“The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression”, by Amity Shlaes

480 pages, Harper, ISBN-13: 978-0066211701

So, just who is the forgotten man Amity Shlaes references in The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression? The Wall Street tycoon? The homeless families? The street-corner apple vendor? The WPA laborer? That woman in perhaps the most famous photograph of the period by Dorothy Lange, titled “Migrant Mother”? Shlaes makes the case for none of the above and that, rather, the forgotten man of the 1930s were the men and women of the American Middle Class, those people that were not at the very top not at the bottom, but rather flailing about in-between with no evident means of support or succor. Perhaps the best description of this fellow comes from an editorial in a Muncie, Indiana paper: “Who is the forgotten man in Muncie? I know him as intimately as my own undershirt. He is the fellow that is trying to get along without public relief…In the meantime the taxpayers go on supporting many that would not work if they had jobs”. This is, mind you from 1937, but could just as easily been written about any government program from then right to the present day.

Shlaes’ work is very open about the Great Depression and especially about the many (failed) attempts of Coolidge, Hoover and FDR to deal with massive unemployment and a stagnant economy. While both political parties were in power for portions of the Depression, Shlaes does not favor either one, but instead provides several plusses and minuses to the approaches of each, and there are points made that make this reader wonder if we’ve learned anything from past mistakes (the parallels between The Great Depression and The Great Recession are enlightening, and Shlaes places in historical perspective the lost opportunities of an entire generation of Americans, then and now). But while reading The Forgotten Man it is important to realize how different our governmental structure was in the 1930s as compared to now: for example, FDR seemed to begin the large central federal government that we’re now used to, where prior to him the state governments were much more in charge; there were fewer regulations to “protect” us (although one may ask whether the regulations put into place during the Depression and afterwards have actually protected us; think banking regulations) and the accepted limits on what government could and couldn’t do fell firmly on the latter.

With that in mind, much of the story necessarily centers on the Roosevelt Administration’s development of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and its clashes with private power generators and distributors, primarily Commonwealth and Southern, headed by one Wendell Willkie, who was a Democrat at the time. As perhaps the largest example of government intrusion into the private sector, this long running battle is an excellent prism through which to view the developing politics of the era and how, compared to today, so little has sadly changed. It was also an example of how the government had become a competitor with the private sector and, seeing as it was also making the rules, was an unfair competitor, to boot. Shlaes’ premise, therefore, is that the Great Depression lasted as long as it did because everyone on all sides fought the wrong battles, and that it was the man in the middle – the regular guy with a decent job and middle class aspirations – who suffered the brunt of both Governmental and Wall Street fecklessness (as usual). Shlaes further emphasizes how the government’s campaign against private business, the rich and its takeover of certain private functions drove the country into a deeper and much longer depression than may have been otherwise; she quotes FDR in 1931 saying that people “look to us for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of the national wealth”, an understanding of economics that the Democrat Party today has adopted as its credo.

Primum non nocere – First do no harm – is supposed to be the guiding principle of the Hippocratic Oath; would that this basic dictum had been applied to economics, then perhaps the painful history of the Great Depression – and the Great Recession – could have been averted.