The Forgotten Man
The Depression's untold stories
Description
In February 1937, a Brooklyn kosher butcher named Joseph Schechter was still absorbing what had happened to him. Two years earlier, his small family poultry business had gone all the way to the Supreme Court and won — a unanimous ruling that gutted one of the centerpieces of Franklin Roosevelt's recovery program. The Schechters were not economists or activists. They were four brothers who sold chickens and had been prosecuted for, among other things, letting customers pick their own birds. They spent money they did not have fighting a case they did not seek. And when they won, unemployment was still stuck near seventeen percent, seven years after the crash.
That gap is the puzzle at the heart of Amity Shlaes's history of the Great Depression. The familiar story runs smoothly: the market collapsed in 1929, a heartless Hoover did nothing, Roosevelt arrived, the New Deal saved the country, and the war finished the job. Shlaes, a longtime economic writer, does not buy the smoothness. Her real question is not whether Roosevelt eventually ended the slump. It is why a downturn that might have been sharp and short instead dragged on for more than a decade — the longest depression in American memory.
To answer it, she moves the camera off the two presidents and onto the people usually left out of the frame. Financiers and butchers, a charismatic Harlem preacher, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, the utility magnate turned scapegoat. Ordinary Americans trying to help one another while Washington, in her telling, kept changing the rules on them. It is a reinterpretation with an argument inside it, and the argument starts by rewinding to the years before the crash.
The question we’re asking : Why did the Great Depression last so long — and who paid for the decade it took to end?What we’ll see : A reinterpretation that trades the two presidents for the overlooked Americans caught between the 1920s boom and a recovery that kept moving the goalposts.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The prosperity nobody understood
Shlaes opens her account before the crash, because she thinks the men who ran the country in the 1930s misread the decade that came before it. The 1920s had produced a genuine, broad-based prosperity — electrification, radios, cars, a rising standard of living that reached far beyond the wealthy. But to a generation of reformers, that boom looked less like progress than like proof of excess. The wealth was suspect, the speculation was a moral failing, and the correction, when it came, seemed almost deserved.
Andrew Mellon stands at the center of this misreading. Treasury Secretary under three presidents, he was the Alan Greenspan of his era — the financial authority whose word steadied markets. Mellon believed in low taxes and a currency people could trust, and for most of the decade the results seemed to vindicate him. Then the crash came, and the same man who had symbolized the boom became the symbol of everything that had gone wrong with it. His reputation would be dismantled, and eventually the government would prosecute him.
02Chapter 2 — The men who wrote the rules
When Roosevelt took office in March 1933, he brought with him a group of advisers Shlaes follows closely — the Brain Trust and the officials who staffed the alphabet agencies. Several of them had recently traveled to the Soviet Union and returned impressed by the sheer ambition of central planning. They did not want communism. But they did want to plan, and the scale of the crisis gave them permission to try things no peacetime government had tried before.
The centerpiece was the National Recovery Administration, created in 1933. Its logic was that ruinous competition had driven prices and wages into a death spiral, so industries should agree on codes fixing wages, hours, and prices — enforced by Washington, promoted with a Blue Eagle emblem that businesses displayed to show compliance. For a moment it felt like a national mobilization. But the codes multiplied into thousands of pages of rules governing how a barber could cut hair or how a butcher could sell a chicken, and the effect was to freeze an economy that needed to move.
03Chapter 3 — The Schechters, the chickens, and the Court
The Schechter brothers ran a kosher poultry business in Brooklyn, buying live chickens and selling them to local butchers and customers. Under the NRA's Live Poultry Code, they were charged with dozens of violations — selling an unfit chicken, ignoring wage and hour rules, and, most memorably, allowing customers to reach into the coop and select their own bird, which the code forbade. The government made an example of small men to defend a big program.
So the Schechters, with little money and less appetite for the fight, took their case to the Supreme Court. In May 1935, the justices ruled unanimously in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States that the NRA was unconstitutional. Congress, they held, had handed away too much of its lawmaking power to the executive, and the federal government had reached past its authority to regulate a local Brooklyn chicken sale. The Blue Eagle, symbol of the whole recovery effort, was struck down by four butchers.
04Chapter 4 — The people the plan forgot
The book takes its title from a phrase Roosevelt used to powerful effect — the "forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid," the one government would remember. But Shlaes reaches back to an older and sharper version, coined by the nineteenth-century thinker William Graham Sumner. In Sumner's telling, the forgotten man is not the intended beneficiary of a reform. He is the third party — call him C — who quietly foots the bill when A and B decide to help someone with C's money. Every program, in this light, chooses whom it counts and whom it charges.
That reframing is the book's widest claim. A policy is not only a rescue; it is a decision about who pays for the rescue, and that person tends to vanish from the story. The Schechters paid. The taxpayer who financed the shifting programs paid. The unemployed worker who never got hired because capital was waiting out the uncertainty — he paid too, and no one counted him. Shlaes populates her history with these figures precisely because official accounts do not.
05Conclusion
By 1940, more than a decade after the crash, unemployment still ran well into double digits. The war would finally absorb the idle millions, but Shlaes refuses to let that ending settle the question. A slump that might have burned out in a couple of hard years instead smoldered through the 1930s, and her book asks us to sit with that duration rather than skip past it to the victory that followed.