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Fresh Debate About FDR's New Deal
by Jim Powell

Jim Powell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is author of FDR's Folly, How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression, (Crown Forum, 2003).

It has been 70 years since Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched his New Deal in an effort to banish the Great Depression of the 1930s -- perhaps the most important economic event in American history. The New Deal was controversial then, and it's still controversial, because it failed to resolve the most important problem of the era: chronic unemployment that averaged 17 percent.

Newsweek columnist Robert Samuelson acknowledged that if World War II hadn't come along, America might have stumbled through many more years of double-digit unemployment. Samuelson, however, is among those who give FDR high marks for handling the political crisis of the 1930s, the worst political crisis this country has faced since the Civil War.

But the political crisis was caused by the double-digit unemployment, and in my new book, FDR's Folly, How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (Crown Forum, 2003), I report mounting evidence developed by dozens of economists, at Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Stanford, the University of Chicago, University of Virginia, University of California (Berkeley) and other universities, that double-digit unemployment was prolonged by FDR's own New Deal policies....