The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction

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View all 7 comments. Jun 11, Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it Shelves: This title looks at the background to the Depression, its social impact, and at the various governmental attempts to deal with the crisis.

The Great Depression & the New Deal : a very short introduction

Nov 10, Ginger rated it liked it Shelves: The title is definitively appropriate. It's a page summary of the causes immediately leading to the Great Depression, the social climate, and then what the Roosevelt Administration did in response to it.

It reads like the extended version of a level college textbook chapter. It covers A LOT of ground in very short time so it's pretty hard to hold onto the specifics and the lists of New Deal acronyms gets weary, but the refresher was definitely helpful. You can't go over this information The title is definitively appropriate. You can't go over this information without seeing how clearly similar the causes of and responses to that depression are to our current economic situation. I was reading this in the food pantry line and someone said "wow, how appropriate, they handing out copies?

Aug 09, Jim Angstadt rated it liked it Shelves: I am impressed by the author's ability to condense a mountain of information into a short, very readable story. This treatment is exactly what I want when introduced to a new subject. But, for a subject that I am somewhat familiar with, this approach may not be as helpful. With over subjects to choose from, there should be something for everyone. Feb 14, Elizabeth marked it as to-read.

I read this guy's blog regularly economic historian at UC Davis , and am obsessed with the stimulus debate, plus I'm working on a research project about 20th C debt in the US. So this is a natural choice. Plus, it's "very short. In case you're curious, he's of the opinion that the New Deal worked, and his numbers prove it. Helpful knowledge, I read this guy's blog regularly economic historian at UC Davis , and am obsessed with the stimulus debate, plus I'm working on a research project about 20th C debt in the US.

Helpful knowledge, but the current stimulus is in too different a global scenario to directly compare. Dec 28, Tim Pendry rated it really liked it Shelves: This is a 'very short introduction' in Oxford's useful series of that name. It is a simple guide to the defining event of the US' twentieth century - the New Deal that arose out of the Great Depression. It is also the story of a conservative politician [FDR] quite capable of radical rhetoric.

His electoral achievement in , taking every State except Maine and Vermont, was unparalleled since Munroe in Rauchway references JK Galbraith once and Galbraith is not to be found in the Further Re This is a 'very short introduction' in Oxford's useful series of that name. This in itself gives us a reason for reading it. Most of us of a certain age had our picture of the era formed by Galbraith but historiography has moved on. Rauchway's perspective is more clinical and, based in California, less subject to the East Coast liberal assumptions of JK that all matters were to be seen in a context somewhere between Washington and Wall Street.

Rauchway's thesis builds on the common view that the patrician FDR was determined on saving capitalism rather than building a state socialist version of America along contemporary European lines. But the story of the New Deal is complex. There were radical voices but its essence came to be the replacement of a socialism for capitalists which seems to be what post-Reaganite America has reverted to , i. This theory of countervailing power, with the Federal Government as arbiter, is very different from state socialism but ultimately it accretes power in the same way.

Since the Supreme Court existed to crush radical intent, the strategy had to involve pulling the activist population into the recovery agenda and then deliver real benefits for key voters or failure would result in the return of traditionalists. The result in showed that the strategy was a good one politically.

The countervailing forces model still placed private enterprise at the forefront of economic recovery which was only sensible in a fully capitalist economy. The TVA and other public engagements in the economy were exemplary in order to encourage better capitalist practice and to kick-start the economies of the South and later, in the late military-industrial era the West but they did not represent a serious incursion of socialism into American economic life.

We see here the seeds of the formalisation of American corporatism as an alliance between large corporations and government, with a voice for labour, consumers, smallholders and, eventually, African-Americans, women, gays and ethnic communities, being laid in the NRA.

Eric Rauchway

This is a model, we might call it neo-progressive, that is now normal across the Atlantic system. The downside was that major corporations, using the lobby system, not only gained advantages from closeness to Government as under the old system with localized serious differences but were to engage Washington as agent for overseas expansion and to set the conditions of trade and ensure that regulation could be used to raise costs for smaller business competitors in traditional industries.

Rauchway hints at rather than states developments beyond but there is little point in studying this era unless we can understand better our own. The integration of the trades unions as junior corporate partners within the Washington lobby state in the s was succeeded by a power struggle in the s within the union movement that resulted in the destruction of all socialist and communist influence.

By the s, the AFL-CIO was, effectively, operating overseas through its indirect influence to assist anti-communist labour movement allies defeat local socialists and communists. FDR achieved a great deal in his first four years, often despite his own conservatism, and he effected the first stage in a political revolution that would genuinely come to be inclusive of African-Americans and would permit federal action to meet social objectives. Without FDR, there could have been no Obama and the s might have been nastier and more violent.

However, the New Deal was faltering by mid-second term. War has the virtue of being more fulfilling to an executive authority, generating economic demand quickly and uniting the nation — in this sense, FDR comes to look far more like his European fascistic counterparts than we may find comfortable to contemplate and, as Hitler expands, he starts to find an ideological cover for war that served equally for Churchill and which fulfilled the needs of what would become the Atlantic system. The proof of the pudding is always in the numbers. Work relief was not now required because war increased the demand for labour - and it was in that the US unemployment rate finally fell to levels.

In short, even a cursory connection with Keynesian ideas would have told any world leader that militarisation in a world of closing borders was a serious option for national economic recovery. The conclusion is sinister but true enough — faced with constitutional limitations and democratic politics at home, radical permanent regeneration of the economy as opposed to a simple turn-round so that the trend is slow improvement within the American Imperium requires war.

FDR was creator of this agenda eventually as international phenomenon in his State of the Union Address. This eventual internationalisation of the New Deal is perhaps the defining aspect of the American period in the sun, whether we call it by the politically charged terms of New World Order or Washington Consensus or the more neutral Atlantic System. Within half a century, the countervailing powers model had become the international soft power structures of the UN, IMF and World Bank and then, latterly, the link between the Atlantic system, multinationals and NGOs.

Allies would become semi-autonomous states in the imperial union.

Federal legalism would come to impose one way demands in regard to corruption and extradition and, as the Wikileaks cables have exposed, politicians in satrapies as diverse as the UK and Yemen worry about their status in Washington and lie to their own populations in order to please the agents of an American President. Rights theory somewhat shorn of its original socio-economic aspects became so embedded in popular culture that it came, latterly, to distort aid-giving and risk super-power confrontation.

Rauchway deals with little of this. He describes and restricts himself to his period but we need to be prepared to think forward to where this would all lead one day. The contentious interpretation that I have given above of the post-war American Imperium provides a solid reason for reading not only this and other histories of American domestic politics in the decade or so before it erupted fully on to the world stage as dominant global power.

To understand the world today, it is vital to understand America itself between and Most people will be looking into this era because of a desire to understand better the Crash and, yes, such study has its uses but no Crash is like any other and what happened in has to be seen as just the latest in a constant and recurring feature of capitalism — its progress through creative destruction. It is brutal but it works, at least on these terms and amidst the same sort of suffering that nature also imposes on us.

Taming nature and taming market are much the same - do nothing and you die, do too much and you die. Just as the current crisis arose from excessive credit, so did the Crash of - and what happened in was, to a great extent, inevitable. The US Administration saved capitalism in the early s and the challenge for Obama on which the jury is out is to do the same for Americanised global capitalism in the early s.

I am sure he will succeed but the costs to America itself may be so great that the coming decades could be among the most internally fractious in living memory. Two years on from his election, State Governments are facing budgetary difficulties that have simply been pushed forward in time from their equivalent level in State defaults on debts were happening within months of the Stock Market Crash in The quantitative easing strategies of the Administration have merely pushed the state budgetary crises into much as international funding strategies keep pushing the potential for a sovereign debt meltdown into the same year.

FDR, as a conservative, was driven in part by the importance of sound money so inflationary strategies were not really driven hard until war broke out. The question remains across the West at what point will the suffering of some to the point of riot and revolt demand an acceptance of inflationary printing of money that will wipe out the wealth of the baby boomers.

If FDR was redistributing between regions to avoid redistributing between classes as Rauchway appears to suggest, will Obama distribute between classes to avoid distributing between generations which is what is really required? Whereas, in , the elite feared anarchy of the left and the right, Obama has neutered the left by his very presence in office.

His failure has its potential answer in the slightly unhinged populist right of the Tea Party. The clever money in Washington knows that this crisis means bringing the EU and China into economic alignment but this is one more big step towards the populist fear of a world government that ignores the little man — a step first taken by FDR in his support for the UN. The book examines a key sampling of New Deal programs, ranging from the National Recovery Agency and the Securities and Exchange Commission, to the Public Works Administration and Social Security, revealing why some worked and others did not.

In the end, Rauchway concludes, it was the coming of World War II that finally generated the political will to spend the massive amounts of public money needed to put Americans back to work. Today we can look back at the New Deal and, for the first time, see its full complexity. Rauchway captures this whole in a remarkably short space, making this book an ideal introduction to one of the great policy revolutions in history. The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area.

These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable. He shows how the magnitude of the resulting economic upheaval, and the ineffectiveness of the old ways of dealing with financial hardships, set the stage for Roosevelt's vigorous and sometimes unconstitutional Depression-fighting policies.

Indeed, Rauchway stresses that the New Deal only makes sense as a response to this global economic disaster. The book examines a key sampling of New Deal programs, ranging from the National Recovery Agency and the Securities and Exchange Commission, to the Public Works Administration and Social Security, revealing why some worked and others did not. In the end, Rauchway concludes, it was the coming of World War II that finally generated the political will to spend the massive amounts of public money needed to put Americans back to work.

Today we can look back at the New Deal and, for the first time, see its full complexity.

The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction - Eric Rauchway - Google Книги

Rauchway captures this complexity in a remarkably short space, making this book an ideal introduction to one of the great policy revolutions in history. Not simply a textbook of definitions, each volume provides trenchant and provocative--yet always balanced and complete--discussions of the central issues in a given topic.

Every Very Short Introduction gives a readable evolution of the subject in question, demonstrating how it has developed and influenced society.

Whatever the area of study, whatever the topic that fascinates the reader, the series has a handy and affordable guide that will likely prove indispensable. Read more Read less. Add all three to Cart Add all three to List. Buy the selected items together This item: Ships from and sold by Amazon. Customers who viewed this item also viewed. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. Roosevelt and the New Deal: Sponsored products related to this item What's this?

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Gundry's 1 bestseller "The Plant Paradox". Review "Rauchway boils it down to pages. Eric Rauchway is all over this. Oxford University Press; 1 edition March 10, Language: Related Video Shorts 0 Upload your video. What did Alexander Hamilton ever do besides get shot in a duel by Aaron Burr? When it comes to government, the answer is: With pictures and accounts, this book tells the dramatic story of the s stock bubble that collapsed on one notorious day and started a Depression.

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Write a customer review. Read reviews that mention roosevelt government economic economy hoover american rauchway war america policy administration major crisis class social programs particularly today market effects. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Had this book appeared slightly later in , it may have included an additional section entitled "the Second Great Depression. Early on this book quotes John Maynard Keynes' summation of the Depression's cause: Unfortunately, credit became widely available in the s and people, bathing in the prosperity, used it, often with reckless abandon.

To top that off, the era of freely flowing markets that spurned pre-war economic growth was stunted by isolationism and high global tariffs. As an even further squelch, legal "cheating," in the form of "pools," on Wall Street was widespread and even publicly acknowledged.

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As the markets rose, so did wild speculation. Many commentators prophesied the events of October 24, well in advance. Unfortunately, many Wall Street players did not. The subsequent economic kaboom was felt the world over. Hoover was president and, though the book claims he did more than "nothing," it also claims that he didn't do enough, either.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt easily grabbed the presidency from the man who soon had cities of squatter shacks named after him "Hoovervilles". Chapter 2 covers "The Hoover Years" from his easy win over a Catholic candidate to his perceived successes with the Louisiana flood though some thought the successes broke down on further analysis. Following the crash he worked mostly as a cheerleader. He apparently thought people would just "fix it" so he took little Federal action as the US economy rotted away.

To the Bush Administration's credit, and to much of the right's dismay, they took fairly immediate action when the economy began to crumble. Perhaps Hoover served as a historic counter-example, although they could also have learned more from the Hoover Years to avert a crash altogether.

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