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:
“Oh, my. I’d forgotten how much I hate space travel.”
—George Lucas (b. 1944)
“You that would judge me do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)