Amity Shlaes devotes much of her book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, to the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But the Depression struck in 1929, three years before FDR took office. Today on Uncommon Knowledge Amity trains her analytical powers on the record of FDR’s predecessor, Herbert Clark Hoover.
“No one in his place,” the New York Times wrote of Hoover in 1930, “could have done more.”