The Forgotten Man

April 2, 2007
This breezy narrative comes from the pen of a veteran journalist and economics reporter. Rather than telling a new story, she tells an old one (scarcely lacking for historians) in a fresh way. Shlaes brings to the tale an emphasis on economic realities and consequences, especially when seen from the perspective of monetarist theory, and a focus on particular individuals and events, both celebrated and forgotten (at least relatively so). Thus the spotlight plays not only on Andrew Mellon, Wendell Wilkie and Rexford Tugwell but also on Father Divine and the Schechter brothers—kosher butcher wholesalers prosecuted by the federal National Recovery Administration for selling "sick chickens." As befits a former writer for the Wall Street Journal
, Shlaes is sensitive to the dangers of government intervention in the economy—but also to the danger of the government's not intervening. In her telling, policymakers of the 1920s weren't so incompetent as they're often made out to be—everyone in the 1930s was floundering and all made errors—and WWII, not the New Deal, ended the Depression. This is plausible history, if not authoritative, novel or deeply analytical. It's also a thoughtful, even-tempered corrective to too often unbalanced celebrations of FDR and his administration's pathbreaking policies. 16 pages of b&w photos.

May 15, 2007
Shlaes (syndicated columnist, Bloomberg; The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy and What To Do About It ) attempts to demonstrate that the policies and programs created by Herbert Hoover and FDR during the Great Depression failed to help their intended beneficiaries. Her research is drawn primarily from autobiographies of individuals who worked for Hoover and FDR as well as newspaper and magazine articles from the period. The author does not dwell on the sense of hope that FDR gave to Americansas documented in the hundreds of thousands of letters from which Shlaes does not quote that they wrote to FDR in response to his fireside chats. That said, the book is an engaging retelling of the Great Depression and the New Deal, but it does not provide new information via any new scholarly approaches to primary sources. Therefore, it is not truly revisionist in its seeking to reinterpret from a more 21st-century conservative angle the era as one that did not have a savior in the form of our only four-term president. The book may be of interest to public and academic libraries needing additional accounts of the era.Diane Fulkerson, Univ. of West Georgia Lib., Carrollton, GA

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