To my mind FDR perpetuated the Great Depression because he did little to fix the fundamental problems. He dealt with the symptoms rather than fix the problems. Think about a leaking house. Are we better off spending our limited resources buying buckets to catch the water or to put up with the water for awhile and fix the roof?
William E
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Definitely not...the depression had about 8 different causes, the monetary policy followed by Republicans, the Smoot Hawley act, the irresponsible and credit based trading of stocks, many other things....Roosevelt's entire administration was geared toward fixing and ameliorating the effects of the depression...all the alphabet soup agencies, AAA, CCC, WPA to name a few. I see nothing in our history that would even suggest Roosevelt prolongued the depression. One might successfully argue that Herbert Hoover and the Republicans prolonged the depression by their inaction, however.
One might argue that the New Deal didn't resolve the depression (and I would agree with that), WWII did seem to fix the depression.
timmy♫♫
I think the only reason the depression happened was that every dollar was backed by gold. You have a very limited amount of funding to grow, but a very real need to grow. Pretty soon the amount of people working will be more than the gold to pay them, unless you can get all of the people to work for less and less with time- and most started at working class poverty- how can you make less than that?
The depression was fate. FDR could have gone against his constituents and played a non-isolationist role in the European diplomatic theater, but then the depression would have lasted perhaps several more decades without WW2.
jpxc99
It can be debated that it was WWII that got us out of the depression considering that FDR's New Deal was mostly abolished by 1943, but don't discount some of the programs that FDR used. Even though some of the programs were deemed unconstitutional many things were created during his administration. As far as the economy goes though it was WWII that pulled the manufacturing out of a rut and created many jobs.
thylawyer
Obviously you must think George W. Bush is a fool, which he is.
Once Congress and Supreme Court got on board, the New Deal did a lot to get the economy moving, and without giving a lot of money to the big corporations and investors who caused the Depression. The big corporations benefitted most from the war, as usual.
regerugged
There are economists and political scientists who have made these points in the past. FDR is such a great American hero that anything bad about his policies gets shouted down by liberals and the liberal-biased main stream media.
We learned from our past mistakes. Our economy and our society, our government, our military have been strong since the end of WWII.