When the New Deal Came to Town

A Snapshot of a Place and Time with Lessons for Today

By: George Melloan

Narrated by: Bob Souer

When the New Deal Came to Town is a snapshot of a time and place: Whiteland, Indiana during the Great Depression, one of the most fraught eras in American history.

Imagine yourself transported back in time to April of 1933 and deposited in a small American town, when a young boy named George Melloan moved with his family to this quiet hamlet during the middle of the worst economic period in American history. Part social history, part personal observations, When the New Deal Came to Town provides a keen eyewitness account of how the Depression affected everyday lives and applies those experiences to the larger arena of American politics.

Told with Melloan's signature "clarity and polemical skill" (The Washington Times), this is a fascinating narrative history that provides new insight into the Great Depression for a new generation.

©2016 George Melloan (P)2017 Tantor

Critic reviews

"An excellent map for finding a way forward for either party." ( Wall Street Journal)

Hometown memories channeled via Ludwig von Mises

I cannot claim to compare my limited knowledge of economics with George Melloan's, but this book is far less a recollection of life in an Indiana town during the New Deal than an exercise in selecting specific anecdotes from that time to support a Austrian/Chicago school of economics interpretation of history. If those are the glasses through which you like to see the world, you'll probably love the book. But for me there was too much diatribe and not enough memoir to make it worth more than a grade of C-.