the forgotten man amity shlaes book review

in the 1950’s, drew a portrait of a nation run by and for economic elites and guided by a philosophy of rugged individualism and laissez-faire. The Crisis of the Old Order, a multi-volume history written by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The best-known accounts of the period are sympathetic to FDR and the New Deal and highly critical of the businessmen, bankers, and Republican presidents of the 1920’s, whom they blame for the collapse. In 1940, on the eve of America’s entry into World War II and as FDR ran for a third term, unemployment still hovered above 14 percent.

In 1938, the unemployment rate was still 17 percent. off the gold standard-slowed the contraction but did not restore the economy to health. Some of Roosevelt’s early measures-deposit insurance, banking reform, and taking the U.S. More than a third of the country’s banks failed in that period, leaving depositors broke and destroying much of the credit system. From late 1929 to early 1933, real economic output in the United States declined by 30 percent and unemployment grew from 3 percent to 25 percent. The dimensions of the crisis faced by FDR were overwhelming.

Much as Lincoln saved the Union and established the symbols of American nationalism, so Franklin Delano Roosevelt (it is said) saved capitalism from itself and laid the framework for the American welfare state. The Great Depression of the 1930’s tested America’s political institutions like no other event in our history except the Civil War. The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

The forgotten man amity shlaes book review