Feb 16, 2009
Bleak but Refreshing
While reading Amity Shlaes’s much-admired book The Forgotten Man, I had trouble figuring out why it has received so much attention. Of course, the parallel is timely as we anxiously await our own Great Depression. But as a non-historian (don’t vote me off the island), I simply saw it as a readable, well-researched, sometimes disjointed story about key individuals involved in the New Deal.
It has a theme, of course--that Roosevelt’s rhetoric about the “forgotten man” was directed at the wrong person; Shlaes’s “forgotten man” is the politically innocent individual who was forced to pay for ad hoc tinkering by intellectuals hankering for socialism. Roosevelt’s amazingly successful rhetoric--fireside chats on the one hand and outrage at big business on the other--allowed the president and his cronies to grab and keep power, even as the depression ground along with no end in sight.
A brief visit at Barnes & Noble resolved my puzzle. The featured books about the Depression tend to be hagiographical, like Jonathan Alter’s and Adam Cohen's, whose titles speak for themselves: The Defining Moment: FDR and the Triumph of Hope and Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America. Against these, Shlaes’s book is a refreshing antidote, if a bleak and skeptical book can ever be called refreshing.
It has a theme, of course--that Roosevelt’s rhetoric about the “forgotten man” was directed at the wrong person; Shlaes’s “forgotten man” is the politically innocent individual who was forced to pay for ad hoc tinkering by intellectuals hankering for socialism. Roosevelt’s amazingly successful rhetoric--fireside chats on the one hand and outrage at big business on the other--allowed the president and his cronies to grab and keep power, even as the depression ground along with no end in sight.
A brief visit at Barnes & Noble resolved my puzzle. The featured books about the Depression tend to be hagiographical, like Jonathan Alter’s and Adam Cohen's, whose titles speak for themselves: The Defining Moment: FDR and the Triumph of Hope and Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America. Against these, Shlaes’s book is a refreshing antidote, if a bleak and skeptical book can ever be called refreshing.