The Hoover Party

'We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work....We have never made good on our promises....I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started...and an enormous debt to boot!'~ FDR's secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau

 

Assessing the legacy

http://iws.ccccd.edu/kwilkison/Online1302home/20th Century/DepressionNewDeal.html


World War II ended both the temporary New Deal programs and the Depression they were attempting to cure. Keep in mind that many facets of the New Deal--Social Security, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Securities and Exchange Commission to name only three--have remained features of American life from the 1930s until the present.

War ended the Depression simply because of increased government spending, an intensified version of what Roosevelt was already doing with the WPA and similar programs.. Responding to the external threats posed by the Axis Powers (Germany, Japan and Italy) Roosevelt and the Congress threw fiscal caution to the wind and spent what was necessary to win the war. In so doing, they also achieved pre-Depression levels of employment and prosperity.

What then is the legacy of the New Deal as a whole? Would it have ended the Depression? The best answer to that is that it went a long way toward alleviating the worst suffering of the Depression while still being captive to the conventional thinking (political, fiscal, racial) of the day. We cannot answer that question of whether it could have ended the Depression based on historical facts. World War II interrupted the process.