Yesterday's Wall Street Journal published a column by Amity Shlaes summarizing her findings in The Forgotten Man, her revisionist history of the New Deal. AEI has made the column available under the heading "The real deal." I've argued here that The Forgotten Man is an important book challenging the received understanding of the 1930's. Charles Kesler observed in his review of Steven Hayward's Age of Reagan:

For all its defense of traditional history, the Right cannot boast of many narrative historians, which is one reason that liberal chroniclers dominate the bookstore shelves.

Building on the work of predecessors such as Jim Powell in FDR's Folly, Shlaes brings a storyteller's gift to her challenge of the received version of the Great Depression. I was accordingly interested in John Updike's New Yorker review of the book. Updike is a superb writer -- I paid tribute to him here in "Considering John Updike" -- and (on the evidence, among other things, of "On Not Being a Dove" in Self-Consciousness) a respectable sixties liberal.

The New Yorker is another story. It was a protagonist in the move from respectable sixties liberalism to the unrespsectable contemporary variety. There was no chance that Updike's review would endorse Shlaes's rejection of the New Deal. Updike's review nevertheless fairly summarizes important elements of the book. He even expresses a writerly appreciation for Shlaes's psychological insight and narrative skill. Only Updike would observe:

As she concludes the chapter “Mellon’s Gift,” her admiration generates a rough-hewn prose couplet: “Mellon might be correct about the Depression being a bad quarter hour. History alone would tell whose edifice had the more enduring power.”

When it comes time to render judgment on the book, Updike presents an argument that is almost a parody. He sings from the traditional hymnal in praise of the old-time religion:

My father had been reared a Republican, but he switched parties to vote for Roosevelt and never switched back. His memory of being abandoned by society and big business never left him and, for all his paternal kindness and humorousness, communicated itself to me, along with his preference for the political party that offered “the forgotten man” the better break. Roosevelt made such people feel less alone. The impression of recovery—the impression that a President was bending the old rules and, drawing upon his own courage and flamboyance in adversity and illness, stirring things up on behalf of the down-and-out—mattered more than any miscalculations in the moot mathematics of economics. Business, of which Shlaes is so solicitous, is basically merciless, geared to maximize profit. Government is ultimately a human transaction, and Roosevelt put a cheerful, defiant, caring face on government at a time when faith in democracy was ebbing throughout the Western world. For this inspirational feat he is the twentieth century’s greatest President, to rank with Lincoln and Washington as symbolic figures for a nation to live by.

Government is good, business is bad. The judgments of economics are "moot." Who cares about freedom so long as politicians make us feel good and their intentions are benign? In his comic conclusion, Updike faithfully restates the living creed against which Shlaes's new book makes timely battle.

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