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.
New Deal
Lowell E. Gallaway and Richard K. Vedder argue on the basis of Austrian School of economics theories that the Great Depression was caused by wages being too high which they say had caused a loss of depositor confidence which caused the bank runs. They further conclude that the "Great Depression was very significantly prolonged in both its duration and its magnitude by the impact of New Deal programs". They suggest that without Social Security, work relief, unemployment insurance, mandatory minimum wages and without special government-granted privileges for labor unions, business would have hired more workers and the unemployment rate during the New Deal years would have been 6.7% instead of 17.2%. Amity Shlaes wrote that "from 1929 to 1940, from Hoover to Roosevelt, government intervention helped to make the Depression Great". Shlaes said that the NRA was misguided because it used price setting to fix monetary problems. According to Shlaes, Roosevelt's experimentation frightened business into inaction and prevented recovery. Eric Rauchway showed that Shlaes tried to diminish the economic growth by referring to the unrepresentative Dow Jones Industrial Average. He continued that usually a historian or economist would have referred to the gross domestic product, which according to the Historical Statistics of the United States grew impressively by 9% annually during Roosevelt's first term and by 11% annually after the short recession of 1937–1938.