The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941
The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 () is a 1984 history of the Great Depression by acclaimed historian Robert S. McElvaine. In this interpretive history, McElvaine discusses the causes and the results of the worst depression in American history, covering the time from 1929 to 1941. He examines the causes of this cataclysmic event, its impact upon the American people, and the political, governmental, and cultural responses to it. He comes down firmly in favor of the "demand-side" argument that maldistribution of income in the 1920s having left the bulk of potential consumers with too small a share of national income to buy all that mass production was putting on the market was the principal cause of the collapse. Building on his innovative use of letters written by "ordinary" Americans during the Depression that were collected in his first book, "Down and Out in the Great Depression", McElvaine takes readers into the experience of Depression victims to an extent never before achieved.
Charles P. Kindleberger
His 1973 and 1986 book "The World in Depression 1929–1939" (University of California Press, 1986 [Revised and Enlarged Edition]) advances an idiosyncratic, internationalist view of the causes and nature of the Great Depression. Blaming the peculiar length and depth of the Depression on the hesitancy of the US in taking over leadership of the world economy when Britain was no longer up to the role after World War I, he concludes that "for the world economy to be stabilized, there has to be a stabilizer—one stabilizer", by which, in the context of the interwar years at least, he means the United States. In the last chapter "An Explanation of the 1929 Depression", Kindleberger lists the five responsibilities the US would have had to assume in order to stabilize the world economy:Kindleberger was highly skeptical of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's monetarist view of the causes of the Depression, seeing it as too narrow and perhaps dogmatic, and dismisses out of hand what he characterized as Paul Samuelson's "accidental" or "fortuitous" interpretation. "The World in Depression" was praised by John Kenneth Galbraith as 'the best book on the subject'.
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