For ninety years, the Franklin Roosevelt administration’s response to the Great Depression has enjoyed a predominantly positive reputation. Accounts of the period have given voice to partisans of the president and to people grateful for the assistance of government programs, while critics have been comparatively neglected—though there are indications this may be changing. In New Deal Rebels, Amity Shlaes offers a collection of primary source documents that recover voices of dissent. The book was published by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) in honor of its ninetieth anniversary: its birth aligns with the period of the New Deal, and the collection includes several entries from AEIR’s founder, Colonel Edward Harwood.

In 1963, University of North Carolina historian William Leuchtenburg published Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940. The book, written masterfully by a rising star in the American historical profession, had a massive effect on both subsequent historiography and the popular understanding of the New Deal era. It was far from uniquely responsible for creating the dominant narrative of the 1930s, but its influence was profound. Even conservative scholars still cite it as an authoritative treatment of the subject.

Yet Leuchtenburg’s treatment of Roosevelt’s domestic policy revolution was hardly unbiased. As his body of work on Roosevelt and the New Deal makes clear, Leuchtenburg, along with other trendsetters in New Deal historiography such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., admired Roosevelt and believed that the New Deal was a fundamentally positive reform of American political and economic life. This is not surprising, considering the dominant political leaning of the history profession in the second half of the twentieth century. What criticism of the New Deal there was usually came from the left, arguing that it did not go far enough in remaking America according to a socialist blueprint.

In any case, Leuchtenburg’s narrative became regnant, and alternative accounts were largely ignored. Dissenting voices could be found in the nooks and crannies of American intellectual life: specialists in economic history such as Benjamin Anderson; Austrian economists and libertarians such as Friedrich Hayek; historians associated with think tanks, such as Robert Higgs, whose theory of “regime uncertainty” remains a powerful counternarrative to the FDR-as-savior story. But none of these authors had a decisive impact on the history profession generally, nor on the widely accepted understanding of the period that has permeated high school and college textbooks.

Amity Shlaes has been trying to do something about this. Shlaes burst onto the scene of New Deal historiography in 2007 with The Forgotten Man, which was predictably tarred as “mythology” by those wedded to the standard mythology of the New Deal. Much of the narrative of the 1930s depends on the interpretation of the 1920s, so it was natural that Shlaes also looked to rehabilitate the reputation of the thirtieth president in Coolidge. Now Shlaes has gathered a wide variety of figures who objected, in one way or another, to the political program of the ’30s.

The forty-five-page introduction by Shlaes is a gem by itself. She precisely identifies the major problems with the New Deal historiography—and the popular account it spawned—of the past century. In the conventional story, Hoover made little effort to mitigate the metastasizing economic downturn, and what he did was useless, while Roosevelt’s measures were innovative, compassionate, and effective. But both Hoover and Roosevelt, at the time, noticed and stressed the similarities of their programs. More ironically—and further complicating the conventional narrative of the Depression—in 1932 Roosevelt ran as a fiscal conservative, scolding Hoover for his administration’s profligate spending and promising to balance the federal budget.

In the usual telling, the New Deal was highly successful in addressing the Great Depression, but anything beyond the most cursory look at the history of the 1930s belies this account. What made the Depression of the 1930s “great” was its duration. Even to its proponents, the New Deal seemed not to be working. Roosevelt and his advisors repeatedly expressed frustration at seemingly intractable economic stagnation. Unemployment did gradually come down from its catastrophic 1933 apex, but it remained stubbornly high through the entire decade, and the 1937 recession militates against any argument that the first New Deal measures of 1933 solved in any substantial way the economic problems of the nation. Compared to earlier serious downturns (one of which, 1920–21, was within easy memory), recovery from the Great Depression was slower and less robust. How does this speak for the success of the policies implemented to combat it?

To achieve a revision of the conventional New Deal story, it is necessary to recover the contemporary voices that have been suppressed. To set the stage, Shlaes begins with a few preambles: William Graham Sumner’s anti-progressive “Forgotten Man” speech of 1883 and addresses by Calvin Coolidge, Al Smith, and Herbert Hoover leading up to Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933, all of which warned of the danger to the nation’s founding principles posed by Americans’ increasing tendency to look to government to solve their problems. The largest section comprises entries from the first New Deal period, followed by critical voices from the second, third, and fourth terms of the long Roosevelt administration.

Shlaes’ selections demonstrate the range and diversity of the New Deal’s critics. There are figures from the left, right, and middle; pundits and businesspeople, economists and politicians; some who rejected the New Deal in toto, others who were sympathetic but objected to certain elements. Even John Maynard Keynes makes an appearance among these “New Deal rebels,” when he chides Roosevelt for his anti-business rhetoric.

Anyone with historical awareness understands that the same debates are played out over and over in the political arena. Arguments for and against state intervention didn’t start with Joe Biden, Newt Gingrich, Ronald Reagan, or Lyndon Johnson. A volume such as this reminds us of this fact: many passages in these pages could be imported into our current public debates with little adaptation. While the New Deal rebels’ basic ideas and arguments have been recapitulated many times by subsequent defenders of the market and limited government, some of their analyses have not been improved upon. They confronted in its early days the popularization of the view that the national government is more often a savior than a threat, and that therefore there should be no limit on its capacity to intervene in economic affairs. David Lawrence’s pamphlet for the anti-Roosevelt Liberty League discerned how the president’s anti-business demagoguery provided cover for constricting the free market:

It is easy enough to blame “big business” for the ills of an economic system that has brought unemployment. … It is high time the blaming of one another ceased and the so-called leaders of American thought recognized that the responsibility for improvement of economic conditions now lies with those in governmental position who are retarding the operation of natural economic laws and shaking the foundations of the Republic by casting doubt upon the title of the individual to his home and his business.

John W. Davis deplored what many now call the “culture of entitlement” that he saw the New Deal cultivating: “Who can fail to see that under the New Deal … there is growing in the country a fixed conviction that every man, idle or industrious, incompetent or useful, rebellious or willing, has a vested right to government support?” Columnist Isabel Paterson unveiled the subterfuge perpetrated in the creation of the Social Security program: “The act was passed on the pretext that the tax money thus collected should be repaid to the workers from whose wages it is deducted, in the form of old-age pensions. … Then the government spends that tax money for ‘current expenses.’ … In exchange, the government simply puts its I.O.U. in the cashbox.” An editorialist for the Santa Ana Register expressed perfectly the logic implied by the (later, more progressive) Supreme Court in the notorious Wickard v. Filburn decision: holding that wheat grown by a farmer on his own farm for use on that farm falls under the purview of federal regulation means that “the Government has the right to regulate everything on the theory that it affects, in some mysterious way known only to the labyrinthine brains of socialistic New Dealers, ‘interstate commerce.’” Thus, “a woman who bakes her own bread … might be fined for ‘affecting interstate commerce.’”

Immersion in these primary sources also provokes the reader to think more deeply about the period, giving rise to questions that don’t appear when the conventional narrative is accepted uncritically. Politics is a complicated and often irrational business, but even so: How is it that the president whose programs were so frequently and indisputably unconstitutional, so blatantly wasteful and even counterproductive, and so obviously ineffectual in ending the depression, was re-elected three times? And then, a few years later, the same electorate swiftly and overwhelmingly approved the 22nd amendment, so as to prevent the same thing from ever happening again.

Historians have of course adduced plenty of more or less persuasive reasons, including Roosevelt’s political genius, the fecklessness of his Republican opponents, the role of the Second World War, and so on. Yet, to my mind, it remains a puzzle. The Democratic Party’s own previous presidential candidates—John W. Davis (1924) and Al Smith (1928)—both eventually turned against the Roosevelt administration for what they saw as its betrayal of the party’s (and more broadly American) ideals. Erstwhile, vocal Roosevelt supporters ranging from the populist radio priest Fr. Charles Coughlin to the intellectual Raymond Moley also broke ranks when they could no longer countenance the aggrandizement of power by the federal government and the willingness of the president to undermine foundational principles of American government to achieve his policy goals. (The current Supreme Court is not the first to be threatened with a “court-packing” scheme). Yet, throughout his four terms, Roosevelt continued to win elections, and did so handily.

If the Great Depression seems increasingly remote from current concerns, it shouldn’t. As AIER president Will Ruger notes in the afterword, “The historical period is relevant even to our rhetoric.” Democrats seeking support for their radical retooling of the economy didn’t choose “Green New Deal” as an appellation because they thought it would be offensive. More substantively, as Michael Tanner showed in The Poverty of Welfare (2003), “President Roosevelt and the New Deal forever changed the face of welfare in America.” Government welfare programs were almost entirely state and local affairs in 1932; by 1939, federal spending dwarfed them. It was also the depression that birthed Keynesianism. A couple of decades ago, some economists and policymakers expressed the belief that Keynesianism was dead. But it never was, and the pandemic response of 2020 and beyond should by now have disabused everyone of that notion.

The belief that government can heal economic ailments by slathering money on them came to prominence in the 1930s, and it has been reinforced ever since by academic and popular interpretations of that decade. The actual history of the New Deal provides little evidence that it was a rollicking success, and it’s long past time that the term’s predominantly positive connotations were overturned. The New Deal did not cure the Great Depression, and it had lasting deleterious effects on American culture and politics. The incisive commentaries from Amity Shlaes’ cast of forgotten men (and women) explain why.