Jonathan Chait has written the definitive takedown of Amity Shlaes and her rather unempirical case against Franklin Roosevelt, the heart of which is Shlaes argument that Hoover, not Roosevelt, was really responsible for those New Deal style reforms (which didn't work...?).This is an excerpt from Shlaes' book cited in Chait's review:
Hoover had called for a bank holiday to end the banking crisis; Roosevelt's first act was to declare a bank holiday to sort out the banks and build confidence. ... Hoover had spent on public hospitals and bridges; Roosevelt created the post of relief administrator for the old Republican progressive Harry Hopkins. Hoover had loved public works; Roosevelt created a Public Works Administration. ... Hoover had known that debt was a problem and created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation; Roosevelt put Jones at the head of the RFC so he might address the debt. ...
Hoover had deplored the shorting of Wall Street's rogues; Roosevelt set his brain trusters to writing a law that would create a regulator for Wall Street.
Of course, as Chait points out, the devil is in the details...
Leuchtenburg also provides a handy rebuttal to Shlaes's preposterous conflation of the two presidents. Hoover's National Credit Corporation, he explains, "did next to nothing." Hoover and Roosevelt would be amused to hear that his bank holiday aped Hoover's, given that Hoover denounced the Emergency Banking Act as a "move to gigantic socialism." (Does this ring a bell?) Shlaes's attempt to equate Hoover's disdain for short-sellers and Roosevelt's regulation of the market presumes that there is no important difference between expressing disapproval for something and taking public action against it.
I hesitate to call the narrative Shlaes and others have been pushing as a "contrarian" version of history, I don't think the case she makes is coherent enough. It's really just a nakedly partisan version of history, an attempt to rewrite the past so that everything history has smiled upon falls in the Republican/Conservative column and everything we remember as bad is associated with Democrats/liberals. This happens all the time, whether it's the attempt to say Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican or a conservative, or casting the Democratic party as the party of segregation--which it once was--without noting that many of those Democrats started defecting to the Republican party after 1948.
I've tried to imagine what a Democratic version of Amity Shlaes-style revisionism would look like. The best example I can come up with is if Democrats insisted that in fact, Jefferson Davis wanted to free the slaves and preserve the Union and Abraham Lincoln was determined to destroy it, merely because Davis was a Democrat and Lincoln a Republican. There's a lot of talk today about how conservatives politicized science over the past eight years, but it seems to me as though they've taken a similar approach to the study of history. Shlaes argument isn't about empirical study, it's about rewriting history so that it casts conservatives in the most favorable possible light. I'd say it's about dismantling liberal arguments for government intervention--but judging from Chait's review the book doesn't even make a coherent attempt to do that.
-- A. Serwer