FDR should have trusted in the market to right itself, she argues, while she eulogises the forgotten men (or small businessmen): those rugged individualists who funded FDR's government activism but were scapegoated by him for their trouble. In fact, she argues, Obama's - sorry - FDR's Soviet-inspired, New Deal philosophy of redistribution and state control actually prolonged the depression through over-regulation and punitive taxation (her previous book was called The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy and What to Do About It). The myth Shlaes proposes to bust is that government intervention dug America out of the great depression.

Only when we know this history can we understand the strength of American character today.E arlier this year, the American columnist Amity Shlaes wrote an article for under the heading 'Cheering for Obama stimulus buys into 1930s myth', and it's hard not to see this revisionist history as a sideswipe at the Obama administration's efforts to tackle the recession. It is why the Depression lasted so long.Īuthoritative, original, and utterly engrossing, The Forgotten Man offers an entirely new look at one of the most important periods in our history.

The real question about the Depression, she argues, is not whether Roosevelt ended it with World War II. She shows how both Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt failed to understand the prosperity of the 1920's and heaped massive burdens on the country that more than offset the benefits of the New Deal programs. Shlaes also traces the mounting agony of the New Dealers themselves as they discovered their errors. Rejecting the old emphasis on the New Deal, she turns to the neglected and moving stories of individual Americans. In The Forgotten Man, Miss Shlaes, one of the nation's most-respected economic commentators, offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depression. These are the people at the heart of Amity Shlaes's insightful and inspiring history of one of the most crucial events of the twentieth century.

Only through the stories of the common people who struggled during that era can we really understand how the nation endured. It's difficult today to imagine how America survived the Great Depression.

The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes