Another book debunking FDR

I am pretty sure I mentioned this before, the New Deal did not end the Great Depression. That this is still accepted as good history surprises me. I get even more surprised when some gets paid money to write a book refuting the claim. The New York Times reviews THE FORGOTTEN MAN A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes which has just that premise. While the reviewer misses a chance to make a reference to My Man Godfrey, he does make one overwhelmingly huge hole in Ms. Shlaes' argument. The book takes the Schechter Poultry case and uses it as an argument against FDR's New Deal. The hole comes in the last paragraph of the review:

Among Roosevelt’s supporters, evidently, were a family of chicken butchers in Brooklyn named the Schechters. “Their major political concern in the 1930s was anti-Semitism,” Shlaes’s appendix quotes one of their descendants as saying. “They believed that if Roosevelt had not solved the problems of the Depression, the U.S. could have gone the way of Nazi Germany.” The Schechters apparently voted for Roosevelt every time he ran.

Economics no longer comes under the name of political economy. That is unfortunate for economics for it has divorced its connection with people for the seductiveness of numbers and theories. Politics uses economics for its own interest and that interest is the people being governed because some times there are far greater dangers in the world than breaking with economic orthodoxy.

The United States could easily have emulated other models in of the Thirties. Some of those ideologies shortened the Great Depression. Alas, none of those ideologies were sympathetic to capitalism.