Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Debunking New Deal Revisionism
In the latest New Republic Jonathan Chait puts the smack down on Amity Shlaes, the current darling among the conservative let's-selectively-(and badly)-invoke-history-for-our-own-ideological-purposes set. As an added bonus, he uses a new book by the incomparable William Leuchtenburg, to help reveal Shlaes' book on the New Deal for what it is.
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8 comments:
That review is every bit as bad and selective with its history as Shlaes could ever hope to be. In fairness, I have not read The Forgotten Man, but I can say that how it is being used and how Chait replied are both terrible affronts to the historiography of the 1930s.
Chait and the users of Shlaes' book should read (or reread) at the very least Freedom from Fear and For the Survival of Democracy, then maybe we can start to have a grown-up conversation about the depression and the New Deal.
Seriously? You are accusing a review of being just as "selective" as a book and you think they are comparable sins? Bah.
I'll happily have that "grown-up conversation" about the New Deal now, Tom, having read Kennedy's book about half a dozen times, and teaching it this semester. But more to the point, I'm going skip past Kennedy, accept Hamby (a book on which I was research assistant for two years, btw), but in the end I'm gonna take Leuchtenburg and take my chances.
I'm also not going to take seriously claims that work relief programs did not provide work and counterfactual claims that the New deal made things worse given both the state of the economy from 1930-1933 when FDR took office, the fact of three re-elections that Shlaes cannot explain, and the millions of jobs work relief programs did provide.
No one claims the New Deal worked to end the depresseion, though stimulus spending undoubtedly did, and of course FDR would have loved for us to have been doing that stimulus spending about two years earlier than we did. Meanwhile the New Deal provided demonstrable relief for millions of Americans who otherwise would not have gotten it. That's a counterfactual I'm pretty comfortable with seeing as we have more then three years of a Depression where the counterfactual existed.
So readers: By all means, read Kennedy and Hamby. But more to the point, go read Williams Leuchtenburg's "In the Shadow of FDR," "The Perils of Prosperity," "Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal," "The FDR Years," and his new biography of Hoover and realize just how out of her depths Shlaes is in writing a very, very, very long Wall Street Journal Op-Ed piece, with all of the historical acument journalists usually bring to their books-as-op-ed-pieces. Then file her under "Goldberg, Jonah" and be done with it.
dcat
I'll leave Shlaes' book out of this, because, like you, I have not read it, which is why I aimed my critique at how some conservatives have used the book, which strikes me as historically shallow, to say the least.
My critique in the comment was of Chait's summary of the New Deal--which, not incidently, was not based in any way on a reading of Leuchtenberg's books on the New Deal, but included a point from Leuchtenberg about Hoover--because Chait's summary was just as selective and shallow as he could make it. If that seems like an unfair criticism of a book review, then let me suggest that nowhere in his review does he summarize the New Deal nearly as well as these two sentences: "No one claims the New Deal worked to end the depresseion, though stimulus spending undoubtedly did, and of course FDR would have loved for us to have been doing that stimulus spending about two years earlier than we did. Meanwhile the New Deal provided demonstrable relief for millions of Americans who otherwise would not have gotten it."
Because, as should be obvious, I was questioning Chait's and the users of Shlaes' book knowledge of the New Deal, not Derek Catsam's. Or we can continue to argue with a book based on a hostile reader's review of a book and appeal to the authority of William Leuchtenberg without actually discussing his arguments, rather than discuss why neither Hoover nor FDR managed to end the depression (and what they did do), and what that might tell us about our current crisis.
1) Contra Tom, I have read enough of Shlaes to know that much of what Chait says about it is true. Once you've read several hundred books, and especially if you've read a few dozen that you've also written reviews of, you can usually tell if a book is very good or very bad after a hundred pages or so. Other books take a deeper immersion, and certainly require a full reading if you are going to write a full review, but you know. I'm going to leave it at that.
2) The burden on Chait is the review the book before him, not to write a summary of the New Deal, which, as he points out, has more than half century of historiography behind it. Want a primer on the New Deal and good history, as I say, start with Leuchtenburg.
3) FDR did end the Great Depression. And he did so through massive spending. He just did so through the preparations for WWII as opposed to the New Deal. In the meantime with the New Deal he provided relief and aid for millions, virtually ended the rampant poverty among the elderly, and may have saved American society. And here is my best argument: the 1936 election. After four years of a supposedly not improving economy (that had, actually, improved by almost every possible measure) Americans gave him one of the greatest landslides in American presidential history .
4) I have to leave on a long road trip now, so I'm going to let readers decide what they think of Chait's review and Shlaes' book-length op-ed and the responsibilities a book reviewer has versus those of the writer of a book. But I'll close with this: Don't let the revisionists sell you a bill of goods. For all of its flaws, and there were many, the New Deal was a good and a great thing. Which helps explain why FDR won in 1936, 1940, and 1944.
dcat
1) I'm not sure that this is the standard I would like to follow to get into the details of critiques of the New Deal, but okay.
2) Yes, but part of the burden of writing a critical review of a book on the New Deal should include summarizing the strengths and weaknesses of the New Deal, which, once again, you have done better in these comments than Chait did in the entire article.
I love the work of Leuchtenberg, but I don't think he's the best primer on the New Deal anymore, mainly because his most comprehensive work on the subject, FDR and the New Deal, is on the far side of the fifty years of historiography you mention. That is why I think Kennedy is better right now.
3) and 4)(kinda) These are the points worth discussing in detail, because they get at the discussion that neither the users of Shlaes nor Chait want to delve into: where, how, and why did the New Deal succeed and fail? As opposed to "New Deal spent a lot, the depression did not end, therefore spending bad," or "Lots of spending ended depression, therefore spending good."
1) You eat poo.
2) Lots and lots of poo.
3) Leuchtenberg has written a great deal on the topic since then. I love Kennedy, don't get me wrong, but on FDR, as in the profession generally, Leuchtenburg > Kennedy. Always.
dcat
I have read the book. It is ok.
I should say that I have read all of the books. I bet even BL himself would write a different book now. Kennedy is probably the closest thing to definitive now.
...and the New Deal was an ineffective mess.
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