The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression
Encyclopedia
The Forgotten Man
: A New History of the Great Depression is a book by Amity Shlaes
and published by HarperCollins
. The book is a re-analysis of the events of the Great Depression
, generally from a free-market perspective. The book criticizes Herbert Hoover
and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff for their role in exacerbating the Depression through government intervention. It criticizes Franklin D. Roosevelt
for erratic policies that froze investment and for not taking smart enough steps to stop the Depression. Shlaes criticizes the New Deal
for extending the length of the Depression and for its effects on individuals.
Shlaes praises the model offered by Wendell Willkie
before the 1940 presidential election
, where the New Deal would have been scaled back and business would have stepped in.
The book begins with an anecdote of the 1937 recession, eight years after the Depression began, when Roosevelt adopted budget-balancing policies indistinguishable from the stereotype of what Hoover supposedly did. Shlaes presents her arguments in part by telling stories of self-starters who showed what the free market could have accomplished without the New Deal.
, Rudolph Giuliani, Mark Sanford
, Jon Kyl
, and Mike Pence
. Fred Barnes
of the conservative Weekly Standard has called Shlaes one of the Republican party's major assets. "Amity Shlaes's book on the failure of the New Deal to revive the economy, The Forgotten Man, was widely read by Republicans in Washington." In February 2009 during the Senate confirmation hearing for Energy Secretary Steven Chu
, Republican Senator John Barrasso
waved a copy of the book and announced, "In these economic times, a number of members of the Senate are reading a book called The Forgotten Man, about the history of the Great Depression, as we compare and look for solutions, as we look at a stimulus package."
On the other hand, The Forgotten Man and its key arguments have been criticized by liberal Nobel Prize
-winning economist Paul Krugman
, among others. Krugman wrote of "a whole intellectual industry, mainly operating out of right-wing think tanks, devoted to propagating the idea that FDR actually made the Depression worse.... But the definitive study of fiscal policy in the 1930s, by the MIT economist E. Cary Brown, reached a very different conclusion: Fiscal stimulus was unsuccessful 'not because it does not work, but because it was not tried'." Krugman is among a number of reviewers who criticized Shlaes for "misleading statistics"—specifically the use of a series for employment during the 1930s that omitted those working in public works programs. Shlaes responded to Krugman in the Wall Street Journal that the Bureau of Labor Statistics
series she had used "intentionally did not include temporary jobs in emergency programs—because to count a short-term, make-work project as a real job was to mask the anxiety of one who really didn't have regular work with long-term prospects". Shlaes said that if the Obama administration "proposes F.D.R.-style recovery programs, then it is useful to establish whether those original programs actually brought recovery. The answer is, they didn’t." Writing in Forbes
, former United States Department of Labor
chief economist and Hudson Institute
fellow Diana Furchtgott-Roth called it the "economic fight of the year."
Other critics of The Forgotten Man include Depression historian Robert S. McElvaine
, who classifies it in a review in the journal Labor History
as "born-again Antisocial Darwinism" and calls it "as much a brief for the Bush tax cuts of 2001 as it is a history of the Depression of the 1930s" historian Matthew Dallek, who has called Amity Shlaes a "revisionist" with a "blind view of the New Deal," historian Eric Rauchway, who wrote that Ms. Shlaes ignored historical GDP easily available in the Historical Statistics of the United States, and journalist Jonathan Chait
of The New Republic
who has called the book self-contradictory, misleading, and inaccurate—an example of how leading Republicans prefer political "theology to history", and are willing to wipe "Hoover's record from their memories" and replace it "with something very close to its opposite."
Forgotten man
Forgotten man is a phrase with several meanings, some of which are polar opposites. It was first used by William Graham Sumner in his article The Forgotten Man to refer to the person compelled to pay for reformist programs; however, since Franklin Roosevelt appropriated the phrase in a 1932 speech,...
: A New History of the Great Depression is a book by Amity Shlaes
Amity Shlaes
Amity Ruth Shlaes is an American author and columnist from New York, who writes about politics and economics.-Education and career:...
and published by HarperCollins
HarperCollins
HarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company. The worldwide...
. The book is a re-analysis of the events of the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
, generally from a free-market perspective. The book criticizes Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover
Herbert Clark Hoover was the 31st President of the United States . Hoover was originally a professional mining engineer and author. As the United States Secretary of Commerce in the 1920s under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he promoted partnerships between government and business...
and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff for their role in exacerbating the Depression through government intervention. It criticizes Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt , also known by his initials, FDR, was the 32nd President of the United States and a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war...
for erratic policies that froze investment and for not taking smart enough steps to stop the Depression. Shlaes criticizes the New Deal
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
for extending the length of the Depression and for its effects on individuals.
Shlaes praises the model offered by Wendell Willkie
Wendell Willkie
Wendell Lewis Willkie was a corporate lawyer in the United States and a dark horse who became the Republican Party nominee for the president in 1940. A member of the liberal wing of the GOP, he crusaded against those domestic policies of the New Deal that he thought were inefficient and...
before the 1940 presidential election
United States presidential election, 1940
The United States presidential election of 1940 was fought in the shadow of World War II as the United States was emerging from the Great Depression. Incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt , a Democrat, broke with tradition and ran for a third term, which became a major issue...
, where the New Deal would have been scaled back and business would have stepped in.
The book begins with an anecdote of the 1937 recession, eight years after the Depression began, when Roosevelt adopted budget-balancing policies indistinguishable from the stereotype of what Hoover supposedly did. Shlaes presents her arguments in part by telling stories of self-starters who showed what the free market could have accomplished without the New Deal.
Reception
The Forgotten Man has been praised by Republican politicians such as Newt GingrichNewt Gingrich
Newton Leroy "Newt" Gingrich is a U.S. Republican Party politician who served as the House Minority Whip from 1989 to 1995 and as the 58th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999....
, Rudolph Giuliani, Mark Sanford
Mark Sanford
Marshall Clement "Mark" Sanford Jr. is an American politician from South Carolina, who was the 115th Governor of South Carolina from 2003 to 2011....
, Jon Kyl
Jon Kyl
Jon Llewellyn Kyl is the junior U.S. Senator from Arizona and the Senate Minority Whip, the second-highest position in the Republican Senate leadership. In 2010 he was recognized by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world for his persuasive role in the Senate.The son...
, and Mike Pence
Mike Pence
Michael Richard "Mike" Pence is the U.S. Representative for Indiana's , and previously the , serving since 2001. The 6th district covers much of Eastern Indiana. He is a member of the Republican Party....
. Fred Barnes
Fred Barnes (journalist)
Frederic W. Barnes is an American political commentator. He is the executive editor of the news publication The Weekly Standard and regularly appears on the Fox News Channel program Special Report with Bret Baier...
of the conservative Weekly Standard has called Shlaes one of the Republican party's major assets. "Amity Shlaes's book on the failure of the New Deal to revive the economy, The Forgotten Man, was widely read by Republicans in Washington." In February 2009 during the Senate confirmation hearing for Energy Secretary Steven Chu
Steven Chu
Steven Chu is an American physicist and the 12th United States Secretary of Energy. Chu is known for his research at Bell Labs in cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, along with his scientific colleagues Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and...
, Republican Senator John Barrasso
John Barrasso
John Anthony Barrasso is the junior U.S. Senator from Wyoming and a member of the Republican Party. He was appointed to the Senate following Craig L. Thomas's death and won a special election in 2008 to fill the remaining four years of Thomas's term....
waved a copy of the book and announced, "In these economic times, a number of members of the Senate are reading a book called The Forgotten Man, about the history of the Great Depression, as we compare and look for solutions, as we look at a stimulus package."
On the other hand, The Forgotten Man and its key arguments have been criticized by liberal Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
-winning economist Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman
Paul Robin Krugman is an American economist, professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times...
, among others. Krugman wrote of "a whole intellectual industry, mainly operating out of right-wing think tanks, devoted to propagating the idea that FDR actually made the Depression worse.... But the definitive study of fiscal policy in the 1930s, by the MIT economist E. Cary Brown, reached a very different conclusion: Fiscal stimulus was unsuccessful 'not because it does not work, but because it was not tried'." Krugman is among a number of reviewers who criticized Shlaes for "misleading statistics"—specifically the use of a series for employment during the 1930s that omitted those working in public works programs. Shlaes responded to Krugman in the Wall Street Journal that the Bureau of Labor Statistics
Bureau of Labor Statistics
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is a unit of the United States Department of Labor. It is the principal fact-finding agency for the U.S. government in the broad field of labor economics and statistics. The BLS is a governmental statistical agency that collects, processes, analyzes, and...
series she had used "intentionally did not include temporary jobs in emergency programs—because to count a short-term, make-work project as a real job was to mask the anxiety of one who really didn't have regular work with long-term prospects". Shlaes said that if the Obama administration "proposes F.D.R.-style recovery programs, then it is useful to establish whether those original programs actually brought recovery. The answer is, they didn’t." Writing in Forbes
Forbes
Forbes is an American publishing and media company. Its flagship publication, the Forbes magazine, is published biweekly. Its primary competitors in the national business magazine category are Fortune, which is also published biweekly, and Business Week...
, former United States Department of Labor
United States Department of Labor
The United States Department of Labor is a Cabinet department of the United States government responsible for occupational safety, wage and hour standards, unemployment insurance benefits, re-employment services, and some economic statistics. Many U.S. states also have such departments. The...
chief economist and Hudson Institute
Hudson Institute
The Hudson Institute is an American think tank founded in 1961, in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, by futurist, military strategist, and systems theorist Herman Kahn and his colleagues at the RAND Corporation...
fellow Diana Furchtgott-Roth called it the "economic fight of the year."
Other critics of The Forgotten Man include Depression historian Robert S. McElvaine
Robert S. McElvaine
Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts and Letters and Chair of the Department of History at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, where he has taught for thirty-five years. He is the author of seven books and the editor of three....
, who classifies it in a review in the journal Labor History
Labor history
Labor history may refer to:* Labor history , a subfield of the discipline of history**Labor history of the United States, describes the history of organized labor, as well as the more general history of working people, in the United States...
as "born-again Antisocial Darwinism" and calls it "as much a brief for the Bush tax cuts of 2001 as it is a history of the Depression of the 1930s" historian Matthew Dallek, who has called Amity Shlaes a "revisionist" with a "blind view of the New Deal," historian Eric Rauchway, who wrote that Ms. Shlaes ignored historical GDP easily available in the Historical Statistics of the United States, and journalist Jonathan Chait
Jonathan Chait
Jonathan Chait is a writer for New York magazine. He was previously a senior editor at The New Republic and a former assistant editor of The American Prospect. He also writes a periodic column in the Los Angeles Times.- Personal life :...
of The New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
who has called the book self-contradictory, misleading, and inaccurate—an example of how leading Republicans prefer political "theology to history", and are willing to wipe "Hoover's record from their memories" and replace it "with something very close to its opposite."
Further reading
- Frederick Lewis AllenFrederick Lewis AllenFrederick Lewis Allen was the editor of Harper's Magazine and also notable as an American historian of the first half of the twentieth century. His specialty was writing about what was at the time recent and popular history...
(1940), Since Yesterday: The 1930's in America, September 3, 1929-September 3, 1939, New York: Harper & Row. - Anthony J. BadgerTony BadgerAnthony John "Tony" Badger is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge University and Master of Clare College, Cambridge. He is a specialist in post-World War II Southern American political history.-Life:...
(2002), The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933-1940, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. - James MacGregor BurnsJames MacGregor BurnsJames MacGregor Burns is an historian and political scientist, presidential biographer, and authority on leadership studies. He is the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Government Emeritus at Williams College and Distinguished Leadership Scholar at the of the School of Public Policy at the University...
(1956), Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, New York: Harcourt, Brace. - James MacGregor Burns (1970), Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
- John T. FlynnJohn T. FlynnJohn Thomas Flynn was an American journalist best known for his opposition to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and to American entry into World War II.-Career:...
(1940), Country Squire in the White House, New York: Doubleday. - John T. Flynn (1948), The Roosevelt Myth, New York: Devin-Adair.
- Burton W. Folsom, Jr.Burton W. Folsom, Jr.Burton W. Folsom, Jr. is an American historian and author who holds the Charles F. Kline chair in history and management at Hillsdale College. He received his BA from Indiana University in 1970, his M.A. from the University of Nebraska in 1973, and his doctorate in history from the University of...
(2008), New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, New York: Threshold Editions. - Burton W. Folsom, Jr., and Anita Folsom (2011), FDR Goes to War, New York: Threshold Editions.
- Hugh Samuel JohnsonHugh Samuel JohnsonHugh Samuel "Iron Pants" Johnson American Army officer, businessman, speech writer, government official and newspaper columnist. He is best known as a member of the Brain Trust of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932-34. He wrote numerous speeches for FDR and helped plan the New Deal...
(1935/1968), The Blue Eagle from Egg to Earth, reprint, New York: Greenwood Press. - Michael HiltzikMichael HiltzikMichael A. Hiltzik is an American reporter and writer who has written extensively for the Los Angeles Times. In 1999, he shared the beat reporting Pulitzer Prize for co-writing an exposé of corruption in the music industry...
(2011), The New Deal: A Modern History, New York: Free Press. - William LeuchtenburgWilliam LeuchtenburgWilliam E. Leuchtenburg is William Rand Kenan Jr. professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at Chapel Hill and a leading scholar of the life and career of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He is the author of more than a dozen books on 20th century history ,...
(1963), Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940, New York: Harper & Row. - William Leuchtenburg (1968), ed., The New Deal: A Documentary History, New York: Harper & Row.