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A review by nick_jenkins
The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes
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.