Don’t let history disappear, redux.

Last week one of my most engaged students came to me and said, “The New Deal didn’t help the recovery from the Depression.  It was entirely World War II.”  I sighed.  The reason he might believe what he said is true is because he’s a Republican and he has been listening to the arguments for their near unanimous congressional opposition to the Obama administration’s efforts to help the economy.  As the New York Times reports today:

For more than half a century, America’s political leaders – Republican and Democrat – have sought to wrap themselves in the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the man credited with replacing fear with hope and ending the Great Depression. But in recent years some writers and economists have been telling a version of this story that is quite different from the one generally taught in school or seen on the History Channel.

In this interpretation Roosevelt is a well-meaning but misguided dupe who not only prolonged the Depression but also exacerbated it. For many people, it’s like hearing that Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother and not the wolf is the rapacious killer.

Since the financial crash this fall, the revisionist look at the Great Depression has attracted new attention . . . . But more than that, it has become an intellectual banner for Republican opponents of the Obama administration’s ambitious bailout and stimulus proposals.

Amity Shlaes, a syndicated columnist who works at the Council on Foreign Relations, helped ignite this latest revisionist spurt with her 2007 book, “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.”

“The deepest problem was the intervention, the lack of faith in the marketplace,” she wrote, lumping Herbert Hoover and Roosevelt together as overzealous government meddlers.

The current financial crisis, as well as continuing praise from conservatives, helped propel the book back onto the Times best-seller list in November. Jonathan Alter, an editor at Newsweek and the author of “The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope” – which has also benefited from the renewed fascination with the 1930s – calls Ms. Shlaes’s book a “taste badge,” flaunted by Republicans looking for a way to oppose the administration.

Today’s article didn’t do much but explain there is this revisionist view and that it is the intellectual basis of the Republicans’ current political positioning.  Intead, it more or less gave a “he said, she said” account of the “competing theories about the Depression and the New Deal” as they were articulated  “at a conference at the Council on Foreign Relations’ New York headquarters, co-hosted by the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University, and partly organized by Ms. Shlaes.”

There are plenty of good critiques of Ms. Schlaes, including Eric Rauchway’s in Slate, and, on a regular basis, Paul Krugman (here, for example). Even political allies, like Megan McArdle, find the fashionable right wing view Shlaes popularized and the Republican party has adopted as its own to be gross caricature:

The problem is that Shlaes way, way, way overstates her case.  There is an academic argument that the National Recovery Administration prolonged the Great Depression . . . . But the Great Depression is complicated, and it’s hard to make the case that government intervention was the main problem with the economy.  As economic history, the book is interesting if one sided.  But as an argument, it leaves a lot to be desired.

But reading political rhetoric is a poor substitute for an immersion in history.  I am lucky that my father at 85 is as sharp, energetic, and passionate as ever, and his memories of growing up poor in the Thirties and the profound differences FDR made are vivid.  Reading books rather than mere opinion pieces is important too.  I recommend strongly David Kennedy’s Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (Oxford History of the United States).

Maybe it’s that we’re a “sound bite” culture.  I don’t know.  But in my adulthood, which more or less began with Ronald Reagan’s flip dismissal of all governmental action as the problem, not the solution, I’ve continually been shocked at the frequency with which people are ready to accept without question that premise and its counterpart — that unregulated markets are wiser than any human institutions can ever be and always are the best solution.