Books like The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes
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.
First publish date: June 12, 2007
Authors: Amity Shlaes
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Books similar to The Forgotten Man (7 similar books)
Amity Shlaes presents a concise biography of Calvin Coolidge, the 1920s U.S. president known for his frugal policies and calm leadership during a period of economic growth.
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"By the publisher of the prestigious Grant's Interest Rate Observer, an account of the deep economic slump of 1920-21 that proposes, with respect to federal intervention, "less is more." This is a free-market rejoinder to the Keynesian stimulus applied by Bush and Obama to the 2007-09 recession, in whose aftereffects, Grant asserts, the nation still toils. James Grant tells the story of America's last governmentally-untreated depression; relatively brief and self-correcting, it gave way to the Roaring Twenties. His book appears in the fifth year of a lackluster recovery from the overmedicated downturn of 2007-2009. In 1920-21, Woodrow Wilson and Warren G. Harding met a deep economic slump by seeming to ignore it, implementing policies that most twenty-first century economists would call backward. Confronted with plunging prices, wages, and employment, the government balanced the budget and, through the Federal Reserve, raised interest rates. No "stimulus" was administered, and a powerful, job-filled recovery was under way by late in 1921. In 1929, the economy once again slumped--and kept right on slumping as the Hoover administration adopted the very policies that Wilson and Harding had declined to put in place. Grant argues that well-intended federal intervention, notably the White House-led campaign to prop up industrial wages, helped to turn a bad recession into America's worst depression. He offers the experience of the earlier depression for lessons for today and the future. This is a powerful response to the prevailing notion of how to fight recession. The enterprise system is more resilient than even its friends give it credit for being, Grant demonstrates"--
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Provides cultural and social perspectives while examining the political and economic history of the U.S. from 1929-1941.
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An expansive view of the United States from the Great Depression through World War II, showing how economic turmoil, the New Deal, and global conflict shaped the nation’s destiny.
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Some Other Similar Books
The Great Depression: A Diary by Benjamin RothLaissez-Faire and the Great Depression by Chester M. Phillips
Americans and the Great Depression: Testimonies from the Federal Writers' Project by Robert E. Sherwood
The Economics of the Great Depression by Ben S. Bernanke
A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 by Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz
The Great Depression: An Economic Analyisis by Robert P. Murphy
FDR and the Great Depression: Perspectives on a New Deal by William E. Leuchtenburg
The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction by Eric Rauchway
The Breakdown of the American Economy in the Great Depression by Richard S. Tedlow
The Clarion Call: Lessons from the Great Depression by Michael R. Edelstein
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