The New Deal as Compensatory Strategy
In The New Yorker of July 2, there is a review by John Updike of a book by Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. The book, it seems, takes issue with usual histories of the Depression and of Roosevelt’s role in saving the country. From her Introduction, Updike quotes Shlaes as saying: “….FDR saved the country in peace, and then he saved it in war. Or so the story line goes.”
Updike points out the faulty logic in Shlaes’ contention that Roosevelt’s interventionist strategies (all that New Deal stuff) were actually counterproductive. FDR did too much fixing, she thinks. Had he left well enough alone, the country would have righted itself of its own accord. The thing that caught my eye was this comment from Updike: “Shlaes, in a bold stroke of psychologizing, lays the hyperactivity to ‘the restlessness of the invalid.’ She goes on, ‘Like an invalid, the country took pleasure in the very thought of motion.’”
Thank you John Updike for drawing attention to Shlaes’ clinical incompetence!! I have rarely encountered a more overblown deterministic explanation of disability’s effect.
