The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression
by Amity Shlaes
List Price:
Our Price: $6.88
You Save: $9.11 (57%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.39 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Amity ShlaesBrand: Harper Collins Publishers
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-05-27
ISBN: 0060936428
Number of pages: 512
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Book Reviews of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression
Book Review: The pendulum swings
Summary: 5 Stars
A very well written book about the times during the 1930. Puts things in perspective, especially during our own depression.
It is interesting to contrast the power that FDR welded during this time. As compared to the days of George Washington and Andrew Jackson, the amount of power in the federal government can be considered frightful. And, yet again, with changes in the economy, the pendulum swings again to a protectionist government.
I especially appreciate the "Cast of Characters," "timeline," "Coda," and the extensive Index, which is helpful to keep all the characters straight. The book is also a reason for investment in a Kindle, to quickly take a deeper look into all the historical characters mentioned.
The Forgotten Man - A new History of the Great Depression
Amity Shlaes
Fed is created in 1913
Herbert Clark Hoover - President 1929-1933
Market Crash 1929
Franklin Delano Roosevelt - President 1933-1944
Securities Act 1933 Roosevelt Stocks & bonds require to file with Federal trade Commission
1934 Securities and Exchange Act, establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission
1935, July 5: Wagner Act - National Labor Relations Board, which ensure the right to collective bargaining and unions
1935, August 14 Social Security act
Aug 30 - Revenue act- Estate and gift taxes, dividend taxes
1934, July 7 - Marco Polo Bridge, near Beijing - Start of Sino-Japanese war
1934, December - Rape of Nanking
1938, June 25 - Fair Labor Standards Act: minimum wage and maximum work hours
1940, Sept 27: Germany, Japan and Italy enters Axis Pact
Nov 5: FDR wins 3rd term
Crash did not cause the depression. Necessary correction of a too-high stock market.
* Loss of international trade due to tariffs and collapse of Europe
* Challenge of change to industrialization from agriculture
* Dust bowl
1. The Beneficent Hand: Jan 1927: Unemployment: 3.3% DOW: 155
Hoover, born 1874 - orphan Coolidge
Fly fisherman Worms
Microphone, love publicity Shy: landslide in 1924, clerk read this state of the union address
Mining engineer, paleontology, chemistry Country lawyer
Worldly American Pure new Englander
Government help business do better Adam smith invisible hand. Like Mellonn
Intervener, distrust of wall street Do no harm
Hoover Dam: Colorado 1924 Coolidge dam: Arizona
Started politics late 35 Started at 28
Harding died suddenly Aug 1923 - Coolidge VP
Mid-1920's the business was focus:
Henry Ford: 6,000 cars in 1923
Thomas Edison: Not only changed the conditions under which men live, but also helped to bring about a new social order
British-born Sam Insull, originally Edison bookkeeper:
Finance leaders: Henry Morgenthau Sr; Felix Warburg, Bernard Baruch; JP Morgan
Wendell Willkie, Corporate lawyer for Firestone
Andrew Mellon, treasury secretary, friends with Henry Clay Frick, president of Carnegie Steel
Built a business empire: Bank, steel, aluminum, Bethlehem steel, spindletop, Texas oil, railway, construction and insurance, invest in new innovation - Find a man who can run a business and needs capital to start or expand, Furnish the capital and take shares in the business, leaving the other man to run it except when he is in trouble. When the business has growth sufficiently to pay back the money, take the money and find another man running a business and need of money and give it to him, on the same basis.
Invest in the private sector, do not intervene too much, wait silently, and the returns would be all the greater.
Benjamin Franklin: the way to wealth, if you desire it, is as plain as the way to market, it depends chiefly on 2 words, industry and frugality. That is, waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both.
Father Divine-Salvation of Blacks was through the gospel of plenty
1924 Coolidge Dam in Arizona
Hoover Dam on Colorado River
2 The Junket: July 1927 Unemployment 3.3% DOW 168
July 1927 the President Roosevelt (after Theodore) headed to Soviet Union: Non-Communist, unofficial American trade union delegation. Joseph Stalin welcomes guests to win over American labor & help him to get loans for the government.
Prof. Rexford Guy Tugwell
John Bartlet Brebner
Stuart Chase, CPA and economic commentator & F.J. Schlink created the Consumer Reports
Paul Douglas
George Counts
1922-Sinclair Lewis Babbitt: Is NOT urban, bohemian, anti-money, idealist
1929 Systemization exportation to Gulag
3 the accident: October 1929 Unemployment 5% DOW 343
Dow doubles from 1907 after 20 years. But, doubles in 2 years from 1927 to 1929
Concern over inflation. Fed sells bonds to soak up money to offset monetary expansion.
Hoover moves to affect the economy.
11/19/29: RR asked to continue construction
11/21/29: treasury secretary Mellon: Henry Ford; Julius Rosenwald (Sears); Pierre Du Pont; Alfred Sloan Jr (GM); Julius Barnes (Chairmen of the board of the US Chamber of Commerce): reduce hours, but keep wages high and employment up.
All public works to continue.
4/15/29: Agricultural tariff: All economists against: June 30, 1930 Smoot-Hawley provoked retaliatory protectionist actions by nations all over the globe.
Young Bank of United States: 12/11/30: 500 thousand depositors-small laborers. Leads to concern of other banks
4 the hour of the vallar: Sept 1931 Unemployment 17.4% DOW 140
1931 William Trufant Foster: "When business begins to look rotten, more public spending."
Inflation taxes savers. Deflation taxes risk takers and punishes leveragers. It makes paying mortgages, as well as property taxes, especially difficult. It goes against the American sense of promise, punishing those who dare to hope they might move ahead.
Real bills doctrine: Fed favored banks that carried substant8ial commercial paper. Mortgages, which tended to have maturities of longer periods, won less approval from the banking system.
January 1932: legislation barring government loans to companies whose presidents were paid more than $15,000/year.
Roosevelt brain trust: Moley, Tugwell, Berle and Rosenman: The New Deal a play off of the Square Deal from Teddy Roosevelt.
1932 Hoover signs into law a large tax increase: the Revenue Act of 1932
This was a time when income tax was more of a class tax than a mass tax.
Top rate from mid-20 to 63%
Roosevelt: Our last frontier had long since been reached. It was time for the princes of property, the wealthy to share their resources. Growth would not provide for the poor only redistribution could.
Cash was not available: Salt Lake City creates the Natural Development Association that made its own money, the "vallar"
March 4, 1933: FDR president: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
5 the experimenter: October 1933 Unemployment: 22.9% DOW 93
1932 Glass-Steagall Banking Act in 1932 under Hoover to expand credit.
FDR needs to act: "Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.
National Industrial Recovery Act: Drive up prices and put people back to work. Act establishes Public works Administration. Creates labor rights so worker with more pay would spend more and strengthen the economy. Creates the National Recovery Administration, symbolized by a blue eagle - a clear invocation of war.
Leads to codes of business minimum wage, child labor rules, and maximum hour rules. Overkill of codes: precise components of macaroni, tailors boundaries of work, barred consumers from picking their own chickens for food. All to increase efficiency. If smaller business died out, that might be fore the best.
FDR June 16: "go on in many groping, disorganized, separate units to defeat or shall we move as one great team to victory.
Agricultural Adjustment Administration, created to sort our farming. Relieve the national emergency by increasing purchasing power, especially the power of farmers. Begins to pay farmers to produce less. Also encourages farmers to sell less by offering them favorable loans in exchange for restraint.
Loosens the gold standard: Asks the treasury secretary to call in all the gold in the country forcing citizens to sell their gold to Treasury for dollars. Weakens the gold standard.
Government buys gold to keep the gold price up. Value of dollar decreases. As gold increases, the price of everything including farm goods increases.
Civilian Conservation Corps Camp: Serve youths and men who would be unemployed.
6 a river utopia: November 1933: Unemployment 23.2% DOW 90
Tennessee Valley Authority: November 1933-product of the New Deal. Power resources generally were too important to stay in the private sector. A public authority, it would manage power, rivers, and economic development thought the Tennessee Valley. It would become the yardstick to compare private companies
Arthur Morgan: Dams
Harcourt Morgan: Agriculture
Lilienthal: Power and rates
4 goals: electricity to homes and farms
Increase use of electricity, providing a better standard of living
Reduce cost of electricity
Through electricity, create a new and more prosperous form of society.
Claim to the Hoover dam-> change to Boulder dam
Theodore Roosevelt dam in Arizona
Wilson dam at Muscle Shoals
Coolidge Dam in Arizona
7 a year of prosecutions: January 1934- Unemployment 21.2% DOW 100
1933 year of experiment, 1934 year of prosecutions
Sam Insull and Andrew Mellon
8 the chicken versus the eagle: November 1, 1934 Unemployment 23.2% DOW 93
Marin Schechter of the Brooklyn Schechters, chicken butchers. 11/1/34 first loss in court for violating the NRA.
Law prohibited "straight killing" customer did not have the right to make any selection of particular birds
1935 Monopoly created
Bill Wilson (stock analyst) and Dr. Robert Smith create Alcoholics anonymous.
5/27/33: Schechter wins
9 Roosevelt's wager: July 1935 - Unemployment 21.3% DOW 119
Works Progress Administration: run hospitals; dig ditches projects under $25,000
Federal Writers' Project to employ unemployed writers_ write travel guides to towns and regions
National youth Administration work and education for thousands of college and high schoolers
FDR rallies against great accumulation of wealth create a tax bill to change society.
Rich families to pay an estate tax when they die, and also a new inheritance tax when they inherited money. Graduated corporate income tax vs. flat tax
1935 Bob Wagner Act: Union, once in place at a company, might keep out workers who did not join. Union need not ever again subject to election for ratification-represent workers in perpetuity.
Social Security Act - provide pensions for senior citizens. First social security payment would not be issued until 1940. Entice older workers to retire to leave more work for young.
Utilities Act: 8/26/35
The new deal was causing the country to forgo prosperity, if not recovery. The wealthy, after all, were in a position to take risks with new ventures precisely because they were wealthy-they could invest in several projects at once.
1935 75% of projects taxed.
John Marsh, subordinate of Willkie - marries a smith college dropout who writes gone with the wind. Leads Willkie to promote Marsh to match success of wife...
1936 first time in peacetime America, federal spending would outpace that of states and localities.
1936 7th year of depression. Draught hits affecting 33% of the nation
John Steinbeck: Grapes of Wrath
10 Mellon's gift December 1936: unemployment 15.3% DOW 182
Andrew Mellon Business, the private sector could give to the people more than government.
1930 creates A.W Mellon educational and charitable trust
11 Roosevelt's revolution January 1937 Unemployment 15% DOW 179
1/20/37 FDR inauguration see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. We are beginning to wipe out the line that divides the practical from the ideal; and in so doing we are fashioning an instrument of unimagined power for the establishment of a morally better world.
12 the man in the brooks brothers shirt January 1937 unemployment 15.1% DOW 179
Stalin's Russia
[...]
Wagner Act, in the short run, continued to hurt profitable companies.
13 black Tuesday, again August 27, 1937 Unemployment 13.5% DOW 187
Andrew Mellon dies (82) August 19737
Taxes designed to punish risk but permitted little reward.
14 brace up, America January 1938 Unemployment 17.4% DOW 121
1935 Congress passed a Neutrality Act. Republicans were still leading the isolationist charge
15 Willkie's wager January 1940 unemployment 14.6% DOW 151
WWII, as in any war, bigger business tended to do well, for they were the ones who became government partners.
Summary of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression
In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes, one of the nation's most-respected economic commentators, offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depression. She traces the mounting agony of the New Dealers and the moving stories of individual citizens who through their brave perseverance helped establish the steadfast character we recognize as American today.
Business & Investing Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in Business & Investing Books
Money for Nothing: One Man's Journey Through the Dark Side of Lottery Millionsby Edward Ugel
HarperBusiness; Published: 2007-09-18; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $1.29
Price in other shops:
You Can Do It! CDby Jonathan D. Pond
HarperAudio; Published: 2006-11-28; Audio CD; Book
Best price: $2.05
Price in other shops:
China's Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Societyby John Naisbitt, Doris Naisbitt
HarperBusiness; Published: 2010-01-05; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $6.99
Price in other shops:
The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperityby Richard Florida
Harper; Published: 2010-04-27; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $9.96
Price in other shops:
Super Freakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insuranceby Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
William Morrow; Published: 2009-10-20; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $6.88
Price in other shops:
Attitude is Everything Rev Ed: 10 Life-Changing Steps to Turning Attitude into Actionby Keith Harrell
HarperBusiness; Published: 2005-05-03; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.31
Price in other shops:
Get Back in the Box: How Being Great at What You Do Is Great for Businessby Douglas Rushkoff
HarperBusiness; Published: 2007-01-30; Paperback; Book
Best price: $0.70
Price in other shops:
Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Tradersby Jack D. Schwager
Perennial (HarperCollins); Published: 1990-08; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.99
The Truth About Money 3rd Editionby Ric Edelman
HarperBusiness; Published: 2003-12-23; Paperback; Book
Best price: $2.50
Price in other shops:
J.K. Lasser's Taxes Made Easy for Your Home-Based Businessby Gary W. Carter
Macmillan General Reference; Published: 1999-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.00
Price in other shops:
Similar Books and other products
A History of the American Peopleby Paul Johnson
Harper Perennial; Published: 1999-02-17; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.49
Price in other shops:
Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modernby Joshua Zeitz
Broadway; Published: 2007-02-06; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.50
Price in other shops:
The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 2)by F. A. Hayek
University Of Chicago Press; Published: 2007-03-30; Paperback; Book
Best price: $10.69
Price in other shops:
The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War IIUniversity Of Chicago Press; Published: 1996-05-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $17.97
Price in other shops:
Why Government Is the Problem (Essays in Public Policy)by Milton Friedman
Hoover Inst Pr; Published: 1993-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $2.19
Price in other shops:
Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1940: How Americans Lived Through the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depressionby David E. Kyvig
Ivan R Dee; Published: 2004-06-30; Paperback; Book
Best price: $11.90
Price in other shops:
Rethinking the Great Depression (American Ways Series)by Gene Smiley
Ivan R. Dee; Published: 2003-07-21; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.00
Price in other shops:
Economic Facts and Fallacies: Second Editionby Thomas Sowell
Basic Books; Published: 2011-03-22; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.07
Price in other shops:
New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged Americaby Burton W. Folsom Jr.
Threshold Editions; Published: 2009-11-17; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.49
Price in other shops:
The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in Americaby Burton W. Folsom
Young America's Foundation; Published: 1991; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.82
Price in other shops: