Manchester is different. His narrative histories are splendid: expertly-crafted slices of life and liberal quoting of contemporaneous newspapers and magazines that amount to a very compelling feeling of the tone of the time.
I'm now reading The Glory and the Dream, Manchester's narrative history of America from 1932 to 1972. I'm not too far into it, but I've already struck gold, in a discussion of President Hoover's delusions about the Depression:
Riffling through Hoover's papers, one sometimes has the strange feeling that the President looked upon the Depression as a public relations problem -- that he believed the nightmare would go away if only the image of American business could be polished up and set in the right light. Faith was an end in itself; "lack of business confidence" was a cardinal sin. Hoover's first reaction to the slump which followed the Crash had been to treat it as a psychological phenomenon. He himself had chosen the word "Depression" because it sounded less frightening than "panic" or "crisis." In December 1929 he declared that "conditions are fundamentally sound." Three months later he said the worst would be over in sixty days; at the end of May he predicted that the economy would be back to normal in the autumn; in June the market broke sharply, yet he told a delegation which called to plead for a public works project, "Gentleman, you have come sixty days too late. The Depression is over."Yeah, the insurgency is in its "last throes," Bush is in Hoovervillian denial, and critics are unpatriotic, according to fuckstain Karl Rove. History repeats.
Already his forecasts were bring flung back to him by critics, but in his December 2, 1930, message to Congress -- a lame duck Republican Congress; the Democrats had just swept the off-year elections -- he said that "the fundamental strength of the economy is unimpaired." At about the same time the International Apple Shippers Association, faced with a surplus of apples, decided to sell them on credit to jobless men for resale at a nickel each. Overnight there were shivering apple sellers everywhere. Asked about them, Hoover replied, "Many people have left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples." Reporters were caustic, and the President was stung. By now he was beginning to show signs of the most ominous trait of embattled Presidents; as his secretary Theodore Joslin was to note in his memoirs, Hoover was beginning to regard some criticism "as unpatriotic."
