Vote For Roosevelt

   

This editorial endorsement of the New Deal will surely disabuse anyone who'd thought about casting a vote for Herbert Hoover in the next election.  However, the Herald's timing seems a bit off in a season when one of the most talked-about books is Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.    

    Shlaes' account scrapes a lot of tendentious mythologizing off the record of the New Deal which had become the sole property of  various hagiographers who had made it the conventional wisdom that "Roosevelt ended the Great Depression." 
    Everyone interested in the history of modern economies and desiring to understand how they work should read this book.  Shlaes writes clean, lucid prose and doesn't fall into the trap of sentimentalizing history.  Roosevelt was a great man but an economic downturn occurred on his watch that was as severe as any in this century. 
    We all know the Santayana line about how those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  Well, those who mythologize history guarantee that the lessons we think we are learning will be wrong.

Comments

[Greg Decker]

While I admittedly have little knowledge of Roosevelt's handling of the Great Depression the story of his wife's social experiment in the town of Arthurdal casts some doubts on his economic astuteness. Or at the very least it shows how little attention he paid to his wife's doings.

http://mises.org/story/2645