The Forgotten Man Review
This is a monumental book and I have the greatest respect for the scholarship and insights of the author. I'm awarding four stars only because of the ponderous nature of the total read. I suspect with all the publicity and acclaim the book is receiving, many more will buy the book than will stay the course and read it through. I did, but it took a bit of resolve and discipline. The author could not present the subject matter without thorough context,and that context required painstakingly going back to a former time when almost none of we readers were alive and reading the daily news. We will have to become familiar with the leaders of politics and business in the 1920s and 1930s: Roosevelt, Hoover, Lilienthal, Mellon, Tugwell, Willkie, Insull, Ickes, Chase, and even Father Devine. There can be no shortcuts; Amity will guide us through the maze and context of this earlier time.
I finished the book a few weeks ago, and I so often think about it as I follow the political intrigue of present times. There are so many remarkable similarities of the Obama presidency to the Roosevelt presidency. Both men came to the White House after difficult economic times had already begun, and both men immediately set aboutl making everything much worse through the application of misguided liberal-progressive policies and tinkering. This book will have the most impact if read during the Obama presidency because of these similarities.
As President Calvin Coolidge once said, "The business of America is business." Business is the wellspring from which all American prosperity flows. When business sees liberal-progressives like Roosevelt or Obama at the helm, fear and paralysis set in. The little guy dreaming of opening a sandwich shop holds off. He hangs onto his money. The fellow with seven hardware stores who had been planning on opening five more now holds off. He hangs onto his money.
Roosevelt responds. He sees what looks like the unhealthy hoarding of money by business and he initiates a tax on what he calls "undistributed profits." Business is now deprived of operating capital. The paralysis deepens. Through the various machinations of the National Recovery Act, Roosevelt tries to centralize ever more power within the American federal government exactly as Obama has been doing in our own times.
Finally, then as now, a silent revolt starts to form against the extremist, anti-business policies of a leftist administration. Roosevelt lost an important case in the U.S. Supreme Court. This loss proved to be an effective push-back against Roosevelt. Roosevelt tried to use the authority of the NRA to viciously attack and destroy a little family-owned chicken processing business. It came to the high court as Schechter Poultry v. United States. The Justices ruled unanimously for the Schechters -- a blow to Roosevelt and the NRA. Later that same day, Justice Brandeis (p.243)collared two of Roosevelt's advisors: "This is the end of this business of centralization, and I want you to go back and tell the president that we're not going to let this government centralize everything. It's come to an end!"
Roosevelt's misguided policies prolonged the Great Depression for many years. Amity lays out the facts and mostly lets the reader draw conclusions. I read the book and came away believing only a healthy business climate can remedy a black econimic downturn. Both Obama and Roosevelt treated business as if it were the enemy. Business then has little choice but to freeze up and wait for more business friendly times. As President Reagan once said, "Government isn't the solution to our problem; government IS the problem." Roosevelt never did end the depression. A great war came along and so distracted him that he no longer had time or opportunity for his endless, failed social experiments.
The Forgotten Man Overview
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. These are the people at the heart of Amity Shlaes's insightful and inspiring history of one of the most crucial events of the twentieth century.
In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes, one of the nation's most respected economic commentators, 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 through brave leadership they helped establish the steadfast character we developed as a nation. Some of those figures were well known, at least in their day—Andrew Mellon, the Greenspan of the era; Sam Insull of Chicago, hounded as a scapegoat. But there were also unknowns: the Schechters, a family of butchers in Brooklyn who dealt a stunning blow to the New Deal; Bill W., who founded Alcoholics Anonymous in the name of showing that small communities could help themselves; and Father Divine, a black charismatic who steered his thousands of followers through the Depression by preaching a Gospel of Plenty.
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 great—in part by forgetting the men and women who sought to help one another.
Authoritative, original, and utterly engrossing, The Forgotten Man offers an entirely new look at one of the most important periods in our history. Only when we know this history can we understand the strength of American character today.
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Customer Reviews
DC Needs To Read This Book - Matthew -
Obama and the people in DC running this country by spending vs growing buiness needs to read this book. It is clearn adding goverment, putting on constraints does not work. Just about everything that the Goverment did during the recession either is broken now or was repeal by later, greater Presidents. Read this book and make up your own mind!
Worth the price & time - Aaron Strader - Fort Wayne
This book shed light on Coolidge, Hoover and FDR. Coolidge was personified the idea of hand-offs government in a economic sense. This was very effective and resulted in the roaring 20's. Hoover thought he was smart enough to "fix" the economy and caused the depression. FDR, turned what should have been a 4-5 year depression into a 14 year depression that was only overcome by WWII. Not the idealized person we learned about in school. This book completely changed my opinion of all 3 men. It is not as boring a you would expect for a book about American politics in the early 20th century. There seems to be a lot of parallels between this and our time. A republican president who is a progressive and caused a massive economic downturn followed by a democrat president who doubled down on the government interventionism in the market by the previous president. I just hope the American people stop this before we have another 14 year depression ending with another world war.
Marvelous account of the Great Depression - lettres et livres -
This is a wonderful and well thought through account of the Great Depression (in my opinion, this and Claudel's books are two of the best on the topic). The similarities and parallels between that era and today are stark and come through quite clearly. The manner in which events and actions are recounted allowed me to better follow today's policies and attitudes for preventing (or not) our recession from getting deeper.
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