed with the private sector. She also discusses FDR's successful (and cynical) strategy for the 1936 campaign, including persecution and condemnation of big business and catering to various targeted voting blocks (farmers, big labor, pensioners, women and blacks). Sound familiar?

The book is generally well written, although the focus drifts from time to time and more analysis would have been welcome. She also includes too many names and mini-resumes of peripheral players.

The Forgotten Man (a term that morphed under FDR from the taxpayer to the unemployed) is recommended for those who want a better understanding of the economics and politics of the 30s to correct some long standing myths (e.g. depression a failure of capitalism, FDR "brought us out" of the depression) and better understand today's economic and political issues.

199 of 240 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars A mixed bag June 19, 2008

By William Whipple III VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

One reviewer characterizes The Forgotten Man as a "party line polemic," while another says it is "not a polemic." I hold to the latter view, but am not sure this is a plus. Maybe we need a polemic (argument or controversial discussion) about "the Great Depression" to counter some of the nonsense that has been written about it.

Amity Shlaes's book follows a cast of characters from 1927 (Herbert Hoover takes command of the great Flood on the Mississippi) to 1940 (FDR wins reelection to a third term). The players include government planners (Rex Tugwell, Harold Ickes), capitalists (Andrew Mellon, Wendell Wilkie, Alfred Loomis), economists (Irving Fisher, John Keynes), jurists ("the four horsemen," Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson), small businessmen (the Schechter brothers), labor leaders (John L. Lewis), social activists (Father Divine), and politicians (Herbert Hoover, FDR, and ultimately Wilkie).

Many of the incidents related are unflattering to the persons involved, including both Hoover and FDR, but Shlaes does not appear to have a partisan axe to grind. Indeed, she spends more time discussing the foibles, dreams, and conflicts of the characters than assessing their accomplishments. The narrative jumps around from person to person in a manner resembling "the grapevine" segment of the Brit Hume Show on Fox News.

The point is made (repeatedly) that the Depression went on longer than might have been expected if the Roosevelt administration had not sought to intervene in so many areas of the economy. Such a conclusion seems rather obvious, however, and it is hardly novel. If you are looking for an insightful analysis of what caused the Depression or the merits of the New Deal, you will not find it in this book.

Still, The Forgotten Man provides many interesting and at times telling details about the leading figures of the period across the political spectrum. It is worth reading for that purpose.