Kathryn Lopez, editor of National Review Online, is one of the very best interviewers around. Her conversation with former Wall Street Journal writer-editor Amity Shlaes is a fine example of Kathryn’s work. Shlaes’s new book, The Forgotten Man: A History of the Great Depression, published just yesterday, "serves up the Great Depression as you’ve never known it — challenging conventional wisdom, telling a gripping story of the triumph of the American spirit and the folly of big government," as Lopez smartly describes it.
It’s a fascinating interview, and one part of it is especially interesting.
The teaser on the NRO front page sets this up nicely:
Amity Shlaes tells the story of the Great Depression through a classical liberal’s keyboard.
Then, in the body of the interview, the following exchange takes place:
Lopez: Could your book be subtitled The Case for Classical Liberalism?
Shlaes: Yes. Where is it in our lives? I’m a liberal. It was a big error to use the word “liberal” to smear other people with. We’re the liberals! We stand for individualism – U.K.-Whig style. The liberal in this book is Wendell Willkie; as part of his political education, his girlfriend, Irita van Doren, made him write book reviews about Whigs.
And Shlaes says,
Wendell Willkie was my surprise hero.
Shlaes’ declaration, "We’re the liberalis!" is one with which readers of this site will of course be quite familiar. The true liberals of our time are on the right, and the stubborn, hidebound conservatives are the "progressives" on the left.
I’m delighted to see Kathryn and her interviewee tackling this issue.
Robert, please send me your review (to my personal email address) when you finish the book, and I’ll publish it here. Best, Sam
I have been convinced by the Amity Shlaes interview at NRO and my reading of the Amazon.com descriptive material to buy the book. This is the hazard of reading blogs: the literary temptation. There is a passage somewhere in the Bible that says of the making of books there is no end. The writer didn’t add that of the readers of books some feel compelled to look into everything they see.
I know very little of Wendell Wilkie and look forward to reading his story.
S.T., I believe that Wendall Willkie, until his death in 1944, acted as the “loyal opposition statesman” to FDR, going on foreign trips on behalf of the Government (not to imply anything wrong; he was doing his patriotic duty). He also wrote a book called “One World” in 1943, which I believe was an advocacy of the United Nations in order to prevent future wars. It was the “Inconvenient Truth” of its day, a big best seller & which kept him in the news until his death.
Dear Mr. Karnick:
After all this time, WENDELL WILLKIE–truly a forgotten man.
He only survives in a Warner Brothers cartoon from the forties, as a punchline; you may remember the one in which Bugs Bunny is battling a gremlin that’s trying to sabotage airplanes:
“It’s you!” says Bugs.
“It ain’t Vendell Villkie!” replies the gremlin–which I have always interpreted as big-government Hollywood zinging small government thinking. (Since it was right in the middle of World War Two, it must have been nigh on to impossible to convince people that total war didn’t necessarily entail total government; so “Vendell”‘s political philosophy must have seemed pretty quaint at the time–or am I off the beam on this?)
Respectfully,
Mike Tooney