Title: Great Society Pdf A New History
Author: Amity Shlaes
Published Date: 2019-09-10
Page: 480
“This well-researched and smoothly written masterpiece sheds a badly needed lesson-laden light on one of the most important and turbulent times in American history. Shlaes has rendered a book for the ages.” (Steve Forbes)"Great Society is accurate history that reads like a novel, covering the high hopes and catastrophic missteps of our well-meaning leaders." (Alan Greenspan)"Shlaes’s account of America in the 1960s recalls her 2007 The Forgotten Man about America in the 1930s, and finds — guess what? — a complicated nation. The author writes with a free style, including information on lesser-known figures of the era, as well as an interesting assessment of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon." (Washington Post)“A provocative, well-argued take on a turbulent era.” (Kirkus Reviews) Amity Shlaes is the author of four New York Times bestsellers: The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man/Graphic, Coolidge, and The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy. Miss Shlaes chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation and the Manhattan Institute's Hayek Book Prize, and serves as a scholar at the King's College. A former member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, Miss Shlaes published a weekly syndicated column for more than a decade, appearing first in the Financial Times, then in Bloomberg.
The New York Times bestselling author of The Forgotten Man and Coolidge offers a stunning revision of our last great period of idealism, the 1960s, with burning relevance for our contemporary challenges.
"Great Society is accurate history that reads like a novel, covering the high hopes and catastrophic missteps of our well-meaning leaders." ―Alan Greenspan
Today, a battle rages in our country. Many Americans are attracted to socialism and economic redistribution while opponents of those ideas argue for purer capitalism. In the 1960s, Americans sought the same goals many seek now: an end to poverty, higher standards of living for the middle class, a better environment and more access to health care and education. Then, too, we debated socialism and capitalism, public sector reform versus private sector advancement. Time and again, whether under John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, or Richard Nixon, the country chose the public sector. Yet the targets of our idealism proved elusive. What’s more, Johnson’s and Nixon’s programs shackled millions of families in permanent government dependence. Ironically, Shlaes argues, the costs of entitlement commitments made a half century ago preclude the very reforms that Americans will need in coming decades.
In Great Society, Shlaes offers a powerful companion to her legendary history of the 1930s, The Forgotten Man, and shows that in fact there was scant difference between two presidents we consider opposites: Johnson and Nixon. Just as technocratic military planning by “the Best and the Brightest” made failure in Vietnam inevitable, so planning by a team of the domestic best and brightest guaranteed fiasco at home. At once history and biography, Great Society sketches moving portraits of the characters in this transformative period, from U.S. Presidents to the visionary UAW leader Walter Reuther, the founders of Intel, and Federal Reserve chairmen William McChesney Martin and Arthur Burns. Great Society casts new light on other figures too, from Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, to the socialist Michael Harrington and the protest movement leader Tom Hayden. Drawing on her classic economic expertise and deep historical knowledge, Shlaes upends the traditional narrative of the era, providing a damning indictment of the consequences of thoughtless idealism with striking relevance for today. Great Society captures a dramatic contest with lessons both dark and bright for our own time.
A book both engaging and necessary Great book about the still much-heralded Great Society. This history of good intentions, government overreach, and terrible results offers lessons for both policy makers and voters today. This study reflects a commendably Burkean sensibility: prudent reform good; radical, officious transformation imposed by the Federal government problematic, leading to bad results that wiser and humbler leaders should have foreseen.CONSERVATIVE AUTHOR Well written, if a bit dry, by a conservative attempting to prove that providing entitlements was a bad idea then and is a bad idea now. Just because we have not managed to lift everyone out of poverty does not mean either that entitlements were an epic fail or that we should not keep trying.4 stars for writing. Not judging the content because of my own viewpoint.The "Great Society" and its roots in today's issues This is a very important book by Amity Shlaes ("The Forgotten Man" a history of the Great Depression.) Ideas and concepts that are mainstream and sort of a "given" these days had their embryo stage in FDR's "New Deal" but really were fully birthed in the 1960's. I have the advantage of having lived through those times and seen the outcomes of these programs among people I knew and worked with and attended school with. This book goes over the roots of the Great Society, a plan to reduce rural and urban poverty and how it has shaped the problems we face today.Shlaes spends time on the socialist roots of such programs as housing developments and welfare. One thing I take exception to is her passing off "bulldozing of streets people loved in the name of moving them into public housing slums they didn’t love." Yes, this happened. But it wasn't just socialism and progressivism in play here, although the idea of high rises as modern and more sanitary is part of it. The reason for high rises was a housing shortage that continued after WWII and the Baby Boom, a movement of people from the poor rural South and Appalachia to urban centers with jobs and cheapness of construction compared to single family housing. The Pruitt-Igoe housing project is of course a feature of the story here, famously imploded after its failure, but the reasons for its failure are not simple. The projects didn't fail because people didn't like living there compared to old city neighborhoods. I actually knew people who had lived there--poor white farmers who moved out of impoverished Kentucky to take factory jobs in St. Louis and house their families in better digs with floors, central heating and plumbing. They loved it--at first. But a design flaw of breezeways and gathering points--and a mix of populations of different race and cultures and then the recessions and then hyper-inflation that battered those factory jobs led to the very modern features of gathering points being not neighborhood meeting spots but crime centers. It got so bad, people were afraid to exit their apartments and ultimately, the crime-infested project had to be abandoned and taken down. Future housing projects were eventually smaller, ground floor townhouse style or Section 8, existing housing rented at a subsidy and accomplished much more successfully.However, where this book shines is that it tracks the progression from Socialism and Communism being treated as anti-American to it becoming ingrained as a normal solution to societal problems; welfare for mothers (but not for the out of work husbands, ended up weakening families) Some of the catchphrases of the times were "Urban Renewal" which wags redubbed "Urban Removal" Shlaes posits that it was a continuation of the vast expansion of the Federal Government (with good jobs and pensions) that started in the New Deal. Moreover, the Great Society plans moved urban renewal and other programs from state control to Federal, taking tax money out and local control as well. This point alone that Shlaes makes is a foreshadowing of the struggle that now is happening between Federal mandates (often without funding) and states being weakened to the point where a governor job is barely more than a city mayor, compared to the power pre-1960s that a governorship entailed.The struggle of states vs feds is well outlined and I can't recall another history book of recent publication that details this important change to our government as set up under the Constitution. (States were sovereign nations almost, with the Federal government have limited enumerated powers only.)Another point Shlaes makes: for the first time, Federal spending on entitlement outstripped defense spending and to this day. It ballooned to 40 percent by the 80's and now it's over 70 percent. This despite constant war activity almost non-stop since World War II (the Korean, the Cold, Vietnam, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, now the longest war in US history) despite the nonstop military action, the entitlements are the lion's share of spending and we are deeply in debt and servicing that debt.As a result of the "Great Society" spending, taxes rose precipitously and at the same time, a twelve year malaise had the Dow enter and exit at the same 1,000 level.This book may not be for everyone, it certainly has a conservative take HOWEVER, the numbers are telling and also the fact that here we are, forty years later from the Sixties and the urban scene is no better for millions, in fact, you could argue it's worse and lots has been spent to what end? Worth reading to make sure you understand the scope of the issues and what worked and what did NOT work. Doing the same things over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. And may be the definition of insolvency, too.
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