Monday, February 13, 2017

Booktalk



We compartmentalize history to fit into teaching blocks, necessarily. Chunks on a timeline. The intricate web of overlapping circumstances, isms, failures, and gamesmanship gets hewn to a monolithic lesson: the New Deal and how Roosevelt and war pulled the U. S. Out of the Great Depression.

Now, outside of classroom constraints it is easier to range about and wrestle within the tentacles that obscure historical snapshots, but which flesh-out the dynamics of a moment and help us grasp the complexity and fluidity of history.

It is a daunting challenge for a writer - and a reader, too. Indeed, it took Amity Shlaes five years to complete her study of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man (2008).

It is not an overview as much as it is an argument for reassessment. Shlaes, a respected writer on economics, argues that the New Deal ultimately "maintained" the depression, and that Roosevelt's exponential exercise of presidential power to leverage government as a pivotal player in economics was as much an obstacle to enterprise and growth as it was a vehicle for rescue and salvation.

Her premise that the degree to which Roosevelt experimented with recipes for recovery, chastised the wealthy as immoral, and politicized groups in need to cultivate constituencies taxed my skepticism, but she also illustrated both the amazing capacity of bureaucracy as well as the pitfalls of their entrenched policies, maneuvering directors, and tendency for self-survival.

The players she chose to introduce and follow through the book were mainly Roosevelt's "brain trust," a stew of intellectuals he kept at a boil from whom he distilled ideas that he put into action, action, action: the scope, complexity, and pace of which still startles.

I came away from this read with not so much an assessment of those times as with more questions about my own expectation of the balance of government in our lives. Surely, the role grew under the New Deal; working to sustain a nation, but also intruding on the individual.

Perhaps the most inspired inclusion by Shlaes was the chapter on Andrew Mellon's legacy. After eight years during which Roosevelt dogged Mellon in the courts as representative of the wealthy capitalists who had caused the the Wall Street collapse, Mellon steps forward in his old age with his long-planned gift to the nation; a National Gallery of Art comprised of his life-long art collection and the construction of the building itself. It is a priceless indulgence only the wealthy could have amassed.  Mellon's unselfishness highlights for Shlaes that private enterprise as much as government is capable of responsible, even inspired, action.

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