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A Brooklyn Heights author told a gathering at the Heights Casino last week how a kosher butcher in Brooklyn, playing David to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Goliath, faced off against the federal government and won.
Amity Shlaes delivered a talk from the pages of her bestselling book, “The Forgotten Man, A New History of the Great Depression,” puncturing the aura that in many New York salons still envelop FDR’s economic policies.
The 1930s showdown pitted a hallowed figure in the Democratic pantheon against some hometown boys, the Schechter brothers, a brood of kosher butchers who beat the price-fixing, anti-market policies of the New Deal’s National Recovery Administration, in a historic Supreme Court case in 1935.
At one time, the Heights Casino, a social and squash club on Montague Street, might have been the roost of New Deal–criticizing capitalist buccaneers, but these days, the conventional thinking on FDR has been soaked up even by Brooklyn’s upper crust.
“We all sort of had this rosy view that the New Deal was what pulled us out of the Depression,” said Casino President Franklin Stone. “She’s shown a more complex view.
Shlaes’s portrayal of the four-times-elected chief executive as economically wrongheaded is, for many, a fresh approach to Depression-era history.
She said it’s the perfect Brooklyn story because it has “that outsider sense that’s always skeptical of government — whether it’s on the other side of the bridge or in Washington.”
That plotline made it hard for anyone to root for FDR.
“It was fun that she picked a story that showed the spunk of the Brooklyn entrepreneur,’ said David Wenk.
©2008 The Brooklyn Paper
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