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In this new history of the Depression and the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Amity Shlaes gives an unusually close-up view of the workings of a presidency long enshrined in American myth. The myth takes a pretty good beating at the hands of this very capable economic historian. FDR did manage to pass out enough jobs, mail out enough Social Security checks, FDR was consistent in one thing: demonizing the rich and anyone else who didn't like what he was doing. He was ruthless in pursuing baseless tax-evasion charges against Andrew Mellon, whose tax-cutting policies in the 1920s had propelled phenomenal growth in the U.S. economy. The book gives a detailed portrait of one of FDR's chief lieutenants: Rex Tugwell, a key player in agricultural policy, who later concluded that much of what he had done was a waste of time. Shlaes is extremely effective in covering the Schechter "sick chicken" case. To a modern reader, it is incredible that farmers could be sued by the federal government for allowing their customers to pick the chicken they wanted out of a coop instead of taking the nearest one! Ditto for other such NRA nonsense as prosecution of a dry cleaner charging ten cents too much to clean a suit. Once you start down the road of running the whole economy, it's hard to know where to stop. Much of the New Dealers' philosophy was honed on a trip to the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, where they were charmed by Joseph Stalin. They believed they had been given a glimpse of a much better future, and returned brimming with ideas on how to run the lives of the commoners in the best interests of the ruling elite. Alas, many were disillusioned when their Russian host signed a deal with Hitler to carve up helpless Poland. Who was "the forgotten man"? In the words of William Graham Sumner, he was the one who got the bill for the money sent by the politician to somebody else, who got it for nothing. This book should be required reading for any voter tempted to vote for a candidate promising us a new version of the old New Deal. It's something the country, and the world, can't afford right now. (Harper Collins, 2007, 383 pp, $26.95) |
and create the farm price support system (which still haunts us today in a time of booming farm product prices) to assemble a winning political coalition. But his economic measures were a hodge-podge of half-baked ideas, the most notable survivor of which is the Social Security system.
