During the 1920s the private sector ruled in America, but by the end of the 1930s, the public sector was dominant. The New Deal had clearly changed the country forever. How it did so, who did it, and what remained unchanged, is the story of The Forgotten Man, by Amity Shlaes, billed as a new history of the Great Depression.

It might not have been so great or so depressing if the "dreamers and junketeers," primarily to Stalin's USSR, in the Roosevelt brain trust had not taken such drastic measures. Amity outlines the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which shut off U.S. producers from the markets they needed and sent the country into a deeper slump. She exposes the actions of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which in its infinite wisdom killed six million young pigs before they reached full size. These were sacrificed as part of a quest to raise pork prices but they serve as a vivid illustration of Hayek's knowledge problem.

Emblems of success during the 1920s were another target-rich environment. Here are the "flamboyant prosecutions" the FDR administration used with great theatrical effect, though they did not always win or get what they wanted. They did succeed at putting a lot of people on the government payroll who did not need to be there. The Forgotten Man shows how the Roosevelt brain trust deployed photographers such as Dorothea Lange and nearly 7,000 writers under the Federal Writers Project. On the labor front, the Wagner Act launched the closed union shop, the most coercive law passed during the New Deal, according to the author.    

At the time, the Economist wondered if the United States had "forgotten how to grow." Social Security and other programs took money out of circulation. All told, Amity says, the changes brought by the New Deal meant that the United States seemed "a less reliable place." Before the 1930s, "liberal" stood for the individual but later it increasingly stood for groups. Fortunately, something else was going on.

"America was not conforming to the Left's expectations," the author writes. "The country's old self-improvement impulse was prevailing, flowering even." The book business showed "a new respect for conservativism" and the "less-governed America" of Coolidge, Mellon, and others "was still strong."

The "forgotten man" of the title is the one who shoulders the load and pays the bills, but does not always benefit from actions taken on his behalf. In a recent interview, Amity Shlaes said that "the forgotten man today is the young generation – those who will pay the taxes we burden them down with because we don't have the guts to question some aspects of our own New Deal nostalgia."

She certainly does have the guts to do just that. The Forgotten Man is a tremendous accomplishment, richly detailed, entertaining, and packed with much more than can be covered in a short review. The jacket blurbs include not a single woman but everybody should read it, and the book deserves the sales and praise it is getting. That praise, however, will not be forthcoming from the feminist benches where Amity Shlaes is the forgotten woman, if anyone there even knew about her in the first place. In those quarters they prefer to read Margaret Atwood, rave about Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, and plot to revive the ERA.

As we have often noted in this column, feminists talk about independence and accomplishment but the militant ranks are really wedded to Big Brother, the ever-encroaching coercive state the New Deal created. They look to big-government entitlements, gender quotas, and programs such as Title IX to get what they want.

Amity Shlaes, whose The Greedy Hand is also worthy of attention, doesn't play by those rules. Her fine work proves that economic history and finance are suitable subjects for, shall we say, women's studies.