New Deal Rebels, a new anthology published by the American Institute for Economic Research, is an antidote to the idea that there ever was a consensus behind President Franklin D. Roosevelt's attempts to end the Great Depression by, among other things, forcing farmers to destroy crops the government deemed "surplus."
A long, illuminating introduction from the volume's editor, Amity Shlaes, is followed by 53 short selections from the New Deal era. Some are a bit tedious for bedtime reading, but many are jewels. These include "One From One Leaves Two," a spunky poem by Ogden Nash from the perspective of a farmer wondering how to make his cow and hens stop "overproducing" milk and eggs (concluding lines: "I pray the Lord my soul to take/If the tax-collector hasn't got it before I wake"); several exasperated Garet Garrett columns for The Saturday Evening Post; the text of the Supreme Court's Schechter Poultry Corp. decision, which unanimously found the National Recovery Administration to be unconstitutional; and an editorial from the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper, celebrating that ruling as a vindication of "the wisdom of the founders of the Republic."
