Franklin Delano Roosevelt has been getting slammed by both conservatives and libertarians as representing “big government” meddling with private enterprise. If he used to receive acclaim for rescuing the American economy from the Great Depression, now the current rightwing historical view is he made the depression worse than it would have been otherwise, that is, if the “free market” were left alone to pull the United States out of the abyss.
Jim Powell, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute writes typical misleading information on FDR:
In recent decades, however, many economists have tried to determine whether New Deal policies contributed to recovery or prolonged the depression. The most troubling issue has been the persistence of high unemployment throughout the New Deal period. From 1934 to 1940, the median annual unemployment rate was 17.2 percent. At no point during the 1930s did unemployment go below 14 percent. Even in 1941, amidst the military buildup for World War II, 9.9 percent of American workers were unemployed. Living standards remained depressed until after the war.
source: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/3800
The actual record of FDR’s administration on unemployment shows that unemployment in 1933 when he took office was 25% and had been reduced to 10% by 1941 before the U.S. had taken action in World War II (the first military response after the Pearl Harbor Attack on Dec. 7, 1941 was in Jan. 1942). By 1945 unemployment was 4% and had been 1% in 1944. The cliché repeated ad nauseam on conservative news media outlets is that World War II ended The Great Depression, not FDR’s New Deal policies. The fact is that The New Deal reduced unemployment by 60%, from 25% to 10%. World War II’s contributions to employment took this 10% and reduced it to 4%. New Deal: 15 point reduction; World War II, a 6 point reduction in unemployment.
One thing you never hear from rightwing free-market revisionists is how the New Deal grew the economy. In the pre-war years, 1933 to 1941, the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) more than doubled, the actual figure being 110.6%. The average annual GDP growth rate before World War II was a staggering 10.99%. To say that the economy did not improve until World War II is a flagrant revisionist lie, a lie important to the ideology that detests government intervention in the economy.