Great society A new history

Review by Choice Review

Despite the subtitle's promise, little new history emerges from this volume. In keeping with the style of her earlier book on the Great Depression, Shlaes writes in the tradition of Thomas Carlyle, who viewed history as the serial biographies of great men, coupled with her own apparent assumption that the greatest harm to humanity comes from those who seek actively to improve society. Opening with the incorrect claim that the New Deal did not reduce unemployment, Shlaes exposes one after another real or imagined failure or shortcoming of government projects during the presidencies of JFK, LBJ, and Richard Nixon. Moreover, she recounts how many political and private interest groups negatively reacted to federal interventions, including white southerners disliking the end of legalized racial segregation and corporate officials in the private sector objecting to good-faith bargaining requirements in what the author erroneously identifies as a generally closed-shop setting. Alongside analyses of US presidents and their political motives, other powerful men, such as labor leader Walter Reuther, emerge as antagonists to the pure capitalism of economist Friedrich von Hayek and his small-government allies. Summing Up: Not recommended. --James Alan Young, emeritus, Edinboro University of PA

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Former Financial Times columnist Shlaes (The Forgotten Man) contends, in this dense yet fluidly written account, that U.S. government efforts to eradicate poverty, increase worker protections, expand medical coverage, and establish environmental regulations during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations led to "economic tragedy." According to Shlaes, federal entitlement programs instituted or expanded during the 1960s failed to win the War on Poverty and established "a permanent sense of downtroddenness" among the poor. She credits Job Corps founder Sargent Shriver and Housing and Urban Development secretary George Romney with attempting to remedy youth unemployment and housing segregation, respectively, but claims that the private sector and local initiatives were more effective in those and other goals. Shlaes praises business executives, governors, and mayors for pushing back against "the incursions of the federal government," and blames union bosses for winning so many employee benefits that U.S. companies could no longer compete with foreign rivals. While Shlaes mainly succeeds in keeping the narrative from bogging down in the nitty-gritty of policy making, her ideological slant leads to some questionable interpretations, as when she claims, " was an indictment of executive overreach generally." The result is more of a backwards-looking polemic against democratic socialism than an essential history of the Great Society era. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, the Wylie Agency. (Nov.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Shlaes (Coolidge, 2013, etc.) offers a decidedly revisionist history of the 1960s in the United States."The New Deal created a forgotten man," writes the author, chair of the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation. "The Great Society created more." In a follow-up to her The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (2007), Shlaes writes that Lyndon Johnson's Great Society reforms "seemed designed to finish the job" of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal government expansion and had similarly disastrous results. The 1960s reformscommunity action, housing, and other programscame "close enough to socialism to cause economic tragedy." While action in the public sector spurred advances in civil rights and health care, Great Society economic programs, including the "lost" War on Poverty, encouraged "a new sense of hopelessness" in welfare recipients, stifled private sector innovation, and led to inflation and unemployment in the '70s. Moreover, argues the author, "Great Society collectivism" resulted in enormous entitlement costs that make it difficult to address today's pressing problems. She cautions against the present flirtation with "broad, vague, and romantic" socialism and champions free-market capitalism and an end to federal intrusions in local government. Her vividly detailed narrative brings to life the social, political, and economic issues of the period. Shlaes emphasizes the little-recognized, outsized role played in public policymaking by socialist labor leader Walter Reuther, a supporter of the radical group that spawned Students for a Democratic Society, led by "professional protester" Tom Hayden, whose 1962 Port Huron Statement helped inspire Johnson's Great Society. Together with democratic socialist Michael Harrington, Reuther hoped Johnson would "complete" Roosevelt's revolution. The author chronicles at length federal "arrogance" in dealing with mayors to implement community efforts. Her disdain for liberal reformers and intellectuals will trouble some readers, as will her insistence that private enterprise, with its efficiency and measures-of-success approach, would have succeeded where public action failed in the face of social and political chaos.A provocative, well-argued take on a turbulent era. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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