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When the New Deal Came to Town

A Snapshot of a Place and Time with Lessons for Today

About The Book

It’s A Wonderful Life meets New Deal or Raw Deal? in this “excellent map for finding a way forward for either party” (Wall Street Journal)—a personal and social history of the New Deal from a conservative point of view, detailing the effects on the economy, culture, and the people of small American town.

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 Wall Street Journal columnist 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.

Written 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.

About The Author

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George Melloan retired in after a 54-year writing and editing career at The Wall Street Journal. In his last assignment he was Deputy Editor, International, of the editorial page and author of a weekly op-ed column titled Global View. He moved to New York in 1962 to join the Journal’s Page One department as an editor and rewrite specialist. From 1966 to 1970 he was a foreign correspondent based in London, covering such major stories as the Six-Day War in the Middle East, the Biafran War in Nigeria and an attempted economic reform in the Soviet Union.

After joining the editorial page in New York in 1970, Mr. Melloan became deputy editor in 1973. In 1990, he took responsibility for the Journal’s overseas editorial pages, writing editorials and columns for the Journal’s foreign and domestic editions about such momentous events as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the open door policy that brought billions of foreign investment into China, fueling its enormous economic growth over a period of 25 years.

Mr Melloan was winner of the Gerald Loeb award for distinguished business and financial journalism in 1982 and twice in the 1980s won the Daily Gleaner award of the Inter-American Press Association for his writings about the rising Soviet influence in Central America. In 2005, he received the Barbara Olson Award for excellence and independence in journalism from The American Spectator.

Mr. Melloan lives in Westfield, N.J. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Dutch Treat Club.
 

Product Details

  • Publisher: Threshold Editions (November 8, 2016)
  • Length: 256 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781501136108

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