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gtoacp
Lv 5
gtoacp asked in Politics & GovernmentPolitics · 1 decade ago

Can a strong case be made that FDR perpetuated the Great Depression and that WWII ended it?

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?

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  • 1 decade ago
    Favorite Answer

    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.

    Source(s): Me, instructor of history at a local college.
  • 1 decade ago

    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.

    Source(s): One thing FDR did was get rid of the gold standard. Today our money is paper not backed by gold. Money and gold are two completly different things now, completely unrelated to each other. Money today is backed by faith in leadership. Whoever it is who leads (not nescesarily the President).
  • 1 decade ago

    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.

  • 1 decade ago

    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.

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  • 1 decade ago

    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.

  • Anonymous
    4 years ago

    Neither. It changed into international conflict II that ended the melancholy and the guidelines of Eisenhower that created the prosperity of the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties. The guidelines of Lyndon Johnson. Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter led to the monetary fall down in the Nineteen Seventies.

  • 1 decade ago

    Are you freaking nuts? Maybe you are just too stupid to realize all that FDR did throughout his term in office. Does the words "New Deal" mean anything to you. So go away and stop attacking the greatest president of the 20th century.

  • Anonymous
    1 decade ago

    the great depression was a direct result of the 90 percent reduction of the circulating currency by internation bankers and the switch to the gold standard>

  • ?
    Lv 7
    1 decade ago

    NOPE!!! Afraid not!!!!

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