Amity Shlaes
The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.
Harper Collins, 464 pages, $26.95

It was famously said that three presidents served under
Andrew Mellon, U.S. Treasury Secretary from 1921 to 1932. In
March 1934 he judged that, set against the long-run
background of American progress, the Great Depression was a “bad
quarter of an hour.” While accepting that present conditions
were “distressing, especially in terms of human suffering,”
he thought that they reflected “a passing phase in our
history.” A strong believer in the rule of law and the need
for the state to respect private property rights, he was
confident that the American economy would bounce back
without big changes in his nation’s key institutions.

Mellon was right about the resilience of the U.S.
economy, but wrong that the Great Depression would leave its
institutions untouched. As Amity Shlaes shows in her
impressive new book, The Forgotten Man, the mid-1930s were
years of political and ideological turmoil. The leaders of
American opinion were less convinced of the fundamental
rightness of their economic and social arrangements than at
any other time, before or since. Many influential Americans
admired Mussolini and believed in the success of Stalin’s
first five-year plan, and they wanted the United States to
experiment with schemes that had fascist or communist
origins. The early years of the Roosevelt presidency saw
radical challenges to property, law, the free market
system, and indeed the Constitution. The resulting changes
to legal and