Books : The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 973
EAN: 9780061285271
Format: Large Print
ISBN: 0061285277
Label: HarperLuxe
Manufacturer: HarperLuxe
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 736
Publication Date: July 01, 2007
Publisher: HarperLuxe
Release Date: June 26, 2007
Sales Rank: 87498
Studio: HarperLuxe
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Product Description:
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. In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes 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 they helped establish the steadfast character we developed as a nation.
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 greatâin part by forgetting the men and women who sought to help one another. The Forgotten Man, offers a new look at one of the most important periods in our history, allowing us to understand the strength of American character today.
Average Rating: 
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Gave this as a gift and haven't read myself, but the reader says it is well worth reading.
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This is a must read. Buy copies for your parents and for your kids. READ IT and spread the word.
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Typical anti-Roosevelt polemic. For people who still think that Herbert Hoover was a victim of circumstance and that 1920's Republicanism had nothing to do with the Wall Street crash of 1929. In short, historical revisionism at its worst.
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Polls of historians credit FDR and the New Deal with ending The Great Depression while polls of economists credit World War II, according to Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man. This factoid is a reason while those who like to let data speak will generally appreciate this book while those who continue to hoist The New Deal on a pedestal will see Shlaes as heretical.
This very timely book revisits the 1920s and 1930s through the eyes of both architects of the economy and those who were directly buffeted by that economy. Shlaes details how the 1920s were actually a period of core growth in the economy based on new technologies like the automobile and radio (like the 1990s benefitting from the info technology revolution) and the policies of FDR's New Dealers prolonged and deepened The Great Depression.
While introducing each chapter with key economic indicators such as the unemployment rate, the year ending Dow Jones Industrial Average and GDP, this is no dry academic treatise. Rather, it is policy making told through experimenters and those experimented on. New Deal Brain Trusters such as the architect of the Tennessee Valley Authority are contrasted with Wendell Wilkie, power company executive whose business was run out of the Upper South by the TVA. The managers of the National Recovery Act are set against two kosher poultry butchers whose lawsuit ended with a landmark Supreme Court ruling declaring the NRA unconstitutional. And Rex Tugwell, ... Read More
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If you read "The Forgotten Man," please make sure that you also read "Since Yesterday," by Frederick Lewis Allen (New York, NY: Harper & Row, first published in 1939) and "Hard Times," by Studs Terkel (New York, NY: Random House, 1970). "The Forgotten Man" is not, as its subtitle says, "A New History of the Great Depression." Instead, it is an argument about what made the Great Depresion worse than it otherwise might have been. That is, it is less a comprehensive history than it is an effort to criticize the New Deal from a modern economic (especially monetarist) perspective. As useful as that criticism may be, you must go elsewhere to begin to understand what the times were really like, and I can think of no better places to go than "Since Yesterday" and "Hard Times."
Thomas C. Hone
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