WHAT THE NEW DEAL WAS ABOUT
National Review and the Wall Street Journal may be impressed by Amity Shlaes' "The Forgotten Man," but I am not. Most of her arguments can be found in most conservative New Deal critiques from John Flynn to Jim Powell. Insull, Mellon and Willkie certainly deserve more sympathetic attention than they usually get, but Father Divine and Bill W? If Shlaes' point is simply that Americans practiced self-help even in the depths of the Depression, OK, but really, does all this add up to anything we didn't already know from "The Grapes of Wrath" or "The Waltons?"
Shlaes' key point is a valid one, as far as it goes. By poorly conceived and sometimes flatly contradictory policies, by lurching from compulsory cartelization (NRA) to trust-busting (PUHCA), by alternate bouts of budget-tightening and fiscal liberality, by courting business and then bashing it, FDR and his minions shell-shocked much of America's entrepreneurship and capital into a defensive position born--as she rightly says--of uncertainty over what "that man" might think of next.
Offsetting this, millions of ordinary Americans (FDR's "forgotten men," not Shlaes' or William Graham Sumner's) felt a new certainty: that basic relief would be provided, that labor and farm interests would not be neglected, that homesteads would not be foreclosed and that the banks where they saved their money (if any) would still be there in the morning. Without such assurance, would the political system itself have survived?
Let's recall also that people in the 1920s often called the period through which they were living "postwar." Always in the background there were the farm price supports, the concessions to labor, the progressive taxation, and the enlistment of dollar-a-day men in the war boards of 1917-1918. "If we could beat the Kaiser then, why not Old Man Depression now?" First Hoover then FDR intervened as no earlier presidents would have, simply because of the precedent of the World War. Almost by reflex, most of the public, indeed much of the business community, demanded it already in 1929-1930.
Shlaes' key point is a valid one, as far as it goes. By poorly conceived and sometimes flatly contradictory policies, by lurching from compulsory cartelization (NRA) to trust-busting (PUHCA), by alternate bouts of budget-tightening and fiscal liberality, by courting business and then bashing it, FDR and his minions shell-shocked much of America's entrepreneurship and capital into a defensive position born--as she rightly says--of uncertainty over what "that man" might think of next.
Offsetting this, millions of ordinary Americans (FDR's "forgotten men," not Shlaes' or William Graham Sumner's) felt a new certainty: that basic relief would be provided, that labor and farm interests would not be neglected, that homesteads would not be foreclosed and that the banks where they saved their money (if any) would still be there in the morning. Without such assurance, would the political system itself have survived?
Let's recall also that people in the 1920s often called the period through which they were living "postwar." Always in the background there were the farm price supports, the concessions to labor, the progressive taxation, and the enlistment of dollar-a-day men in the war boards of 1917-1918. "If we could beat the Kaiser then, why not Old Man Depression now?" First Hoover then FDR intervened as no earlier presidents would have, simply because of the precedent of the World War. Almost by reflex, most of the public, indeed much of the business community, demanded it already in 1929-1930.
Labels: Amity Shlaes, FDR, New Deal
posted by Lloyd Drako at
1:04 PM
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