The Forgotten Man:  A New History Of The Great Depression, by Amity Shlaes

It is really only recently that I started reading much about the history of the Great Depression, an area of history that I have not tended to find appealing in itself, but rather emblematic of the larger political problems that have made FDR into something other than a canny political operate whose economic knowledge was poor and whose political effect on the United States has been highly disastrous.  Yet this book does a good job in pointing out the ways that the Great Depression remains relevant to contemporary concerns in political economy and makes for a fascinating and deeply interesting read, even for someone who tends to find the political machinations of the period to be rather unpleasant to dwell upon at length.  Perhaps most interesting of all, the author manages to draw a great deal of attention to the way that the intersection of politics and economics made for a great deal of suffering for the common man that shows some of the origins of the out-of-touch nature of many leftist efforts at social engineering that came into vogue during this time, while also setting those matters in a larger context.

This book consists of fifteen chapters, after an introduction that states the author’s aims, that examine the author’s aims, and these chapters deal with the period from 1927 to 1940.  The author begins with a look at Coolidge’s presidency and Hoover’s response to a flood of the Mississippi in 1927 (1).  After that the author gives a thorough discussion of a forgotten leftist junket trip to the Soviet Union, also in 1927 (2).  Then there is the accident of the stock market crash in 1929 and the disastrous response of Hoover’s administration to it (3) and the way this served the political interests of the Democrats who only made things worse, starting in 1931 (4).  The author examines FDR’s problematic role as an experimenter in 1933 (5) as well as the way that the TVA helped turn Wendell Wilkie into a rival of FDR (6).  The author thoughtfully discusses the various attempts at show trial prosecutions in 1934 by FDR’s administration (7) and the struggle of the Schechters to overcome intrusive regulations on chickens that threatened their business (8).  After that the author deals with Frankfurter’s role in helping Roosevelt win his wager that government largess would ensure his victory in 1936 (9) despite FDR’s failure at solving the economics that led to a furthering of the depression in 1937 (10).  The author spends some time talking about Tugwell as an honest New Dealer (11) and the deepening of economic troubles as 1937 progressed (12).  After that the author discusses the rise of Wilkie starting in 1938 (13), and Wilkie’s own efforts to win the Republican nomination for president and present a credible alternative to FDR’s chicanery (14), after which the book ends with a coda (15), acknowledgments, bibliographic notes, a selected bibliography, and an index.

At its heart this book is the competition between two forgotten men.  Since the time of the Great Depression, Democratic politics has involved seeking to promote the person who is being “helped” by government, person X, as a supposedly forgotten person who somehow deserves all of the special attention focused on him (or her) despite the fact that such help has been ruinously expensive and often entirely unsuccessful at bettering X’s position.  Likewise, the original discussion of the forgotten man involved a look at C, the person who contributed to society through paying taxes and working productively who provided the resources by which leftist activist A and corrupt government official B provided for the wasteful benefits given to X.  In paying attention to the real forgotten men and women of the period, and the way in which a desire to ape European socialist and Communist “reforms” led American leftists to desire massive change in American society, Shlaes has done a good job in providing a historical context to the contemporary fight for America’s soul that involves the tangled relationship of politics and economics and the baleful role that Europe’s own political behavior has had in provoking envy and emulation on the part of America’s own corrupt political elites.