But that number hides something: A third of the people Shlaes counts as unemployed had a job that the New Deal gave them through its relief programs. Based on such a statistic, you could think the New Deal wasn’t alleviating the Great Depression.

That’s appalling-almost as bad as 23 percent in 1932. Let’s look at a figure Shlaes gives twice in her book and again in her Wall Street Journal editorial: She has unemployment at 20 percent in the 1937-38 recession.

If you want to know how the New Deal treated ordinary Americans, this choice really matters. Instead she chooses different estimates of unemployment that (she acknowledges) show a much larger share of Americans out of work during the New Deal. The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression is a book by Amity Shlaes and published by HarperCollins in 2007. And though she quotes an unemployment number, she doesn’t quote the figures I’ve just mentioned. She starts each chapter with a rat-a-tat of just-the-facts, but instead of GDP, which represents the overall economy, she quotes the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which represents the maybe 10 percent of Americans who owned stock. In 1940, on the eve of America’s entry into World War II and as FDR ran for a third term, unemployment still hovered above 14 percent.Shlaes makes a different argument about numbers, because she uses different numbers. In 1938, the unemployment rate was still 17 percent. Its hard not to see Shlaes revisionist history as a sideswipe at the Obama administrations efforts to tackle the recession, says Ian Pindar. Despite its subtitle, it’s less a new history of the Great Depression than what Shlaes says it is: a resurrection of the duPont critique. off the gold standard-slowed the contraction but did not restore the economy to health. Which she does, in her new book, The Forgotten Man. Shlaes also traces the mounting agony of the New Dealers themselves as they discovered their errors. In this book, CFR Senior Fellow Amity Shlaes asserts that the real question about the Depression is not whether Roosevelt ended it with World War II, but why the Depression. Some of Roosevelt’s early measures-deposit insurance, banking reform, and taking the U.S. Author Shlaes presents the neglected and moving stories of individual Americans, and shows how through brave leadership they helped establish the steadfast character we developed as a nation. More than a third of the country’s banks failed in that period, leaving depositors broke and destroying much of the credit system. From late 1929 to early 1933, real economic output in the United States declined by 30 percent and unemployment grew from 3 percent to 25 percent. The dimensions of the crisis faced by FDR were overwhelming. Much as Lincoln saved the Union and established the symbols of American nationalism, so Franklin Delano Roosevelt (it is said) saved capitalism from itself and laid the framework for the American welfare state. The Great Depression of the 1930’s tested America’s political institutions like no other event in our history except the Civil War.

The forgotten man by amity shlaes