The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression is a book by Amity Shlaes and published by HarperCollins. The book is a re-analysis of the events of the Great Depression, generally from a free-market perspective. The book criticizes Herbert Hoover and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff for their role in exacerbating the Depression through government intervention. It criticizes Franklin D. Roosevelt for erratic policies that froze investment and for the steps needed to stop the Depression. Shlaes criticizes the New Deal for extending the length of the Depression and for its effects on individuals.
Shlaes praises the model offered by Wendell Willkie before the 1940 presidential election, where the New Deal would have been scaled back and business would have stepped in.
The book begins with an anecdote of the 1937 recession, eight years after the Depression began, when Roosevelt adopted budget-balancing policies indistinguishable from the stereotype of what Hoover supposedly did. Shlaes presents her arguments in part by telling stories of self-starters who showed what the free market could have accomplished without the New Deal.
The book argues that members of FDR's "Brain Trust", including Rexford Tugwell of Columbia University, had connections to the Soviets and their interest in central planning.
Read more about The Forgotten Man: A New History Of The Great Depression: Reception
Famous quotes containing the words forgotten, history and/or depression:
“A: You have never forgotten a grievance or remembered a favor. B: What favor?”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The chief lesson of the Depression should never be forgotten. Even our liberty-loving American people will sacrifice their freedom and their democratic principles if their security and their very lives are threatened by another breakdown of our free enterprise system. We can no more afford another general depression than we can afford another total war, if democracy is to survive.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)