[JohnGalt]

FDR, America's Second Worst President, friend to Conrad Black and neoconservatives everywhere.

[dix]

read later

[Sofa King]

ost authentic historians credit Roosevelt with swiftly reviving the American banking system, guaranteeing bank deposits, minimizing the number of bank failures and substantially alleviating the Depression. Yet as with most other historical achievements, the revisionists have been hard at work. Jim Powell of the Cato Institute (cited approvingly in a recent column by Robert L. Bartley) argues in a new book that FDR actually prolonged the Depression!"

...and the fact that the Great Depression didn't end until World War II means nothing, apparently.

[oyez]

(Everything You Believe about FDR is False)

What if you don't belive in anything about FDR?

[hopespringseternal]

When he entered office in 1933, unemployment was at 33%, there was almost no public-sector relief for the jobless, 45% of family homes had been -- or were in imminent danger of being -- foreclosed, and the Chicago Grain Exchange, the New York Stock Exchange and the banking system had collapsed. Almost no one was engaged in agriculture on an economically sustainable basis and the nation's food supply was apt to be severely interrupted at any time.

I'm not buying it. For one thing, all the old timers told me that the foreclosures came much later and were not for delinquent mortgage payments, but for property taxes. This is how the government acquired embassy row.

While farming was difficult, most old farmers expressed the sentiment that the depression did not have the earth-shattering impact depicted here. Factory workers and urban dwellers took the full force of the depression, farmers and rural dwellers were one step removed from it.

Of course, this is anecdotal and these people were children or young adults, so take this as you may.

At any rate, there is ample debate that the bottom had been reached and the recovery that happened under FDR was unrelated to his hand-waving and pronouncements. In the end, he may have expanded government simply because the opportunity existed, irrelevant to how it affected the economy. In fact, many of his own advisors warned him that his actions were detrimental to recovery, but he pressed on because the political situation was ripe for their implementation.

[Skooz]

World War II ended the Great Depression. FDR had little to do with it.

[Pan_Yans Wife]

ping

[SteveH]

What about the "bank holiday" that FDR declared in 1933, and the subsequent revocation of the citizens' right to own gold, among other atrocities. which FDR was responsible for?

(Obligatory sheesh)

[NutCrackerBoy]

So we have Conrad Black calling the argument "revisionist" that FDR prolonged the depression, in the book by Jim Powell, praised by Robert L. Bartley.

Personally, I am trying to understand how we got to our current unconstitutionally big and obtrusive federal government (see Article I Section 8). At what historical step did we actually violate the constitution? That informs my interest in this debate.

[aristeides]

The Roosevelt Myth.

[Ohioan]

A total "whitewash." The author avoids questions of Constitutionality, broken promises, deliberate rationalizations and lies, and fails to take into account the role played by the inherent strength of the fundamental social underpinnings of the American societies of the era as opposed to those to which they are being compared.

If our recovery--as poor as it was under Roosevelt--was in fact better than those in some other lands; so too was the previous prosperity of America, as well as the post World War II (and post Roosevelt) recovery of America. Roosevelt does not deserve credit for a self-reliant population--or the fruits of having such a population. Quite the contrary, he did everything he could to make them less self-reliant.

All in all, a "whitewash," pure and simple.

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site