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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
As the generations that experienced the Great Depression, even the youngest of them, die off, the period passes into the care of historians. There is a danger, at this remove in time, of Depression nostalgia. T. H. Watkins's "The Great Depression: America in the 1930s," an illustrated print companion to 1993's public-television series of the same name, concludes on a ringing upbeat note:
In the end, the world of the Great Depression, molded by fear, uncertainty, determination, and a wondrous bravery, gave us the world of our own present hope--and if we shape our world half as well as did the men and women of the 1930s, we will have gone a long way toward honoring our own obligation to the future.
David M. Kennedy's mammoth "Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945" won its author the Pulitzer Prize for the year 2000 and, from the Boston Globe, the encomium "This is modern America's story--modern America's most thrilling, most irresistible, and most significant story." If not as thrilling and oft-told as that of American involvement in the Second World War, the decade that preceded the war has received ample attention, from Studs Terkel's book of colloquial, sometimes searing interviews, "Hard Times" (1970), to the tables and hard-core economics of Ben S. Bernanke's "Essays on the Great Depression" (2000). Now we have, in a sprightly contrarian mood, "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression," by Amity Shlaes, a syndicated columnist for Bloomberg News and a former member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal (HarperCollins; $26.95).
Where the words "new history" appear, revisionism will follow. Shlaes's introduction tells us, "It is time to revisit the late 1920s and the 1930s. Then we see that neither the standard history nor the standard rebuttal entirely captures the realities of the period." With a degree of divulgence rare in an introduction, Shlaes lays out her thesis. "The standard history of the Great Depression" is pro-Roosevelt, and is wrong:
The same history teaches that the New Deal was the period in which Americans learned that government spending was important to recoveries. . . . The attitude is that the New Deal is the best model we have for what government must do for weak members of society, in both times of crisis and times of stability. . . . The New Dealers displayed a sort of dynamism from which today's moribund politicians might learn. . . . FDR saved the country in peace, and then he saved it in war. Or so the story line goes.
Shlaes's story line proposes instead that the nineteen-twenties, far from "a period of false...
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