Location: The Heritage Foundation's Lehrman Auditorium
It's difficult today to imagine how America survived the Great
Depression. Only through the stories of the common people -
the heart of Amity Shlaes's history - who struggled during that era
can we really understand how the nation endured one of the most
crucial events of the 20th Century.
Rejecting the old emphasis on the New Deal, The Forgotten
Man offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great
Depression. Shlaes turns to the neglected and moving stories
of individual Americans and shows how through brave leadership they
helped establish the steadfast character we developed as a
nation. Some of those figures - Andrew Mellon and Sam Insull
- were well known at the time. But there were also unknowns -
the Schechters, a family of butchers in Brooklyn who dealt a
stunning blow to the New Deal; Bill W., who founded Alcoholics
Anonymous; and Father Divine, a black charismatic who steered his
thousands of followers through the Depression by preaching a Gospel
of Plenty.
Shlaes also traces the mounting agony of the New Dealers
themselves as they discovered their errors. She shows how
both Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt failed to understand the
prosperity of the 1920s and heaped massive burdens on the country
that more than offset the benefit of New Deal programs. She
argues that the real question about the Depression is not whether
Roosevelt ended it with World War II, but why the Depression lasted
so long. From 1929 to 1940, federal intervention helped to
make the Depression great - in part by forgetting the men and women
who sought to help one another.