The Forgotten Man

At the behest of my brother-in-law I have only just completed the reading of a book he loaned me over the holidays ... the Christmas holidays... okay so Evelyn Wood would not be proud of me!

Anyway, it was a book I was truly anxious to jump into and it has lived up to my expectations. The book is "The Forgotten Man", the author is Amity Schlaes - an economist and columnist.

The subtitle indicates that it is a "New History of the Great Depression". My brother-in-law indicated that there are a lot of parallels between our present day - which some are now referring to as "The Great Recession" and that tragic event that drug out the 1930's.

Other than the stuff my parents and grandparents told me about the Great Depression - and what I saw on "The Waltons", I more or less skipped over that decade of American history. I always seemed to have been enamored by the following decade - the 1940's.

I have decided that Barack Obama is FDR - only FDR isn't what we thought he was. In many ways, George W. Bush was very "Hoover-like". George W. Bush started us down the road of government takeovers with his "TARP I"; Hoover began to open the door to collectivism - the idea that some things were too big to be handled by business or individual states - they needed be organized by a larger hand - the hand of government. Hoover just opened the door. Roosevelt tore down the door and the entire structure in an attempt to remake everything.

My Dad is not and never was - a Roosevelt man. My grandfather, Dad's father-in-law could never leave his allegiance to Roosevelt. I heard Dad argue with him many times, that it was FDR that got us into all this mess with so much government spending; my Papa (grandfather) would respond with something like: "Dav-O, you just don't know ... he got us out of some terrible trouble!"

That was always the story. No matter how much of a Socialist - or even Communist - Roosevelt was, he got us out of the Depression.

In the book, Schlaes builds the case for the fact that by manipulating money, attacking big business in the courts and in the newspapers, and proposing and passing legislation that so favored Unions that it hamstrung business - Roosevelt worsened and prolonged the Depression.

It seems to me that FDR just revelled in his power and played with it like a game - pitting his own people against one another; speaking in favor of something one day and against it the next.

His first term was very "Utopian" , his "brain-trust" was all made up of ideologues many of whom adored Marx, Lenin and Stalin.

It seems that FDR's first term might have been somewhat like Obama's - massive changes. In fact, his popularity - like Obama's was on the downward slide. That's when FDR shifted and began a practice of favoring specific coalitions with funding or with favorable legislation. In doing so he built up a solid block of votes.

Somewhere in that first term, Roosevelt left many of his ideals behind and followed his first love - politics.

That modus-operandi got him through three more elections.

Some things stand out to me about this history:

• While I am in no wise, a Roosevelt fan (unless were talking about Uncle Teddy), my impression of him has always been somewhat favorable; now it is less.


• I believe that the period of the 1920's have been grossly mis-characterized. My impression was that it was a decade of debauchery. People spent money they didn't have, speculated, and lived wildly. But rather, the 1920's was a remarkable decade - a Renaissance of Capitalism. It was an age of invention and industry... Ford ... Edison.... etc. And while the prosperity of the day did lure some people into spending what they did not have, many people went from rags to riches through honest, hard work and smart dealing.


• I thought the term "jobless recovery" was something Rham Emanuel invented to try and keep the wolves at bay until the Obama administration could complete it's U.S. make-over; instead I learned that FDR's administration used the same term to describe the "recovery" of the early thirties. . . a recovery that wasn't really materializing.


• I had a better impression of Hoover before reading the book. He seems to me to be a great manager. He was best when there was a crisis and he could pull in talents and resources and manage a solution. But his policy on tariffs hampered the economic downturn and as mentioned earlier, he winked toward collectivism and the idea that the government might be the solution after all.


• I am amazed at the government entities that we take for granted today - that once were private enterprises or considered shockingly Socialistic at their inception. Like Social Security and the TVA.


• Finally, I think it was Stalin that really turned this country around: when he started executing many of his former political allies - many of the eggheads in the Brain-trust saw the light.

Their new found allegiance to the country coupled with the diligent patriotism of "The Forgotten Man" made up the Greatest Generation.

It's not a real difficult read if you like American History - I highly recommend the book ... especially for these times.