The following essay is an example of analytical history at its best. Without relying on narrative techniques, the Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith takes apart the economy of the 1920s and shows us how its weaknesses led to the Great Depression of the 1930s. In the course of doing so, he also “takes apart,” in the colloquial sense of that expression, the presidents of the 1920s and a number of their leading advisers.
The effectiveness and power of the essay depend upon a number of factors. One is Galbraith’s mastery both of the facts he deals with and of the economic mechanisms of the society; he discusses few events that are not thoroughly familiar to students of the subject, but he has an unfailing eye for what is significant. Another is his gift for anecdote and the pithy phrase. As he says, the epigram that Elbert H. Cary of U.S. Steel “never saw a blast furnace until his death” is well known; but not everyone who writes about Cary knows enough to use it. Still a third is Galbraith’s ability to state his own opinions without qualification and at the same time without passion, to make the kind of calm, reasoned judgments that are characteristic of a convinced but unprejudiced and intelligent mind. All these qualities explain why his books, such as American Capitalism, The Affluent Society, and The Great Crash, 1929 (a fuller treatment of the subject of this essay), have been both popular and critical successes.
