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Fireside chats dust bowl definition4/17/2024 ![]() ![]() ![]() “By personality an intervener,” he favored government intervention, as long as it didn’t violate his sense of the Constitution, and sought control over economic events that would, according to Shlaes, have gone better if left alone. Hoover, contrary to his popular image as a do-nothing President who hid from the Depression on fly-fishing retreats to his Appalachian camp on Virginia’s Rapidan River, was a dynamo, a world-travelling freelance engineer and humanitarian from the West he had risen to the highest office after energetically performing as Secretary of Commerce for Presidents Harding and Coolidge. But the gravest problem, as Shlaes sees it, was government “intervention, the lack of faith in the marketplace.” Both Presidents tried to lift wages, when letting them sink would have liberated businesses to start hiring and resume business as usual. There were multiple contributing factors: the stingy Federal Reserve the “disastrous” Smoot-Hawley tariff, which discouraged foreign trade higher taxes imposed on a staggering citizenry freaks of weather like floods and the drought-induced Dust Bowl. It was a necessary correction of a too-high stock market, but not a necessary disaster.” The crash preceded an underlying problem, deflation, caused by not enough money in circulation as banks failed and shut their doors a number of dollar-starved communities-Salt Lake City Ventura, California Yellow Springs, Ohio-issued their own scrip, while Presidents Hoover and then Roosevelt supported policies, like the gold standard, aimed at a nonexistent inflation. “American capitalism did not break in 1929. Shlaes’s story line proposes instead that the nineteen-twenties, far from “a period of false growth and low morals,” were “a great decade of true economic gains” whose “faith in laissez-faire” was justified. FDR saved the country in peace, and then he saved it in war. The New Dealers displayed a sort of dynamism from which today’s moribund politicians might learn. The attitude is that the New Deal is the best model we have for what government must do for weak members of society, in both times of crisis and times of stability. The same history teaches that the New Deal was the period in which Americans learned that government spending was important to recoveries. “The standard history of the Great Depression” is pro-Roosevelt, and is wrong:> Then we see that neither the standard history nor the standard rebuttal entirely captures the realities of the period.” With a degree of divulgence rare in an introduction, Shlaes lays out her thesis. Shlaes’s introduction tells us, “It is time to revisit the late 1920s and the 1930s. Where the words “new history” appear, revisionism will follow. Now we have, in a sprightly contrarian mood, “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression,” by Amity Shlaes, a syndicated columnist for Bloomberg News and a former member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal (HarperCollins $26.95). Bernanke’s “Essays on the Great Depression” (2000). Kennedy’s mammoth “Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945” won its author the Pulitzer Prize for the year 2000 and, from the Boston Globe, the encomium “This is modern America’s story-modern America’s most thrilling, most irresistible, and most significant story.” If not as thrilling and oft-told as that of American involvement in the Second World War, the decade that preceded the war has received ample attention, from Studs Terkel’s book of colloquial, sometimes searing interviews, “Hard Times” (1970), to the tables and hard-core economics of Ben S. ![]()
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