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robivy's review against another edition
5.0
In my opinion, reading this book should be a prerequisite for ever voicing an opinion on current politics in the U.S. Although the text is somewhat dense at times, the detail is important as every chapter plays a role in shedding light on what really happened during the depression - which is quite different from the general public's understanding due to the mainstream media's tendency toward revisionist history. This book made abundantly clear what I had anecdotally known to be true: a) that Herbert Hoover's economic incompetence transformed a normal cyclical recession into what would become the great depression, and b) that FDR took advantage of (and prolonged on purpose) the depression in order to permanently establish a new definition of "liberal", usurp states rights and give birth to the sprawling federal government we have today, father the entitlement culture and thereby make large groups of the electorate beholden to the left (seniors, labor, etc). This book ratifies my long-held opinion that FDR did more to damage our country than any other individual in our short history. This book also opened my eyes to two truly great Americans - Andrew Mellon and Wendell Willkie - and makes me wonder what could have been for our country if they had been allowed to steer the ship during the depression instead of FDR. Well done Ms. Schlaes!
clarks_dad's review against another edition
2.0
Meh. I think this was probably one of the better written histories of the Depression that I've read, but it reeks of Conservative Tea Party drivel. I wonder if I'd read this before the financial crisis and the subsequent political baloney flying back and forth from both sides if I would have received it differently. Most likely I would.
The one positive I will take from this book is a more rounded view of Hoover. A man whom all I knew about was that he was a fantastic organizer from his experiences with supply-running during WWI and that he basically sat on his thumb while the economy turned to crap all around him. Technically speaking, as Shlaes pointed out, that not strictly true.
However there is an awful lot that I find ridiculous, not least of which is an entire chapter about a trip to Soviet Russia taken by a group of individuals who would later be in FDR's circle. I could hear the communist by association implications right beneath the surface and find them all too similar to the charges leveled at any president with an activist approach to dealing with downturns in the business cycle that isn't a Republican. The running criticism of FDR in general seems to be in this book that the New Deal did nothing but make things worse and extend the Depressions effects over a decade by scaring off investors who were afraid to hire among all the new regulations and the changing business climate. Again, you hear the same thing about President Obama today.
It seems that many conservatives need a lesson in history, for their reach is a little short-sighted. Perhaps they should pick up a book about the good old 19th century and the heyday of the robber barons who made absolutely ridiculous amounts of money at the expense of their workers who had no unemployment insurance, social security benefits or even enough in most cases to allow their children the luxury of going to school instead of working to feed themselves and support their families, to say absolutely nothing about becoming middle class. That's what a deregulated America looks like. That's what a 7% tax rate looks like. You get NOTHING and you are completely at the mercy of whatever business entity is at the top of the totem poll. Not to say I think all corporations are evil or that we should punish our most innovative with excessive taxation, but I think the road to deregulation is incredibly naive and has only reared its ugly head again because people have forgotten their history.
The one positive I will take from this book is a more rounded view of Hoover. A man whom all I knew about was that he was a fantastic organizer from his experiences with supply-running during WWI and that he basically sat on his thumb while the economy turned to crap all around him. Technically speaking, as Shlaes pointed out, that not strictly true.
However there is an awful lot that I find ridiculous, not least of which is an entire chapter about a trip to Soviet Russia taken by a group of individuals who would later be in FDR's circle. I could hear the communist by association implications right beneath the surface and find them all too similar to the charges leveled at any president with an activist approach to dealing with downturns in the business cycle that isn't a Republican. The running criticism of FDR in general seems to be in this book that the New Deal did nothing but make things worse and extend the Depressions effects over a decade by scaring off investors who were afraid to hire among all the new regulations and the changing business climate. Again, you hear the same thing about President Obama today.
It seems that many conservatives need a lesson in history, for their reach is a little short-sighted. Perhaps they should pick up a book about the good old 19th century and the heyday of the robber barons who made absolutely ridiculous amounts of money at the expense of their workers who had no unemployment insurance, social security benefits or even enough in most cases to allow their children the luxury of going to school instead of working to feed themselves and support their families, to say absolutely nothing about becoming middle class. That's what a deregulated America looks like. That's what a 7% tax rate looks like. You get NOTHING and you are completely at the mercy of whatever business entity is at the top of the totem poll. Not to say I think all corporations are evil or that we should punish our most innovative with excessive taxation, but I think the road to deregulation is incredibly naive and has only reared its ugly head again because people have forgotten their history.
oldnew23's review against another edition
4.0
After you are force-fed high school and college level U.S. History survey courses, instead of taking that shallow understanding, which is usually based on incorrect conclusions about the Great Depression, to the grave, you should pick up this book and read it.
barium_squirrel's review against another edition
1.0
This book had a lot of interesting information about the New Deal and New Deal era, but it did a very poor job of proving its central thesis: that the New Deal worsened the Great Depression. It didn't examine alternate hypotheses, like the impact of the Dust Bowl; not did it provide a direct link between New Deal policies and the economy. It acknowledges that the economy recovered slightly during the New Deal era, but constantly points out that it didn't rise to the level of 1929: an absurd standard. It claims that private individuals could have provided enough charity that the government didn't need to: but it's examples of private charity are Father Divine's exploitative cult and Andrew Mellon 's donation of artwork to the National Gallery (which I'm sure was a real help to all the homeless, starving, unemployed Americans). The New Deal undoubtedly had many flaws, but this book's fails to prove that they outweighed the benefits, let alone that they worsened The Depression.
nick_jenkins's review against another edition
2.0
Is this a history of the Great Depression? It is in the sense that Shlaes rejects both Hoover and FDR as statists who wanted to see public investment crowd out private enterprise.* Thus, Shlaes does cover both Hoover's and FDR's responses to the Depression, but don't be fooled. This is a history of the New Deal, not a history of the Depression.
The difference is important. In spite of its title, the focus is on power politics, not on everyday experience or even on economic conditions. Shlaes makes use of occasional jaunts into the lives of ordinary people--opening with an incredibly lurid anecdote about a young boy who killed himself in 1937 because of his family's desperate economic condition--but these vacations from the elite world are merely cynical and opportunistic gropings at the symbol of "the forgotten man" in order to bludgeon and shame New Dealers for harming the populace. (Shlaes's periodic visits to the career of Father Divine are similarly half-hearted. Shlaes doesn't actually show consistent interest in African Americans' experience of the Depression; she cares only about using a particularly cooperative example of an African American to score points against FDR.)
If the book's subtitle is misleading, its title is even deceptive. The explicit argument of the book is that the "real" forgotten man of the Depression was the middle class--the referent of the eponymous essay by William Graham Sumner. FDR and the New Deal punished the hardworking middle class, she implies, courting and enrapturing the working class with public spending and favorable laws and sending the bill to those ordinary taxpayers of the middle class who always get screwed by lavish government action.
If we judge the book by its content, however, the "forgotten man" isn't the middle class, it's Andrew Mellon, and other "malefactors of great wealth" (as FDR called them). Shlaes wrote this book as a defense of the patriarchal right of the very wealthy to make the big economic decisions, to choose how and where and when to deploy their vast capital. Men like Mellon or Samuel Insull or Wendell Willkie or J. P. Morgan, Jr. not only did not get the credit and honor and deference they deserved during the New Deal, but FDR and his minions arrogantly pursued them legally and economically, competing with them for control of the economy while using all kinds of underhanded tricks to tilt the playing field in the government's favor.
For Shlaes, the New Deal was a plot to name, shame, and blame the wealthy and to usurp their natural right to rule. Triumphalist accounts of the New Deal as the necessary reforms which pulled the US out of the Depression and created a durable set of institutions and rules which prevented a recurrence of the irresponsible behavior and inequality of the 1920s are therefore not only wrong, but malicious. Even if later historians of the New Deal don't realize it, they are hiding the real story of the New Deal--the noble suffering and hardship of the true forgotten men, the benefactors of great wealth.
Shlaes's revisionism culminates in what seems at first a strange place, but one that makes complete sense as long as you understand that her attack on the New Deal is rooted in her hero-worship of the captains of industry. The pièce de resistance of the book is Shlaes's account of Mellon's selfless gift to America of his art collection and his construction of the National Gallery of Art on the Washington Mall. This museum is the ultimate vindication of Mellon's (and Shlaes's) philosophy of great fortunes: without men like Mellon and fortunes like his, the world will never have nice things like art galleries and imposing buildings.
For Shlaes, a QED can be written on the steps of the National Gallery--it is incontrovertible proof of the necessity, the blessings, and the functionality of an economic system that allows wealth to pool in the laps of the truly great men of the world, trusting them to use that wealth to selflessly bestow on everyone else both art and, sometimes, employment. Shlaes's understanding of the economy is that creation, production, and innovation only happens because great men make it so; they are the job-creators, the wonder-workers, the ones who built America. We spurn them at our cost.
If this is how you think, you're going to love this book. If you ever have even a small doubt that this is truly how the economy works, you're going to find this a weird journey through the 1930s, like a walk through a hall of funhouse mirrors--everything distorted, nothing in proportion. Above all, don't be fooled: this is not what anything looked like to more than a few Americans at the time.
*Shlaes's interpretation of Hoover as a New Dealer malgré lui is particularly ironic given that she routinely hawks her books at the Hoover Institute, the think tank Hoover founded that is dedicated to the very ideas that Shlaes argues Hoover enthusiastically transgressed as Secretary of Commerce and then as President.
The difference is important. In spite of its title, the focus is on power politics, not on everyday experience or even on economic conditions. Shlaes makes use of occasional jaunts into the lives of ordinary people--opening with an incredibly lurid anecdote about a young boy who killed himself in 1937 because of his family's desperate economic condition--but these vacations from the elite world are merely cynical and opportunistic gropings at the symbol of "the forgotten man" in order to bludgeon and shame New Dealers for harming the populace. (Shlaes's periodic visits to the career of Father Divine are similarly half-hearted. Shlaes doesn't actually show consistent interest in African Americans' experience of the Depression; she cares only about using a particularly cooperative example of an African American to score points against FDR.)
If the book's subtitle is misleading, its title is even deceptive. The explicit argument of the book is that the "real" forgotten man of the Depression was the middle class--the referent of the eponymous essay by William Graham Sumner. FDR and the New Deal punished the hardworking middle class, she implies, courting and enrapturing the working class with public spending and favorable laws and sending the bill to those ordinary taxpayers of the middle class who always get screwed by lavish government action.
If we judge the book by its content, however, the "forgotten man" isn't the middle class, it's Andrew Mellon, and other "malefactors of great wealth" (as FDR called them). Shlaes wrote this book as a defense of the patriarchal right of the very wealthy to make the big economic decisions, to choose how and where and when to deploy their vast capital. Men like Mellon or Samuel Insull or Wendell Willkie or J. P. Morgan, Jr. not only did not get the credit and honor and deference they deserved during the New Deal, but FDR and his minions arrogantly pursued them legally and economically, competing with them for control of the economy while using all kinds of underhanded tricks to tilt the playing field in the government's favor.
For Shlaes, the New Deal was a plot to name, shame, and blame the wealthy and to usurp their natural right to rule. Triumphalist accounts of the New Deal as the necessary reforms which pulled the US out of the Depression and created a durable set of institutions and rules which prevented a recurrence of the irresponsible behavior and inequality of the 1920s are therefore not only wrong, but malicious. Even if later historians of the New Deal don't realize it, they are hiding the real story of the New Deal--the noble suffering and hardship of the true forgotten men, the benefactors of great wealth.
Shlaes's revisionism culminates in what seems at first a strange place, but one that makes complete sense as long as you understand that her attack on the New Deal is rooted in her hero-worship of the captains of industry. The pièce de resistance of the book is Shlaes's account of Mellon's selfless gift to America of his art collection and his construction of the National Gallery of Art on the Washington Mall. This museum is the ultimate vindication of Mellon's (and Shlaes's) philosophy of great fortunes: without men like Mellon and fortunes like his, the world will never have nice things like art galleries and imposing buildings.
For Shlaes, a QED can be written on the steps of the National Gallery--it is incontrovertible proof of the necessity, the blessings, and the functionality of an economic system that allows wealth to pool in the laps of the truly great men of the world, trusting them to use that wealth to selflessly bestow on everyone else both art and, sometimes, employment. Shlaes's understanding of the economy is that creation, production, and innovation only happens because great men make it so; they are the job-creators, the wonder-workers, the ones who built America. We spurn them at our cost.
If this is how you think, you're going to love this book. If you ever have even a small doubt that this is truly how the economy works, you're going to find this a weird journey through the 1930s, like a walk through a hall of funhouse mirrors--everything distorted, nothing in proportion. Above all, don't be fooled: this is not what anything looked like to more than a few Americans at the time.
*Shlaes's interpretation of Hoover as a New Dealer malgré lui is particularly ironic given that she routinely hawks her books at the Hoover Institute, the think tank Hoover founded that is dedicated to the very ideas that Shlaes argues Hoover enthusiastically transgressed as Secretary of Commerce and then as President.
muhly22's review against another edition
4.0
The conventional story of the Great Depression, which I learned in school, was that Hoover (a Republican) caused the stock market to crash because the economy was left irresponsibly unregulated. Then Roosevelt got elected, and using the economic philosophy of Keynesianism, injected massive amounts of money into the economy, rescuing America from the Great Depression.
Then in college, I learned that wasn't quite accurate. That version of history was that Roosevelt got elected and spent a whole lot of money on his New Deal. That actually didn't help us get out of the Depression, and may have even played some small role in prolonging it. But it gave the country hope, it kept Americans from despairing, which was just as important.
Shlaes demonstrates that even that softer version is not accurate. It's hard to read this book and not marvel that there wasn't a complete revolt of every private businessman against FDR. Several of the actions of his administration during the New Deal were downright chilling - the prosecution of the Schecters for failing to comply with the dictates of an unelected government agency on how they were permitted to sell chickens to their customers (for instance, customers couldn't pay for a specific chicken, but just had to pay for a generic chicken, which the Schecters would then slaughter, something that was not only well outside the scope of what government should have been involved in, but also violated the Jewish religious beliefs of the Schecters and their customers), and the Undistributed Profits Tax (which prevented businesses from reinvesting their earnings back into the business).
Reading this book in an election year when one whole party has gone off the rails economically, when they rail against wealthy individuals and businesses, the comparisons are hard to miss. The policies may have changed, but the goal hasn't - the ending of business, and forcing citizens to rely on government for their well-being.
Then in college, I learned that wasn't quite accurate. That version of history was that Roosevelt got elected and spent a whole lot of money on his New Deal. That actually didn't help us get out of the Depression, and may have even played some small role in prolonging it. But it gave the country hope, it kept Americans from despairing, which was just as important.
Shlaes demonstrates that even that softer version is not accurate. It's hard to read this book and not marvel that there wasn't a complete revolt of every private businessman against FDR. Several of the actions of his administration during the New Deal were downright chilling - the prosecution of the Schecters for failing to comply with the dictates of an unelected government agency on how they were permitted to sell chickens to their customers (for instance, customers couldn't pay for a specific chicken, but just had to pay for a generic chicken, which the Schecters would then slaughter, something that was not only well outside the scope of what government should have been involved in, but also violated the Jewish religious beliefs of the Schecters and their customers), and the Undistributed Profits Tax (which prevented businesses from reinvesting their earnings back into the business).
Reading this book in an election year when one whole party has gone off the rails economically, when they rail against wealthy individuals and businesses, the comparisons are hard to miss. The policies may have changed, but the goal hasn't - the ending of business, and forcing citizens to rely on government for their well-being.
jknuteso's review against another edition
1.0
Author neglects American history when writing this revisionist history.
scottacorbin's review against another edition
3.0
Some parts quite interesting but other parts a bit of a slog.
dannb's review against another edition
4.0
In light of our current politics/society and an improved understanding of how "recent" some deeply embedded aspects are.
Is our political environment really any worse today?:
Is our political environment really any worse today?: