Great Society: A New History

by Amity Shlaes

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061706431
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	11/24/2020
Pages:	528
Sales rank:	167,915
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 5.80(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

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. 

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. Twitter: @amityshlaes

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Clash 1

New Frontier

1 The Bonanza 21

2 Port Huron 56

Great Society

3 Great Society 95

4 Revolt of the Mayors 137

5 Creative Society 179

6 Interlude: Looking for Socialism 205

7 Housing Society 228

8 Guns, Butter, and Gold 254

9 Reuther and the Intruder 291

Abundant Society

10 Moynihan Agonistes 313

11 The Governor of California 352

12 Scarcity: Burns Agonistes 378

Coda: Demolition in St. Louis 420

Acknowledgments 431

Appendix of Graphic Data 433

Notes 443

Bibliography 475

Index 487

Editorial Reviews

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

“An illuminating alternative to sentimental reminiscences of liberals’ attempts in the 1960s...to banish poverty in America. Her account is original and persuasive, presenting the leading poverty warriors not with scorn but with sympathy and piercing insight….Ms. Shlaes’s chronicle is not just a story of how good people’s good intentions went wrong. It is also a story of how the assumption that the near future will closely resemble the recent past can lead even the best intentioned and most well-informed people to pursue policies that turn out to be mostly counterproductive and often destructive.” — Wall Street Journal

"Gripping...the lesson for the future could not be clearer." — John Taylor, Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

"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

"Gripping...the lesson for the future could not be clearer."

John Taylor

An illuminating alternative to sentimental reminiscences of liberals’ attempts in the 1960s...to banish poverty in America. Her account is original and persuasive, presenting the leading poverty warriors not with scorn but with sympathy and piercing insight….Ms. Shlaes’s chronicle is not just a story of how good people’s good intentions went wrong. It is also a story of how the assumption that the near future will closely resemble the recent past can lead even the best intentioned and most well-informed people to pursue policies that turn out to be mostly counterproductive and often destructive.

Wall Street Journal

"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

12/23/2019

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.)

Publishers Weekly

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

An illuminating alternative to sentimental reminiscences of liberals’ attempts in the 1960s...to banish poverty in America. Her account is original and persuasive, presenting the leading poverty warriors not with scorn but with sympathy and piercing insight….Ms. Shlaes’s chronicle is not just a story of how good people’s good intentions went wrong. It is also a story of how the assumption that the near future will closely resemble the recent past can lead even the best intentioned and most well-informed people to pursue policies that turn out to be mostly counterproductive and often destructive.

Wall Street Journal

"Great Society is accurate history that reads like a novel, covering the high hopes and catastrophic missteps of our well-meaning leaders."   

Alan Greenspan

"Great Society is accurate history that  reads  like a  novel, covering the high hopes and catastrophic missteps of our well-meaning leaders." 

Glamour

12/06/2019

In this meticulously researched and detailed U.S. economic history of the turbulent years of 1960–71, Shlaes (Calvin Coolidge Presidential Fnd.) argues that well-meaning but faulty social programs of the Great Society are the seeds of our present-day financial and monetary turmoil. The author describes how under the presidential administrations of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon grew massive government-funded social programs in the areas of health care, housing, and transportation. These policies transformed the lives of every American, in one way or another, says Shlaes, and for many, the development of government intervention into the daily lives of citizens was (and still is) despised as pure socialism. Throughout, Shlaes subtly endorses capitalism as the remedy, and though some readers may be receptive to her interpretation of these historical events, political figures, and policies of the period, others will disagree. VERDICT While far from a polemical text, Shlaes's work raises a point of view that represents a specific spectrum of economic ideology; for readers who share the author's beliefs.—Linda Frederiksen, formerly with Washington State Univ. Lib., Vancouver

Library Journal

Terence Aselford brings an announcer's voice to this work as he peppers listeners with the statistics and anecdotes in its opening summary. Shlaes takes a skeptical view of the Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” which expanded government in the 1960s. She cites problems such as the urban housing projects that turned to space-age materials to curb vandalism as factory jobs left cities and poverty increased, provoking criticism from many, including author James Baldwin. As she does, she traces the evolution of Ronald Reagan from GE spokesman to political figure. She uses tallies of guns, butter, and the Dow to track economic effects. Aselford can bog down when talking about dry topics such as legal challenges or Federal Reserve maneuvers, but he generally keeps this detailed history of a decade of change interesting. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2019 - AudioFile

Terence Aselford brings an announcer's voice to this work as he peppers listeners with the statistics and anecdotes in its opening summary. Shlaes takes a skeptical view of the Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” which expanded government in the 1960s. She cites problems such as the urban housing projects that turned to space-age materials to curb vandalism as factory jobs left cities and poverty increased, provoking criticism from many, including author James Baldwin. As she does, she traces the evolution of Ronald Reagan from GE spokesman to political figure. She uses tallies of guns, butter, and the Dow to track economic effects. Aselford can bog down when talking about dry topics such as legal challenges or Federal Reserve maneuvers, but he generally keeps this detailed history of a decade of change interesting. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2019 - AudioFile

2019-11-10
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 reforms—community action, housing, and other programs—came "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.

Kirkus Reviews