"An Emergency at Least Equal to That of War"

"But in the end there is little historical evidence for her larger claim that the New Deal made the Depression worse and that without it, the crisis would simply have passed. After all, the catastrophe of the 1930s was halted not by private industry but by the massive public spending generated to fight World War II--an outlay of government resources far greater than anything Roosevelt had initially imagined. The fall in unemployment during the buildup to the war seemed proof of the central principles of Keynesianism: the private economy cannot always spend its way out of a depression; sometimes public spending is needed to stimulate growth. The experience of the war seemed to validate the New Deal, not disprove it. If anything, it suggested that Roosevelt should have gone further--that the New Deal was compromised by his timidity, not his radicalism. Does Shlaes seriously think that the Depression would have melted away if only Calvin Coolidge had been President? Was Alcoholics Anonymous really an alternative to the New Deal?"

Kim Phillips-Fein reviews Amity Shlaes's The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression in The Nation.

As does Eric Rauchway in Slate.