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Amity Shlaes

The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression Paperback – Illustrated, May 27, 2008

by Amity Shlaes (Author)

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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.

Print length

512 pages
Language

English
Publication date

May 27, 2008
Dimensions

5.31 x 1.15 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

9780060936426
ISBN-13

978-0060936426
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Amity Shlaes is among the most brilliant of the young writers who are transforming American financial journalism.” -- Paul Johnson, author of Modern Times

“I could not put this book down. Ms. Shlaes timely chronicle of a fascinating era reads like a novel and brings a new perspective on political villains and heros―few of whom turn out to be as good or bad as history would have us believe.” -- Arthur Levitt

“Americans need what Shlaes has brilliantly supplied, a fresh appraisal of what the New Deal did and did not accomplish.” -- George F. Will

“The Forgotten Man is an incisive and controversial history of the Great Depression that challenges much of the received wisdom.” -- Harold Evans, author of The American Century and They Made America

“The Forgotten Man offers an understanding of the era’s politics and economics that may be unprecedented in its clarity.” -- Mark Helprin

“Shlaes’s account of The Great Depression goes beyond the familiar arguments of liberals and conservatives.” -- William Kristol, Editor of The Weekly Standard

“Amity Shlaes’s fast-paced review of the [Depression] helps enormously in putting it all in perspective.” -- Paul Volcker

“The Forgotten Man is an epic and wholly original retelling of a dramatic and crucial era. There are many sides to the 1930’s story, and this is the one that has largely been lost to history. Thanks to Amity Shlaes, now it’s been re-found.” -- Peggy Noonan

“Entertaining, illuminating, and exceedingly fair. . . . A rich, wonderfully original, and extremely textured history of an important time. -- The American Spectator

“A well-written and stimulating account of the 1930s and its often dubious orthodoxies. . . . Ms. Shlaes rightly reminds us of the harmful effect of Rooseveltian activism and class-warfare rhetoric.” -- The Wall Street Journal

“The finest history of the Great Depression ever written. . . . Shlaes’s achievement stands out for the devastating effect of its understated prose and for its wide sweep of characters and themes. It deserves to become the preeminent revisionist history for general readers. . . . Her narrative sparkles.” -- National Review

“Captivating. . . . Illuminating. . . . The Forgotten Man is an engaging read and a welcome corrective to the popular view of Roosevelt and his New Deal. . . . A refreshingly critical approach to Franklin Roosevelt’s policies.” -- Clive Crook, The Financial Times

“Amity Shlaes tells the story of the Depression in splendid detail, rich with events and personalities. . . . Many of Shlaes’s descriptions make genuinely delightful reading.” -- The New York Review of Books

“The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes will forever change how America understands the causes of the Depression and FDR’s policies that prolonged it for a decade.” -- Grover G. Norquist, The American Spectator

About the Author

Amity Shlaes is the author of four New York Times bestsellers: The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man/Graphic, Coolidge, and The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy.
Shlaes chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation and the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Book Prize, and serves as a scholar at the King’s College. Twitter: @amityshlaes

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0060936428

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial; Illustrated edition (May 27, 2008)

Language ‏ : ‎ English

Paperback ‏ : ‎ 512 pages

ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780060936426

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0060936426

Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.3 ounces

Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 1.15 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #110,142 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

#34 in United States Local Government

#1,523 in Economics (Books)

#4,505 in United States History (Books)

Customer Reviews:
1,147 ratings

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Amity Shlaes
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Amity Shlaes is proud to announce the publication of GREAT SOCIETY: A NEW HISTORY (HarperCollins). Many readers will remember THE FORGOTTEN MAN, a history of the 1930s. This book is the sequel, treating the Great Society programs of the 1960s, as well as the underdescribed efforts of the private sector-- far more important than we remember.
Miss Shlaes is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, COOLIDGE, THE FORGOTTEN MAN, THE FORGOTTEN MAN/GRAPHIC and THE GREEDY HAND.
Miss Shlaes chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation. She chairs the Hayek Prize, a prize for free market books given by the Manhattan Institute.
She is a presidential scholar at the Kings College/New York.
Miss Shlaes has been the recipient of the Hayek Prize, the Frederic Bastiat Prize of the International Policy Network, the Warren Brookes Prize (2008) of the American Legislative Exchange Council, as well as being a two-time finalist for the Loeb Prize (Anderson School/UCLA).
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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Customer reviews
4.5 out of 5
1,147 global ratings

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GD
One of the best books I have ever read
Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2017
Verified Purchase
I love this book.
Amity Shales is not just an accurate writer she is engaging. I read this book a few years ago & it really opened my eyes beyond the canned history I got in school. I can't remember who I loaned it out to & apparently they loved it because it was never returned to me! I was happy to re-buy the book for my children.
Lord of the Flies was a seminal book in my childhood - it made me want to read everything. The Forgotten Man is a seminal book of my adulthood - I became a voracious reader of history after reading this book.
Thank you for writing it!
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AG
Who is this for? Too dense, scattered, academic.
Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2020
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I usually love history books. I’ve been on an American history kick for a year or so. Despite the great reviews I just founded it scattered, dense and academic.

It would very frequently introduce new characters with zero context and zero connective tissue to the preceding text. And then cover a bunch of other stuff only to abruptly pick up prior storylines.

It was also quite dense. Lots of detail on seemingly little things but left out a lot of what I wanted to learn. What was life like for basic families? How did homeless survive? What industries grew? Almost nothing on these topics but detail upon detail of the finance secretary’s art collection and all the drama (zzzz) of how it became donated to the US.

It feels like this was a collection of facts that needed to be stored somewhere and it was just sorta copy and pasted together.

Out of respect to the author I hate to give a negative review but I feel it valuable to future readers.

I’d like to believe the book was just over my head and there’s some obvious-to-others reason why it’s so great!
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William Bilyeu
A great history of a depressing era
Reviewed in the United States on May 27, 2020
Verified Purchase
Amity Shlaes is an excellent historian and writer. I enjoyed her biography of Coolidge and I enjoyed this wonderful history. I am a historian and I learned things from this book that I did not know, and it spurred research. The more I learned about the "New Deal" the more I found to criticize about it. It has long been shown that the liberal, progressive, socialist reforms of the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression, and Ms Shlaes presented more evidence of communist ideology and influence that too few people understand even today. After reading Coolidge and The Forgotten Man, I ordered Great Society, another history of the futility of government practices and programs. The history of the New Deal shows the government officials ineptitude, incompetence, and willingness to put people on trial for political purposes, and the stupidity and tyranny of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who admired Stalin and in many cases imitated him.
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Having a grad degree in economics, this was by far the best book I have read on the subject
Reviewed in the United States on March 29, 2020
Verified Purchase
Amity puts the depression into stark, human terms by describing the plight of the common man and the confusion brought on by the political decisions made. It was a difficult time, and there have been endless debates about whether Smoot Haley, the Federal reserve, business, etc. are at fault. It is a complex argument, lining up the Austrian school on one side, and John M keynes on the other.

In the end, you have to draw your on conclusions. But this book will provide an important viewpoint that is essential in coming to your own ideas.
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Robert Lemmon Jr
Will History Repeat Itself with Another Great Depression?
Reviewed in the United States on April 19, 2017
Verified Purchase
In his most recent book, "The Road to Ruin," financial writer James Rickards recommends "The Forgotten Man" by Amity Shlaes -- and that's because he believes the coming collapse could be either deflationary or inflationary. And there is no better example of deflation than The Great Depression in the 1930s.
Some give FDR the credit for ending that deflation while others credit World War II with being the main terminator.
While many liberals flocked to the the Roosevelt's administration, in the end the "forgotten man" ended up paying for FDR's many experiments.
Mrs Shlaes spent many years researching those experiments. And while she lists many of her sources, such as Frederick Lewis Allen's "Only Yesterday," she understandably omitted Allen's "Since Yesterday," a competing history of the 1930s
I get the impression that Mrs Shales wishes she had been able to make the trip to Russia and speak with Joseph Stalin. As one who has worked both in the public sector (as a teacher) and the private sector (as a commodity broker) I firmly believe Harry Truman's statement that the only thing new under the sun is the history we have not read. In other words history repeats itself.
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Fred Shoemaker
A new history interpreting things . . . differently, especially FDR.
Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2018
Verified Purchase
I enjoyed this book. I especially enjoyed the descriptions of the actions of FDR and his associates. It was especially interesting and shocking to read how FDR determined the spot price of gold. I always assumed he used the principles of economics, his use of 'lucky numbers' came as a complete shock. It was also interesting to read the description of the so-called 'Great Engineer' Herbert Hoover. It was not kind to him. One of the few public figures to come out well was Andrew Mellon. One wonders if things would have gone differently if only Hoover had listened to him instead of firing him!
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Bookworm
New Coths for the New Deal
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 10, 2018
Verified Purchase
This book challenges the received wisdom concerning the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression that followed. It begins by describing the suicide caused by the impact of the Great Depression - and then informs the reader that the suicide occurred in 1938, when unemployment and bankruptcy had returned almost to the level of 1931, the worst year of the recession. Indeed Shlaes contends that but for the war 1939 and 1940 might have been worse, and Roosevelt would not have won his third term, if he had chosen to stand again.
Shlaes argues that the twenties were not a frivolous decade - the USA made enormous advances and the companies that survived contributed to the post-war boom as well.
She disputes the idea that all Republicans were laissez faire - in particular Hoover both believed in state intervention, and did everything that he could to prop up the banks and stabilize the economy. That he failed was not the consequence of indifference, or indeed a lack of Keynesianism - he intervened more than Roosevelt did in his first term of office. Indeed Roosevelt's "we have nothing to fear but fear itself" is a Moneterist not a Keynesian proposition.
She then goes through some individual cases. Wenvil Wilkie, who went bust, went alcoholic, but then recovered both personally and financially, to unsuccessfully challenge Roosevelt in 1940. She follows the legal prosecution of the bankers, who got the blame - rather than the Stock Market. The outcome was a lot of money spent, no convictions, but some sizeable art donations that have enriched New York's galleries ever since.
There is a fascinating chapter on how whole counties - having lost faith with both the goverment and the financial institutions, just set up their own, including their own currencies. Other states set up a system of exchange, defining how much corn or meat a car repair or a dress might be worth. Though I do not think she comments on this - such a mass opt-out must have impacted upon goverment revenues, and limited the power of the state to intervene.
She describes how many American politicians and in particular the Democratic Party were both deceived and besotted by Stalin and the Soviet Union, and how some hoped to use the New Deal, which finally took off in Roosevelt's second term, to promote his policies in the USA.
In one area Roosevelt was very successful - he won over the entertainment industry - and securred its attachment to both the New Deal and the Democratic Party. As a baby boomer I found it interesting that far from being an hobo, Woody Guthrie was paid well for travelling round the country and writing socialist and fraternal hymns. By winning over the entertainment industry Roosevelt has influenced the way that we all see the Great Depression, and how economists and modern news media see the world through Keynesian eyes.
Though she does not explicitely say this, I could only conclude that WW2, allowed the New Deal to work. It suspended all normal economic intercourse, allowed the USA to sell to the combatants, but critically the USA won. It won big - for a generation all of its economic rivals, Britain, Germany, Japan and Russia were crippled by the cost or the damage of war. This is a very good read.
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Bobski
History
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 28, 2019
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Very very illuminating. Dispels a lot of myths.
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Amazon Customer
THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 3, 2016
Verified Purchase
This book explores the Great Depression from a new and very human angle. It should be read by any with an interest in that period.
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Key Perspective
Somewhat tedious
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 25, 2017
Verified Purchase
Hard going
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RENATO MONTEIRO OLINO
Muito bom, mas cansativo em alguns momentos...
Reviewed in Brazil on August 14, 2020
Verified Purchase
O livro traz muitos detalhes sobre a vida dos políticos e demais pessoas influentes nos USA na época da depressão. Muitas histórias interessantes, mas por vezes a leitura ficava cansativa.
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