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The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression | 
| Author: Amity Shlaes
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
Buy Used: $9.00
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Rating:  111 reviews
Sales Rank: 3453
Media: Paperback
Pages: 512
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 0060936428
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.916
EAN: 9780060936426
ASIN: 0060936428
Publication Date: June 1, 2008
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Condition: Has been read, but remains in great condition. Ships within 2 business days. 100% Customer satisfaction guaranteed.
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Product Description
In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes, one of the nation's most-respected economic commentators, offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depression. She traces the mounting agony of the New Dealers and the moving stories of individual citizens who through their brave perseverance helped establish the steadfast character we recognize as American today.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 45 more reviews...
 Bought it yesterday - donating it to the public library tomorrow September 6, 2008
Norman Schroeder (Maine, USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
After struggling through the first three chapters (I gave up during the voyage of Rex Tugwell and friends to visit Stalinist Russia - they made it to port; I couldn't wait to get off), I made a vow to always, always, look more carefully at who's singing the praises of any book I'm considering. If I had done so with "The Forgotten Man," I would have saved the $15.95 cost of the paperback version. When the choir includes The Weekly Standard, The NY Post, Peggy Noonan, Newt Gingrich, Steve Forbes and The American Spectator, I should have known immediately that I was setting myself up for a sustained gust of wind from the right. Surprise, surprise, it takes FDR and his New Dealers down several pegs, or more. Revisionism - okay - every great historical figure, including FDR, is subject to spending time in the ideological spin cycle. Not so bad, perhaps, if Ms. Shlaes' jump around, connect-the-dots prose style wasn't so headache-inducing. Another reviewer called her treatment of The Great Depression "breezy." I'd sum it up as faux history, unpersuasive, and verging on unreadable. On second thought, strike "verging on."
 Setting the Record Straight September 2, 2008
Eric Mayforth (Houston, TX United States)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
We have been told all our lives that Franklin D. Roosevelt "saved capitalism" with his New Deal, which was a stark departure from the policies of Herbert Hoover. Amity Shlaes sets the record straight, refuting the conventional wisdom in "The Forgotten Man", a timely look back at the Great Depression.
The stock market crash was a major cause of the Depression, but Hoover's deflationary policies, the Smoot-Hawley tariff, Hoover's tax increases, and all of FDR's experiments following the crash created an atmosphere of uncertainty. Businessmen did not know what the rules would be a few months down the road, since they were constantly changing. As a result, they waited for more propitious times to invest--this retarded the recovery and led to a second crash in 1937. FDR eventually took his attention off of economic experiments, and instead pitted class against class to maintain his political capital. FDR's brain trust included many intellectuals who subscribed to then-trendy European collectivist nostrums, many of which were included in the New Deal.
Shlaes shows that Hoover and Roosevelt were more similar to each other than Hoover was to his GOP predecessor Calvin Coolidge. In the early 1920s, there was a serious economic downturn, but the laissez-faire ethic that Harding and Coolidge used to combat that downturn (which was short-lived and is now largely forgotten, thanks to their hands-off approach) was nothing like the interventionist policies used by Hoover and FDR that lengthened the Depression. When reading this book, one ardently wishes that Coolidge would have run for another term--he surely would have handled the Depression as the early '20s downturn was handled, and the economy would have recovered much more quickly than it did under Hoover and FDR.
In the book are many portraits of "forgotten men" who were bullied by FDR's alphabet-soup agencies. One of these was Wendell Willkie--he eventually ran for president as the Republican nominee against FDR in 1940. Willkie is remembered by many as a moderate, but Shlaes demonstrates that the free-trade, free-market ideas he espoused in that campaign were more conservative than many people realize.
Shlaes makes a few good comparisons to back up her thesis. She states that the French attempted a type of New Deal at the same time the Americans did, and it caused a collapse in their economy. In the 1930s, we lost ground vis-a-vis Britain and other nations whose policies were not as activist. If she had wanted to use more recent examples, she could have also mentioned that in the last quarter-century, Ireland has gone from being one of the poorest nations in Europe to being one of the richest as a result of following low-tax policies. In recent years, Estonia and Russia have made strong gains using these policies as well. And here in America, tax cutting led to broad prosperity in the 1960s and 1980s (just as it did in the 1920s), and the capital-gains tax cut of 1997 helped the economy pick up its level of growth in the late 1990s.
I compare Shlaes's brave book to Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism". Both explode decades-old myths ("FDR and the New Deal saved the country", "Fascism is a right-wing phenomenon") that have been permitted to live for far too long. Where the Great Depression is concerned, Shlaes is to be commended for attempting to clear the air.
 Not so fast ......there September 1, 2008
P. quintel (china)
I would feel better if the author had nothing to do with the CFR,a Rockefeller arm of the Rothschild organization.This is far from the whole story......a lot was going on behind the scenes.
The same group of banksters and wall street thugs that caused problems before are causing the same problems now.
Also see the Benjamin Freedman audio
Mr. Freedman, born in 1890, was a successful Jewish businessman of New York City who was at one time the principal owner of the Woodbury Soap Company. He broke with organized Jewry after the Judeo-Communist victory of 1945, and spent the remainder of his life and the great preponderance of his considerable fortune, at least 2.5 million dollars, exposing the Jewish tyranny which has enveloped the United States. Mr. Freedman knew what he was talking about because he had been an insider at the highest levels of Jewish organizations and Jewish machinations to gain power over our nation. Mr. Freedman was personally acquainted with Bernard Baruch, Samuel Untermyer, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy, and many more movers and shakers of our times. This speech was given before a patriotic audience in 1961 at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., Mr. Freedman's essential message to us - his warning to the West - is more urgent than ever before. - K.A.S. The complete transcript of the speech exists at
http://100777.com/jewry/freedman
Read The Secret Bailout of J. P. Morgan: How Insider Trading Looted Bear Stearns and the American Taxpayer
by Ellen Brown she has many great articles and she isn't related to CFR.
Wag the Dog: How to Conceal Massive Economic Collapse
- by Ellen Brown - 2008-08-14
The President's Plunge Protection Team had come to the rescue
US Mortgage Crisis: Fannie and Freddie. Give Away the Farm
- by Dr. Ellen Hodgson Brown -
She also has a great book on amazon called Web of Debt
Below are the same group that caused problems before.
WHO ARE THE REAL OWNERS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE?
Rothschilds of London and Berlin
Lazard Brothers of Paris
Israel Moses Seaf of Italy
Kuhn, Loeb & Co. of Germany and New York
Warburg & Company of Hamburg, Germany
Lehman Brothers of New York
Goldman, Sachs of New York
Rockefeller Brothers of New York
All of the above listed men are Jews. And in England the banks of the Rothschild family.
Superficial August 26, 2008
Thomas Kwiatkowski (Elkhorn, WI USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a rambling critique of Roosevelt's response to the Great Depression that seems to have a theme and coherence apparent only to the author. Seldom have a I felt that I wasted my time reading a book, but this is one of those rare occasions... and I say that as a conservative who believes that FDR's economic response to the Depression is not only overrated, but in many respects has been detrimental to the country. Shlaes, however, simply does not make a persausive case. Her research is thin, perhaps non-existent. She spends little time explaining substantive responses to the Depression, but went on for pages about Andrew Mellon's art collection and his donation of it to the nation. While I do not mean to denigrate Mellon's donation of the art and the National Gallery that houses it, Shlaes' swooning over this act within the context of the Depression brings to mind Marie Antoinette's legendary response to the severe shortage of bread among starving Parisians with her comment "have they no cake, let them eat cake!" It perpetuates the worst stereotype of Republicans. I expected more from a former member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board. For a well-articulated and supported critique of the New Deal, your time is better spent reading Jim Powell's "FDR's Folly."
A potential history textbook August 23, 2008
Lloyd H. Brown (Jacksonville, FL)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This excellent, well-written, well-researched book by Amity Shlaes should be mandatory in college courses on American history. It balances the extravagant claims of New Deal enthusiasts with the reality of the Great Depression, clearly showing how FDR's experimental programs deepened and lengthened that unhappy period, contrary to the myths. Shlaes shows convincingly that the "forgotten man" was the taxpayer, not the man in the unemployment line.
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