My Amazon Review of Amity Shlaes "Great Society: A New History"

The Cost of Good Intentions

Revisionist conservative historian Amity Shlaes has written what purports to be a history of the Great Society. True it is a history, but it is far from complete. Nevertheless her book offers a host of easy to read vignettes surrounding the milieu of the 1960’s and early 1970’s. She highlights the important role UAW leader Walter Reuther played in bringing about the civil rights revolution and the role of socialist Michael Harrington in supplying much of the intellectual heft to the ideas Lyndon Johnson promoted. She surprisingly offers a sympathetic portrait of the emergence of the New Left and she is especially sympathetic to the activist role played by Casey Hayden, Tom Hayden’s first wife.

In my opinion she spends way too much time on the role of the Office of Economic Opportunity in promoting far left community groups under the rubric of “maximum feasible participation.” This front of the war on poverty ended in defeat as America’s cities exploded in racial violence. It was the unrest at home and the growing unpopularity of the Vietnam War that led to a Republican revival in 1966, an election she does not mention.

However she is especially acute in her discussion of OEO’s Legal Services Corporation which unleashed a brigade of activist lawyers that rewrote housing, welfare and health law and spawned the notion of the public interest law firm. She also devotes far too much effort in discussing Nixon’s failed Family Assistance Plan while leaving out such Nixon accomplishments of the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Thus it was Nixon, not Johnson who created the enlarged administrative state of today.

She also doesn’t really focus on Medicare and Medicaid. It is these two entitlement programs that both improved the health of American and are driving huge increases in federal spending today. As was to be expected the all-in cost of these two programs has far exceeded their initial estimates.

Shlaes offers great insight in highlighting the importance of a now forgotten filibuster in the Senate led by Everett Dirksen. At the height of LBJ’s power in the fall of 1965 organized labor made a big push to eliminate Section 14B of the Taft-Hartley Act. That section allows states to ban union shops and thus offering the option of becoming a “right to work” state. That effort failed and the way was open to industrializing the South and to the diminution of union power in the North.

To sum up Shlaes has written an interesting and enjoyable history of the Great Society, but just remember it will not be remembered as the definitive history of the era.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2GMST6VS3F9NR/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv