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The Forgotten Man
by Amity Shlaes
A contrarian, people-centered retelling of the 1930s that asks who really paid for the New Deal's fixes, and whether recovery came slower than it had to.
What It's About
The Forgotten Man is a narrative history of the Great Depression that takes its title from a phrase popularized by William Graham Sumner, a nineteenth-century Yale professor, and later borrowed by Franklin Roosevelt in a 1932 radio address. Amity Shlaes turns that phrase around. Instead of focusing only on the unemployed or the poor, she asks who bore the costs of the government's answers to the crisis: the saver, the small businessman, the worker who kept a job and paid higher taxes, and the investor who waited for confidence to return.
Her approach is storytelling through individuals. Business owners, workers, bankers, and officials move in and out of the account, and the shifts between Washington and ordinary lives give the book a steady human rhythm. The prose is brisk and readable, with a clear narrative line rather than a dense survey of policy. Reading it feels closer to following a long argument conducted through people than to working through a textbook.
Shlaes's central claim is that many New Deal interventions, however well meant, made recovery slower and more uncertain than it needed to be, and that the country's rebound owed more to private initiative and sheer resilience than to federal programs. Readers should expect a clear point of view, pressed hard, with opposing arguments acknowledged more lightly than some readers would like.
Read this if you…
- want a counter-narrative to the usual heroic story of the New Deal
- are interested in how economic policy shapes the choices of ordinary savers and business owners
- prefer history told through individual lives rather than presidents and Congress alone
Skip it if you…
- want a balanced, neutral survey that gives equal weight to every major historian's view
- are looking for a detailed analysis of monetary policy or the banking crisis
Key Ideas
- 1
The taxpayer as the forgotten party
Shlaes uses Sumner's idea to focus on people who received no direct aid but absorbed the costs of relief, taxes, and regulation. This shifts attention from who was helped to who paid, and it makes the book's moral framing distinctive. Her argument rests on the view that those costs had consequences for saving, hiring, and investment.
- 2
Policy uncertainty as a drag on recovery
A recurring theme is that unpredictable rules, price and wage controls, and fresh taxes made businesses hesitant to invest or hire. Shlaes argues that the problem was not only the level of government action but its instability. Readers interested in why confidence matters in economic downturns will find this line of argument central.
- 3
Private resilience and local initiative
The book pays attention to the ways ordinary Americans rebuilt livelihoods through their own efforts, families, and communities. Shlaes presents this resilience as a strength that the national story often overlooks. It is the thread that gives the book its title-level warmth, even when its policy conclusions are contested.
- 4
Recovery as contested history
The book is best read as one side of a long debate about the 1930s, not as a final verdict. Shlaes challenges the standard narrative that treats New Deal programs as the main engine of recovery. Reading it alongside more mainstream accounts helps readers judge which causal claims hold up.
Limitations
Critics argue that Shlaes is selective in choosing evidence and that she underweights the scale of suffering and the real relief that New Deal programs provided. Some economists and historians dispute her reading of cause and effect, especially the claim that policy slowed recovery. Her focus on individual stories, while vivid, cannot settle macroeconomic questions on its own. Because the book is written from a clearly free-market perspective, readers should treat it as a strong argument within an ongoing debate rather than as a settled account.
Questions Readers Ask
- Who is The Forgotten Man best suited for?
- It suits readers who already know the basics of the Great Depression and want a sharper argument about the New Deal. Those interested in economics, political debate, or the history of market policy will find it engaging. It is less useful for readers who want a neutral overview, since the author's perspective shapes almost every chapter. A general reader with some background will find it accessible.
- How does it compare to Jonathan Alter's The Defining Moment?
- Alter's book is more sympathetic to Franklin Roosevelt and focuses tightly on his first hundred days. The Forgotten Man covers a wider stretch of the decade and is openly skeptical of the New Deal's results. Reading both gives a useful contrast, since they reach very different judgments about the same period and the same president.
- Is the book still relevant to current economic debates?
- Yes, many of its questions remain live, including how government spending affects recovery, how regulatory uncertainty shapes investment, and how to weigh costs against benefits in a crisis. Readers should keep in mind that the book was written to contest the prevailing account of the 1930s, so its conclusions are best weighed against later research.
- Published
- 2009
- ISBN
- 9780712639965
- Difficulty
- intermediate
- Category
- Business
Book details and cover from Google Books.
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