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“The New Deal Worked”: Why Do So Many People Accept that as Fact?
...“only about half of the economists and three quarters of the historians disagreed fully with the statement that the New Deal lengthened and deepened the Great Depression. Not a hint of that shows up in the textbooks, which cite as criticisms only statements from sources like President Hoover, the Liberty League, or business interests, that to modern ears sound highly ideological, naive, or self-serving. Obviously, such statements were made, and their tone probably represents accurately the majority of the contemporaneous criticisms. All the same, one might wish that the texts would also discuss some of the more sophisticated criticisms, or else avoid evaluation altogether because of the complexity of the issue.” (Thomas F. Cargill and Thomas Mayer, “The Great Depression and History Textbooks,” The History Teacher (August 1998).

Contemporary critics of the New Deal included John Maynard Keynes (yes, that Keynes). Keynes repeatedly criticized FDR for discouraging private business investment with his taxes, regulations and overheated rhetoric (the White House charged that opponents were “Big Business Fascists”). Radical historian Howard Zinn (yes, that Howard Zinn) published Keynes’s criticisms in his New Deal Thought reader (1966)....