Is there agreement that FDR's New Deal. . .

Art

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Was a good thing for America and slowed the Depression, or did it lengthen it?

I keep seeing books along those lines. I don't believe they are true, but I would like some information about it, because if the same things Hoover did are continued, then revolution would not have been far off.
 
There is a good deal of agreement that recovery was slower than it should have been, but there is disagreement about why--conservatives tend to blame the 1937 recession on the New Deal, liberals claim that on the contrary it was FDR's cutbacks on WPA spending, etc. that was at fault. For an alternative to both explanations, see https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...reat-depression-in-1937.404563/#post-13750738

Also, the "New Deal" was hardly a totally consistent set of policies--it went from encouraging monopoly with the NRA in 1933 to crusading against it with the TNEC in the late 1930's, for example.
 
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1937 happened right when FDR cut back on the New Deal and attempted to balance the budget. That recession ended when the New Deal kicked back in. Heck of a coincidence if one wants to make it one. No person should believe the New Deal worsened the Great Depression. Such is modern Conservative poppycock that gets touted now because the great distance of time allows for any narrative to be invented--fleeting memory, the passing of first hand sources and witnesses, and other assorted things go into that, as essentially fewer people if anyone is alive to call it out and it passes into legend like King Arthur, to be molded to the author's assumptions, innuendos and imaginations. It is the same line of thought that transforms JFK into a Conservative, that somehow no one recognized at the time, including the Conservatives that hated Kennedy with a passion. And the list goes on. There is a school of dogmatic thought in modern Conservatism that every hero figure of history was actually a Conservative, and every Liberal thing was certainly a problem and a hindrance to progress as it was not Conservative.
 
because if the same things Hoover did are continued, then revolution would not have been far off.

A revolution is incredibly unlikely with a POD so late. In any case, I doubt that anyone elected to the presidency would continue Hoover's policies - not even Garner. However, I think it's very unlikely that anyone else would be able to pull off FDR's resolution of the banking crisis so quickly, so a worse economy is quite likely.

Anyways, the US suffered from the Great Depression so much mainly because it began in the US. As I see it, there are two explanations of the New Deal. First, the New Deal caused a recovery, and second, the recovery was coincidental to the New Deal. It should, of course, be noted that the economy recovered while the New Deal was in effect, dropped into a brief recession in 1937 after FDR cut back on it, and recovered by 1939 after he restored his policies. It's quite unlikely that the economy coincidentally recovered as the New Deal was in effect, so the New Deal certainly helped the economy. Saying that the New Deal did not help the economy strikes me as revisionism for the sake of revisionism, or as partisanship.
 
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