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You are here: Home / Politics / Media / I have heard among this clan

I have heard among this clan

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Republicans are gaga about the revisionism of Amity Shlaes (via Steve Benen). Dave Weigel a few weeks ago:

The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, published in 2007, has become one of the most influential books of the decade. Republicans and conservative activists have read the book, absorbed its lessons, and deployed them in the current debate over how to tackle the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s. Newt Gingrich has read it. So has Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee. And so has Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), the head of the Senate Republican Policy Committee; according to his spokesman, the senator has also circulated the book among his colleagues.

Shlaes is a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, a former board member of the WSJ, and a columnist for Bloomberg. She has written at least three op-eds in the Washington Post over the past year, one of which proclaimed that “Phil Gramm was right…A recession is two consecutive quarters in which the economy shrinks, and last quarter it grew” (later it was determined that the economy had been in recession for six months at the time of her article and Phil Gramm’s remarks).

And what about her great book, The Forgotten Man? Here’s Jon Chait (h/t Steve Benen again):

Now here is the extremely strange thing about The Forgotten Man: it does not really argue that the New Deal failed. In fact, Shlaes does not make any actual argument at all, though she does venture some bold claims, which she both fails to substantiate and contradicts elsewhere. Reviewing her book in The New York Times, David Leonhardt noted that Shlaes makes her arguments “mostly by implication.” This is putting it kindly. Shlaes introduces the book by asserting her thesis, but she barely even tries to demonstrate it. Instead she chooses to fill nearly four hundred pages with stories that mostly go nowhere. The experience of reading The Forgotten Man is more like talking to an old person who lived through the Depression than it is like reading an actual history of the Depression. Major events get cursory treatment while minor characters, such as an idiosyncratic black preacher or the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, receive lengthy portraits. Having been prepared for a revisionist argument against the New Deal, I kept wondering if I had picked up the wrong book.

Many of Shlaes’s stories do have an ideological point, but the point is usually made in a novelistic way rather than a scholarly one. She tends to depict the New Dealers as vain, confused, or otherwise unsympathetic. She depicts business owners as heroic and noble. It is a kind of revival of the old de haut en bas sort of social history, except this time the tycoons from whose perspective the events are narrated appear as the underappreciated victims, the giants at the bottom of the heap.

[….]

“Even if you add in all the work relief jobs, as some economists do,” she has contended, “Roosevelt-era unemployment averages well above 10 percent. That’s a level Obama has referred to once or twice–as a nightmare.” But Roosevelt inherited unemployment that was over 20 percent! Sure, the level to which it fell was high by absolute standards, but it is certainly pertinent that he cut that level by more than half. By Shlaes’s method of reckoning, Thomas Jefferson rates poorly on the scale of territorial acquisition, because on his watch the United States had less than half the square mileage it has today.

That Republicans embrace this kind of silliness is predictable. That the Council on Foreign relations and our leading newspapers promote it is shameful.

Reader Interactions

27Comments

  4. 4.

    mingo

    sounds like ‘Atlas Shrugged’ for what now passes for right wing ‘intellectuals’.

  5. 5.

    Jon H

    ” That the Council on Foreign relations and our leading newspapers promote it is shameful”

    But also predictable.

  6. 6.

    schrodinger's cat

    They also provide a platform to people like Michael Gerson and Bill Kristol, and then wonder why newspapers are facing difficult financial times.

  10. 10.

    kid bitzer

    #5 is right–edge o.t.a.w. is your go-to site for thorough, well-documented refutations of schlaes and other lying new-deal denialists.

    eric rauchway over at eotaw is a real historian–not a publicist for right-wing front operations–and he has the facts and figures.

  12. 12.

    omen

    reason editor nick gillespie “interviewed” amity shlaes on cspan not long ago. he swallowed everything hook, line and sinker. it was to laugh.

  13. 13.

    RememberNovember

    Amity means friendship- how oxymoronic.

    Theyr’e trying to stuff her into an Ayn Rand suit. /Fail.

    Hey if the New Deal failed then we really didn’t win WW2 and never put a man on the moon.

    They are grasping st straws that don’t even exist.
    Maybe they need to go to Shangri-La di dah Gulch and hide behind there Randian Force Field.

  14. 14.

    Bootlegger

    This is what happens when reporters write history books. Rather than being about the facts, its about the story. Add in the partisan hackery and you now have Faux History to go with Faux News.

  15. 15.

    JK

    @omen: I never considered Nick Gillespie to be the sharpest knife in the drawer. Thanks for providing further evidence to support my judgement of him.

  17. 17.

    Ash Can

    @omen:

    Amity Shlaes was fired from the Financial Times for lying…

    I’m thinking more and more that, in the not-too-distant future, all of our news is going to come from enterprising bloggers and foreign news services. The current US news sources are going to (continue to) marginalize themselves into oblivion through their sheer idiocy and laziness.

  18. 18.

    barkleyg

    ANSWER:

    joe from Lowell

    The Forgotten Man : history book :: Republican April 1 Budget : actual budget

    Question: Which two Fiction reads on the current Repugs reading list for economics contain No numbers, except for Page Numbers?

  19. 19.

    Mike in NC

    This is what happens when reporters write history books. Rather than being about the facts, its about the story. Add in the partisan hackery and you now have Faux History to go with Faux News.

    Several years ago a hack named Robert Stinnett came out with “Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor” which alleged the Japanese attack was provoked by the US government, etc. It enjoyed some popularity with the wingnuts until it was ripped apart by numerous actual historians and experts on the subject, including writers for the US Naval Institute’s “Proceedings” magazine.

  20. 20.

    TheOfficialHatOnMyCat

    The prevailing wind of the 20th Century in the Western World was progressive policy and the advance of liberal government.

    Did we think that the Republicans were going to acknowledge that for us? Hype it up?

    Maybe we can spend a few days gazing into CATO Institute literature? Good times! We can start with their blueprint for destroying Social Security.

  21. 21.

    Comrade Kevin

    @Ash Can:

    I’m thinking more and more that, in the not-too-distant future, all of our news is going to come from enterprising bloggers and foreign news services. The current US news sources are going to (continue to) marginalize themselves into oblivion through their sheer idiocy and laziness.

    If that happens, we’ll really be fucked.

  22. 22.

    The Pale Scot

    How does a B.A. in English qualify one to comment on economics?

    maybe by being a hard core Likudist.

  23. 23.

    Ash Can

    @Comrade Kevin:

    If that happens, we’ll really be fucked.

    Tell me about it. But what can we expect if, while all the big-name domestic news sources DougJ mentions happily print her crap, it’s only the Financial Times that kicks her good-for-nothing ass to the curb?

  24. 24.

    TonyT

    She’s a game girl though, got up and finished 4th!

    Having a good time? Grab a line …

  25. 25.

    Hedley Lamarr

    I have seen this unhappy individual a few times on my TV and conclude that she is not sighted. Therefore, with no editor, she types blindly on her computer. Monkeys do this well, too.

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