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Posted on 4/21/2009, 11:55:53 PM by markomalley
There aren’t any sex scenes or vampires, and it won’t help you lose weight.
But House Republicans are tearing through the pages of Amity Shlaes’ “The Forgotten Man” like soccer moms before book club night.
Shlaes’ 2007 take on the Great Depression questions the success of the New Deal and takes issue with the value of government intervention in a major economic crisis — red meat for a party hungry for empirical evidence that the Democrats’ spending plans won’t end the current recession.
“There aren’t many books that take a negative look at the New Deal,” explained Republican policy aide Mike Ference, whose boss, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia, invited Shlaes to join a group of 20 or so other House Republicans for lunch earlier this year in his Capitol suite.
“Republicans are gobbling it up — and so are other lawmakers — because it tells you what they did, what worked and what didn’t.”
“It’s been suggested as required reading for all of us, I think,” said Erica Elliott, press secretary for Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) — who himself notes that his chief of staff “stole” his hardback copy, so he had to purchase a paperback.
Garrett said the book “is a good read” that details, among other things, “how FDR engaged in vitriolic demonizing of Wall Street and Big Business to advance his agenda.”
Also, he jokes, “it had good pictures when you get to the middle.”
“The Forgotten Man” is currently out of stock at The Trover Shop, the bookstore closest to the House side of the Capitol. Co-owner Al Schuman said sales haven’t been off the charts but added: “If all my books sold that well, I’d be a rich man.”
It’s not hard to see what Republicans find compelling about the book. Shlaes, a columnist at Bloomberg, a senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former editorial board member at The Wall Street Journal, presents a vision of the Great Depression that challenges the conventional wisdom that casts Herbert Hoover as a goat, FDR as a hero and the New Deal as the country’s salvation.
It also looks at the Great Depression with particular sympathy upon the plight of those who were burdened with supporting the “weak members of society” during the New Deal and endeavors to give a voice to those “forgotten men.”
To some, that voice sounds a lot like a rallying cry. Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) quoted from the book’s epigraph during a recent news conference related to the mortgage cramdown bill, referencing William Graham Sumner’s definition of the “forgotten man”: “He works; he votes; generally, he prays — but he always pays.”
“Now, the forgotten man today is the taxpayer,” Bachus said. “It’s discussed and it’s decided that we are going to help this individual or corporation out, we propose a law, and guess what, it’s the forgotten man today who always pays for someone else’s mistake. He pays his mortgage on time, but he has to pay someone else’s mortgage.”
Critics of the book, including economist Paul Krugman and historian Eric Rauchway, have challenged Shlaes’ use of data, noting, for example, that the unemployment statistics she uses do not count Works Progress Administration jobs. Shlaes defends her approach, arguing that make-work jobs are not evidence of economic growth and noting that President Barack Obama recently used the same data series she did in discussing unemployment during the Great Depression.
Others, such as Matthew Dallek, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, have called her take “revisionist”; Shlaes said she is simply recounting what she found.
It’s clear, however, that she brings a certain perspective to her task. As she told Reason magazine in January: “The government is like a lobster. It will eat anything, it wants to survive, it will compete with anything, and it can be a cannibal. When you look back at the ’30s using the public choice lens, what you discover is the extent to which the Depression wasn’t about a virtuous government and bad businesspeople. Rather, it was about people in office competing with the private sector for power.”
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who invited Shlaes to address the Conservative Opportunity Society earlier this year, uses words like “definitive” when referring to the tome, noting that Shlaes wrote it before the economic meltdown and that he read it “before we saw this even coming.”
“I think it’s conclusive when you read the book, although I don’t believe she said so, that the New Deal was actually a bad deal, and today we have a president who believes that the New Deal was a good deal, and would have been a far better deal if FDR would have spent a lot more money,” he said.
There is a danger, however, in extracting too much from Shlaes’ tale, which is meant to offer something of a corrective to the prevailing wisdom, not a replacement for it.
“Definitive isn’t the word I would use,” Shlaes said. “I just thought, ‘Maybe there’s more to the story, and if I find more, I’ll try to capture that in the book,’” she said.
She notes that she is a “history writer with a journalism background, not an economist,” and that it was not her intent to write a polemic — rather, it was to tell the stories of individuals who lived through and helped shape the era.
“That’s why it’s called ‘The Forgotten Man,’ not ‘The Misspent Money’ — it’s about the people,” she said. “The book is specifically about policy agony — when you do policy and you know that the policy that you’re doing is not optimal. It’s about the New Dealers, in part, and their own agony at the imperfection of their work.”
Fans of the book’s political applications might also take note that Shlaes herself stops short of asserting that a laissez-faire approach would have been more successful than the one Franklin D. Roosevelt took.
“We don’t know — because we weren’t there — what would have happened if they had left the market alone,” she said. Or, as she puts it in the book, “Of course Hoover and Roosevelt may have had no choice but to pursue the policies they did. They may indeed have spared the country something worse — an American version of Stalin’s communism or Mussolini’s fascism.”
How does she feel about being a darling of the House GOP? “Insofar as certain policymakers are reading the book, on the authorly level, that’s really gratifying,” she said.
“And if certain politicians find ‘The Forgotten Man’ useful for making arguments, that’s great, but that does not mean that I endorse the individual action of the individual lawmaker,” said Shlaes.
“Books have lives, and stuff happens to them that you never plan.”
I just wish they’d read the Constitution for a change.
My dad recommended this book to me a couple months ago. For right now, I’m reading a survival book, but plan on reading this one soon.
It is good.
Read it in combination with Robert Gellately’s “Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe.”
Have not read it yet, but I am presently reading one written from a European perspective released in 1942, captures all the evils of national socialism:
The Road to Serfdom, by Hayek
It is excellent and powerful - disturbing to see how close the economic policies of the Obama administration parallel those of the Third Reich.
That’s fine and dandy, but they sure as hell better be reading Liberty and Tyranny as well.
Of course it's "revisionist" - the progressives/liberals write the history and make sure their books get into the schools and universities.
If the Republicans are devouring this one, they should try "Free to Choose" and "Road to Serfdom" for a second course and "Atlas Shrugged" for dessert. Then watch "Fountainhead" and "Zhivago" for the double feature after dinner.
Yes. I like how she puts a face onto the victims of the New Deal. For those who believe in the cold inhumanity of conservative economic principles need to read this book as it will give them a perspective of the cold inhumanity of American Liberalism.
There are a ton of stories and a ton of characters, so much so, that it can be difficult to follow at times. However, it’s worth reading at least to be argue with your liberal friends in their same language, which is from the perspective of the victims of liberal policies.
I read the book right after it came out. I think that the author was on Bill Bennett’s show. Excellent book but even more relevant now. I just read it at the time for the take on the depression.
Another excellent book about the economic policies of that era is from the German perspective; The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze provides an excellent account of German economic policy during the Nazi years.
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