The Great Depression: America 1929-1941

by Robert S. McElvaine

Book Overview

A perennial backlist performer. From the Trade Paperback edition. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812923278
• Release Date: December 1993
• Publisher: Times Books
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 1.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.2" x 1.2" x 6.1"

Customer Reviews

The Depression from the bottom-up

Having just read "The Forgotten Man" by Amity Shlaes, and "The Great Depression" by Robert McElvaine, back-to-back, I have the opportunity to compare how both authors treat this complex topic. What struck me is that Shlaes' approach seems to be "top-down" while McElvaine's approach is "bottom-up". McElvaine sprinkles into his text the correspondence from ordinary Americans to the Roosevelts; the language is rich, heartfelt, evocative, and infuses the text with a deep sense of melancholy. Shlaes focuses more on the major players, people in a position of power, thought leaders. Both authors approach the topic of the New Deal from diametric economic and political camps. McElvaine's commentary is definitely biased toward a liberal belief in government. His swipes at President Reagan may seem anachronistic (I believe the book was published in the early eighties, and then re-published in the early nineties) so Reagan-bashing may have been more au courant at the time, but now it seems like cheap jabs. Fortunately, these remarks are not too distracting. Shlaes makes a strong case that the New Deal was concident to the easing of the economic downturn, while McElvaine plays both sides - he attributes the New Deal as "saving capitalism" but as having little influence on ending the Depression. Both books emphasize the experimental nature of FDR's attempts at righting the economy, and ascribe much of the direction of the New Deal to political rather than economic forces. Both books are required reading for the student who wishes to understand how America changed from the Roaring Twenties to the Great Depression.

Wonderful history book

Wow. I've read a lot of history over the years and this is clearly one of the best. Way more than a recitation of facts, McElvaine offers an interpretation of what was going on in the 1920s and 1930s. I know conservatives will hate this and accuse it of a liberal bias -- and McElvaine is clearly a liberal -- but it's hard to see how Coolidge Economics -- tax cuts for the wealthy, an anti-regulatory atmosphere, an explosion of credit -- could result in anything other than an asset bubble and a financial/economic meltdown. Oversimplifying here, but when wages are stagnant but corporate profits, dividends, and stock prices climb rapidly, the result is that the investor class keeps investing (and speculating) in new factories and new products that the other 90% of the population can no longer afford -- so corporations think of new ways to offer credit. E.g., the installment plan. At some point, even credit hits a limit, consumer demand declines, corporations cut back, bank and business asset values fall.... (Richard Koo's The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics is another good title on this subject.) McElvaine notes that Roosevelt's policies did *not* get the US out of the Depression. (The unemployment rate in 1939 was still 17%.) Roosevelt was a pragmatic policitian, according to McElvaine -- which conclusion he backs up with plenty of examples -- and did not stick to any particular set of policies, producing the up-and-down nature of the 1930s. It took WWII to finally stimulate the economy enough to get it going again. This book is more political history than social or economic history. So, if you're looking for a day in the life of the "forgotten man", that's a different book. But it does cover enough of social history to get a feel for the period. E.g., the different effect of 1920s and 1930s movies on the public is discussed. And there's enough of economic history to see that those economic "historians" who start with economic theory and then cherry-pick facts to support their theory, have gone off in the wrong direction. McElvaine covers events in detail, including the creation and history of all those alphabet-soup agencies of the 1930s. So even if you disagree with his conclusions, the info is all here for you to draw your own.

New Deal as Seen from the Reagan Era

This book was written in 1983, in the early years of Ronald Reagan's presidency. It's very interesting to see how angry the Reagan fans are at reading it. Biased! they cry, and so it is... forthrightly biased against Reagan, but intelligently skeptical toward the alleged success of Keynsian solutions to the Depression. Critics of FDR today seem widely to assume that the New Deal was strictly a Keynsian operation; McElvaine takes pains to distinguish FDR's policies from Keynesian thinking. Roosevelt, says McElvaine, was never a thorough Keynsian. Historiography is a leapfrog occupation; the history written in 1983 becomes the source material of 2007. Much better statistical analysis of data from the 1930s is now possible because of computers. Letters and hidden files from the 1930s are now available. Thus "we" think ourselves better positioned to know what was really happening than poor Robert McElvaine, who wrote his book without our telescopic hindsight. The most interesting material in this still widely read textbook, for me anyway, is found in the last chapter, titled Perspective. McElvaine was highly alarmed at the economic policies he foresaw Reagan instituting. Here's what he wrote: Keynsianism had offered a temporary way out of the Depression, but by itself it could provide no permanent solution. The fundamental problem in the economy remained maldistribution of income. ...there were some significant changes in income distribution in the United States between 1929 and 1981. There were important reductions in the shares going to the top 5 percent and the top 20 percent. Most of these declines...took place during the Great Depression. ...the redistribution from the top fifth went mostly to the second and third fifths; to the middle class. ...Although the poorest Americans have not benefited greatly, it is reasonable to conclude that the redistribution from the richest to the middle-income brackets helped sustain purchasing power in the postwar years of relative prosperity. Ronald Reagan's 1981 imitation of Andrew Mellon's tax cuts favoring the rich reversed this beneficial trend, and did so quite intentionally. Yes, one can see why the Reaganites would hate this book! Later, McElvaine declares that the real solution to the Depression that emerged from the New Deal and wartime spending was to return to the old-time American faith in more or less constant expansion. Two factors, he argues, have prevented a major depression in the postwar years: the Keysian 'skills' the government had learned to apply to recession and inflation, and the ability of the many programs left from the New Deal to work automatically "to counter economic downturns." If McElvaine were to write a 16th chapter to his book today, He'd have a lot to gloat about as a prophet. Reaganomics sharply reversed the redistributive justice of the New Deal, transferring wealth and ownership to the richest of the rich from the potential earnings of the middle class, and doing nothi

Good Book on the History of the Great Depression

This is a good book on the HISTORY of the Great Depression era. If you are writing a college paper or just want to read an authoritative book on the subject, read this book. I was impressed with how thoroughly the author detailed the people, the times, and the policies that were enacted (and the political reasons they came about in that form) and kept the book moving along. There are details and more details. I was surprised with some of the things I read. Messy politics seemed to drive many of the policies adopted to deal with the Great Depression. The New Deal was not a tidy, consistent program but a series of pragmatic reforms in a sea of economic turmoil. You get a good feel for that era. It is obvious that most people back then felt that capitalism was obviously flawed because of the disaster called the Great Depression. There had been a feeling since Theodore Roosevelt's big stick attacks against "the malfactors of great wealth" that capitalism needed to be tamed. The Great Depression brought that to a head. Many people living back then acquired a deep fear of laissez-faire capitalism, and a wave of activism rose up to do something about it. Some of FDR's political maneuvers detailed in this book seemed designed to neutralize some of the more radical activists at that time, like Father Coughlin, Huey Long, and the Townsend plan. The Townsend plan and Huey Long's share the wealth programs were radical schemes to redistribute wealth. They had huge followings of millions in America. So FDR moved to cut them off with what was then a slim version of Social Security (later expanded by others). In retrospect, FDR appears in this book as a master politician, an opportunist, and a pragmatist. In a sea of Depression era politics, he navigated himself and the country (like the sailor he was) from the center-right (an advocate of balanced budgets, reduced government payrolls, and mild relief efforts) to the center-left (Social Security, more extensive relief programs, populist speeches attacking "economic royalists"). The result is that he disarmed the more radical elements of society and saved the free market system. My only complaint with the book is the obviously-biased introduction that the author has written for the most recent edition in which he assails Reaganomics. The author clearly mistrusts capitalists and suggests that Reagan was trying to undo the New Deal stabilizers put into place during the Great Depression. In fact, if you read Reagan's memoir "An American Life," Reagan makes angrily clear that he voted for FDR four times and would never undo the New Deal. Instead, he made it clear that he tried to undo Lyndon Johnson's Great Society from the 1960's. The SEC, FDIC, Federal Reserve Open Market Committee, and other pragmatic New Deal measures are still operating strong. So the author's opinions have been shown to be wrong. Yet I think the author's opinions are very revealing, even if I do not agree with most of them. The Great

Terrific Overview Of The Great Depression Of The 193Os

Most historians agree that the Second World War is the single most important event shaping and directing subsequent developments throughout the balance of the 20th century. Indeed, no single other event so shaped the world or influenced the events leading to that war than did the great worldwide depression. In this wonderful book by historian Robert McElvaine, we are treated to a terrific account of the human ordeal of the 1930s, which, as noted historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Notes, "does justice to the social and cultural dimensions of economic crisis as well as to its political and economic impact." Here we take a busman's tour into a world literally turned upside down by the massive and systematic economic dislocations that suddenly arose in the late 1920s. Moreover, this is a quite fair-minded and scrupulously researched effort that imaginatively recreates the amazing social, economic, and political conditions of the Great Depression for the reader in a most entertaining and edifying way. Today it is difficult, especially for younger readers, to understand just how traumatic and dangerous the crisis in democracy that the events surrounding the Great Depression were, not only in this country, but also in all of the constitutional democracies of the west. To the minds of many fair-minded Americans, the capitalist system had failed, and it was the man in the street with his family who bore the cruelest brunt of this failure. Millions were set adrift, and everywhere ordinary human beings were stripped of their possessions, their livelihood, and their dignity as thousands and then millions of businesses and enterprises went bankrupt. For a time it appeared the government itself would lost the confidence of the people, and that civil order would be sacrificed along with all of the material dispossessions millions had already suffered. Socialism and even communism flourished as alternative answers in academic circles, and no one seemed sure or even confident that the system could be saved or resurrected as it continued to fail. The rise from the ashes of the Great Depression was uncertain, fitful, and quite painful, and only the advent of the circumstances surrounding the Second World War really cured the economic ills that Americans struggled with in those times. The fact that we seem to have forgotten the fact that capitalism is a god that can and does fail is worrying to the author, and he examines some of the dangerous and misguided tacit assumptions of contemporary politicians such as the supply side "voodoo" economics of Ronald Reagan's administration.I found the book to be a valuable aid in understanding how ordinary Americans, forged in the crucible of hard times and make-do, were given the character, self-reliance, and native ability to improvise that so influenced our conduct in the Second World War. Many scholars attribute our military success to the brilliant efforts by our young company and platoon leaders both in Europe and in