Rethinking FDR

Based on my amateur armchair analysis, I have always considered Franklin D. Roosevelt a great President, but not for the reasons my grandparents' generation would think...

I thought given the circumstances and the unique challenge he had to encounter fighting World War II alongside an ally whom we really could not trust in Stalin, he did as well as could be expected, and he used the bully pulpit to its maximum potential, in spite of dealing with polio.

However based on my knowledge of history and economics, I do not buy into the popular belief that FDR ended the Great Depression through Keynesian economic policies, nor do I buy into the belief that Hoover got us into the Great Depression by relying on "supply-side economics"

(In fact, Hoover's protectionist economic policies and reliance on big government made the depression worse, and many great economists argue the New Deal PROLONGED the Great Depression)

As Amity Shlaes points out in this article at OpinionJournal.com, the time may have come for a serious debate about the nation's economic policies and their effect on the Great Depression.

Here is an excerpt:

Roosevelt did famously well by one measure, the political poll. He flunked by two other meters that we today know are critically important: the unemployment rate and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In his first inaugural address, Roosevelt spoke of a primary goal: "to put people to work." Unemployment stood at 20% in 1937, five years into the New Deal. As for the Dow, it did not come back to its 1929 level until the 1950s. International factors and monetary errors cannot entirely account for these abysmal showings.