作者：Amity Shlaes
出版社：Jonathan Cape
副标题：A New History of the Great Depression
发行时间：2007年6月1日
来源：下载的 epub 版本
Goodreads：3.91（4520 Ratings）
豆瓣：8.0（40人评价）

概要

Amity Shlaes 从一个自由主义者的角度，以编年史的形式撰写了美国从1927年-1940年美国经济大萧条时期的历史和观点，在作者的眼中，小罗斯福并不是拯救了美国的英雄，而是整个经济大萧条的最强音，最终解救美国经济的不是罗斯福，而是二战

作者介绍

Amity Shlaes (born September 10, 1960) is an American author and newspaper and magazine columnist. Shlaes writes about politics and economics from a US libertarian perspective. Classical Liberal. Chair, Coolidge Foundation. Scholar, King's College. Chair, MI Hayek Prize.
经典自由主义者，柯立芝基金会主席，以自由主义的观点撰写政治和经济评论性文章

作者的 Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmityShlaes

个人观点

最近比特币抄的火热，所以让我想到了这段美国废除金本位的历史，复习一下，为未来可能发生的事情做心理准备，对于黄金、比特币这样具有天然货币属性的物品，要控制起来是非常困难的，美国用其国家公信力做到过一次，然后吃了30多年亏，未来的货币发展一定会非常耐人寻味

20世纪30年代的美国，经济大萧条（失业率20%+），共产主义运动兴风作浪，濒临大战前夕，上一任总统毫无作为，在这样的的大背景下，罗斯福高票当选总统，然后强势推动新政——一系列围绕凯恩斯主义的经济政策。其中和黄金相关的部分，包括废除金本位，禁止黄金协议（使用黄金的重量来作为协议的价格），立法禁止持有黄金（每人持有黄金不能超过100美金），将美元和黄金做挂钩（35美金每盎司直到布雷顿森林体系解体）等等

和黄金相关的这些法案的实施，引起的一系列上诉，其中的4个案子被合并在了一起到了最高法院接受违宪审查，最高法院最终 5:4 认为并不违宪（支持和反对方都撰写了意见，可以查到），其实那时候，美国最高法院自身面临一系列来自行政分支和立法分支的压力，但是依旧保持了较高的独立性

在罗斯福和 Four Horsemen（美国最高法院的四位保守派法官） 之间，有过一系列的经典对决，其中最精彩的，是罗斯福裹挟两院抛出 court-packing plan，动议将最高法院人数从9人稀释到15人（然后自己可以提名6个人），为此
Owen Roberts 做出了经典的妥协性投票（最后还烧了自己的笔记），这就是「the switch in time that saved nine」的故事，僵持到最后保守派法官 Willis Devanter 宣布辞职，整场对决才宣告谢幕，看这段历史的时候我会觉得，和罗斯福相比，现在的川普真的太嫩了~

摘录

As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or in the better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X…. What I want to do is to look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man. Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. He is the man who never is thought of….
He works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays….
—WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER, YALE UNIVERSITY, 1883

The same history teaches that the New Deal was the period in which Americans learned that government spending was important to recoveries; and that the consumer alone can solve the problem of “excess capacity” on the producer’s side. This explanation acknowledges that the New Deal did not bring the country to recovery fast, but emphasizes that the country got there eventually—especially with the boost of military spending in the late 1930s. The attitude is that the New Deal is the best model we have for what government must do for weak members of society, in both times of crisis and times of stability. And that the New Deal gave us splendid leaders and characters: Roosevelt himself, a crippled man who bravely willed us all back into prosperity and has been called the apostle of abundance. The brain trust, thoughtful men whose insights validated their experiments. The Hundred Days—that period at the start of his first term when Roosevelt legislated unprecedented reforms—was a thrilling period. From Adolf Berle, the expert on corporations, to Frances Perkins, the pioneering social reformer, to Tugwell, the New Dealers displayed a sort of dynamism from which today’s moribund politicians might learn.

What then caused the Depression? Part of the trouble was indeed the crash. There were monetary and credit challenges at the young Federal Reserve, and certainly at the banks. Deflation, not inflation, was a big problem, both early on and also later, in the mid-1930s. The loss of international trade played an enormous role—just as both Hoover and Roosevelt said at different points. If the United States had not raised tariffs at the beginning of the decade and Europe had not collapsed in the 1930s, the United States would have had a trading partner to help sustain it. Part of the problem was the challenge of the transition to industrialization from agriculture. Part was freakish weather: floods and the uncanny Dust Bowl seemed to validate the sense of apocalypse. With money and the weather breaking down, men and women in America felt extraordinarily helpless. They were willing to suspend disbelief.
But the deepest problem was the intervention, the lack of faith in the marketplace. Government management of the late 1920s and 1930s hurt the economy. Both Hoover and Roosevelt misstepped in a number of ways. Hoover ordered wages up when they wanted to go down. He allowed a disastrous tariff, Smoot-Hawley, to become law when he should have had the sense to block it. He raised taxes when neither citizens individually nor the economy as a whole could afford the change. After 1932, New Zealand, Japan, Greece, Romania, Chile, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden began seeing industrial production levels rise again—but not the United States.

The big question about the American depression is not whether war with Germany and Japan ended it. It is why the Depression lasted until that war. From 1929 to 1940, from Hoover to Roosevelt, government intervention helped to make the Depression Great. The period was not one of a moral battle between a force for good—the Roosevelt presidency—and forces for evil, those who opposed Roosevelt. It was a period of a power struggle between two sectors of the economy, both containing a mix of evil and virtue. The public sector and the private sector competed relentlessly for advantage. At the beginning, in the 1920s, the private sector ruled. By the end, when World War II began, it was the public sector that was dominant.

There remains a question. If so much of the New Deal hurt the economy, why did Roosevelt win reelection three times? Why, especially, the landslide of 1936? In the case of the third and fourth Roosevelt terms the answer is clear: the threat of war, and war itself. Roosevelt, unlike his narrow-minded Republican opponents, understood the dangers that Nazi Germany represented. In 1936, however, the reason for victory was different.

Roosevelt’s move was so profound that it changed the English language. Before the 1930s, the word “liberal” stood for the individual; afterward, the phrase increasingly stood for groups. Roosevelt also changed economics forever. Roosevelt happened on an economic theory that validated his politics and his moral sense: what we now call Keynesianism. Keynesianism, named after John Maynard Keynes, emphasized consumers, who were also voters. The theory gave license for perpetual experimentation—at least as Roosevelt and his administration applied it.
Keynesianism also emphasized government spending. Yet focusing on consumers meant that Washington neglected the producer. Focusing on the fun of experiments neglected the question of whether unceasing experimentation might frighten business into terrified inaction. Admiring the short-term action of spending drew attention away from its longer-term limits—economies often go into recession when the spending disappears. Supplying generous capital to government made government into a competitor that the private sector could not match. Keynesianism provided the intellectual justification and the creation of constituencies.
Too much attention has been paid to what political polls saidabout the New Deal. Too little has been paid to two other measures, both also polls, in their way. One was the unemployment rate, which did not return to precrash levels until the war. The other was the stock market. It told a heartbreaking story. Uncertainty about what to expect from international events and Washington made the Dow Jones Industrial Average gyrate, both daily and over longer periods, in a fashion not repeated through the rest of the century: seven out of the ten biggest “up” days of the twentieth century took place in the 1930s. The uncertainty made Americans doubt themselves as investors. The Dow did not return to 1929 levels until nearly a decade after Roosevelt’s death. The goodwill of the New Dealers, and there was enormous goodwill, could not excuse such consequences.
About half a century before the Depression, a Yale philosopher named William Graham Sumner penned a lecture against the progressives of his own day and in defense of classical liberalism. The lecture eventually become an essay, titled “The Forgotten Man.” Applying his own elegant algebra of politics, Sumner warned that well-intentioned social progressives often coerced unwitting average citizens into funding dubious social projects. Sumner wrote:
“As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine…what A, B, and C shall do for X.” But what about C? There was nothing wrong with A and B helping X. What was wrong was the law, and the indenturing of C to the cause. C was the forgotten man, the man who paid, “the man who never is thought of.”

This book is the story of A, the progressive of the 1920s and ’30s whose good intentions inspired the country. But it is even more the story of C, the American who was not thought of. He was the Depression-era man who was not part of any political constituency and therefore lived the negatives of the period. He was the man who paid for the big projects, who got make-work instead of real work. He was the man who waited for economic growth that did not come. As an editorialist in Indiana wrote in 1936, “Who is the ‘forgotten man’ in Muncie? I know him as intimately as I know my own undershirt. He is the fellow that is trying to get along without public relief and has been attempting the same thing since the depression that cracked down on him.”
Among the people whom the New Deal forgot and hurt were great and small names. The great casualties included the Alan Green-span figure of the era, Andrew Mellon, treasury secretary for the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations—a figure so towering it was said that “three presidents served under him.” Another was Samuel Insull, a utilities magnate and innovator to whom the New Dealers assigned the blame for the crash. Yet another was James Warburg, a Roosevelt adviser who became so angry with the president that he penned book after book to express his rage. George Sutherland and James McReynolds, two of the four justices on the Supreme Court who fought back against Roosevelt, were also important. It was Willkie who spoke out most explicitly for the forgotten man on the national stage.
Others were of humbler background: those farmers who found themselves forced to kill off their piglets in a time of hunger because FDR’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration ordained they must; a family of kosher butchers named Schechter who believed in Roosevelt but fought the New Deal all the way to the Supreme Court; a black cult leader named Father Divine; Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, who taught Americans that the solution to their troubles lay not with a federal program but within a new sort of entity—the self-help community.

Cummings liked the tactic. Morgenthau was horrified. “Mr. President,” he told Roosevelt, “you know how difficult it is to get this country out of a depression and if we let the financial markets of this country become frightened for the next month it may take us eight months to recover the lost ground.” Morgenthau might be Roosevelt’s yes man, but he had already learned a few things at Treasury. Roosevelt indicated to Morgenthau the next night that he had been kidding, but Morgenthau believed the reality might also be that the president had simply, upon consideration, changed his mind.

Next Roosevelt set to work invalidating gold clauses in contracts. Since the previous century, gold clauses had been written into both government bond and private contracts between individual businessmen. The clauses committed signatories to paying not merely in dollars but in gold dollars. The boilerplate phrase was that the obligation would be “payable in principal and interest in United States gold coin of the present standard of value.” The phrase “the present standard” referred, or so many believed, to the moment at which the contract had been signed. The line also referred to gold, not paper, just as it said. This was a way of ensuring that, even if a government did inflate, an individual must still honor his original contract. Gold clause bonds had historically sold at a premium, which functioned as a kind of meter of people’s expectation of inflation. In order to fund World War I, for instance, Washington had resorted to gold clause bonds, backing Liberty Bonds sold to the public with gold.
Now, in the spring of 1933, upon the orders of Roosevelt, the Treasury was making clear that it would cease to honor its own gold clauses. This also threw into jeopardy gold clauses in private contracts between individuals. The notion would be tested in the Supreme Court later; meanwhile, bond and contract holders had to accept the de facto devaluation of their assets. The deflation had hurt borrowers, and now this inflationary act was a primitive revenge. To end the gold clause was an act of social redistribution, a $200 billion transfer of wealth from creditor to debtor, a victory for the populists. Announcing the legislation before it passed, Senator Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma said, “No issue in 6,000 years save the World War begins to compare with the possibilities embraced in the power conferred by this amendment.” The rich had the money, and “because they have it the masses of the people of this Republic are on the verge of starvation—17,000 on charity, in the bread line.” Now the debtor would, through devaluation, see his debt reduced.
Even those in Roosevelt’s entourage who disapproved went along, in the hope that all these moves were genuinely temporary, one-time events, and that if and when Roosevelt officially went off gold, he would quickly replace the old rule with a new one—exchanging one promise to deliver gold for dollars at a certain rate for another promise to deliver gold or silver for dollars at another, different rate. The operation would be like resetting a dislocated shoulder—painful but quick, and followed by the euphoria of relief.
Yet the cries from the West did not abate. And Roosevelt felt he must do more. One April evening that spring—shortly before guests from Britain were expected—he met with members of his cabinet. Secretary of State Cordell Hull was there, along with Treasury Secretary Woodin, Herbert Feis (a holdover from the Hoover administration), budget director Lew Douglas, Ray Moley, now at the State Department under Hull, Jimmy Warburg, and others.
“Congratulate me,” Roosevelt suddenly said to them. He hadgone off the gold standard. There was a political plan—by supporting the Thomas Amendment in Congress, which allowed him to set the price of gold, he would signal to farmers his strong backing for higher prices. But there was no economic plan for what to do now. The men in the room reacted so strongly as to make themselves seem ludicrous: “They began,” as Moley recalled in amusement, “to scold Mr. Roosevelt as though he were a perverse and particularly backward schoolboy.” First of all, they reacted simply at the shock of what he had done—the country had not been off the gold standard in peacetime since before the turn of the century. But far more unusual was the way the president had done it. Why was there no new price of gold? This move was different from simple devaluation. Instead of reducing uncertainty, the president was increasing it.
Roosevelt was merry, which gave him the advantage. He even teased his guests about their devotion to the gold standard. Even the gold standard had worked, after all, only when men said it must work. Cordell Hull, Moley later recalled, looked as if he had been stabbed in the back when FDR removed a ten-dollar bill from his pocket, examined it, and said “Ha!”—the bill was from a Tennessee bank—“in your state, Cordell. How do I know it’s any good? Only the fact that I think it is makes it so.”
The country seemed to like Roosevelt’s attitude. Someone had to deal with the money problem, and he had been brave enough to do it. The papers were reporting that Roosevelt had already, in one way or another, put more than a million people back to work. The Dow was now heading toward the 90s, up from its tiny base. Legislators and southern agricultural commissioners were already busy quantifying the amount of acreage to retire—10 million acres of cotton fields, for example. Farmers began receiving their payments. Peek would be able to announce that checks to a million farmers to pay $110 million on their contracts to take more than 4 million bales of hay out of production had already been sent. To many, this seemed odd, outrageous even. The $110 million that went to farmers more than offset the $100 million in savings the government had gained by cutting its employees’ salaries. In a year of hunger—the year that the pair had starved in the cabin on the New York lake—food production was cutting back, and additional food was being withheld.

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