Franklin Delano Roosevelt And Barack Hussein Obama II

“We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. . . . We have never made good on our promises. . . . I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . . And an enormous debt to boot!”

- Henry Morgenthau, FDR's Secretary of the Treasury, 13 May 1939

One of FDR’s first acts as President was to close down all banks, a maneuver he hoped would prevent scared depositors from withdrawing their savings.

What this maneuver actually did, however, was intensify the public’s panic. It didn’t improve banking at all, nor did it help in any way with the Grat Depression. 

  

Unemployment rates over the course of the Great Depressi looked like this:

• 1929:   3.2 per cent

• 1930:   8.7 per cent
• 1931: 15.9 per cent
• 1932: 23.6 per cent
• 1933: 24.9 per cent
• 1934: 21.7 per cent
• 1935: 20.1 per cent
• 1936: 16.9 per cent
• 1937: 14.3 per cent
• 1938: 19.0 per cent
• 1939: 17.2 per cent
• 1940: 14.6 per cent 

FDR averaged 17.7 per cent unemployment, which is staggering:

[T]o be more precise, FDR’s unemployment average was more than five times the 1929 level."

Many FDR apologists like to cite the 1933 to 1940 drop in unemployment as the greatest drop, percentage-wise, in the unemployment rate ever by an American President. Of course, what this fails to take into account, among a litany of other things, is the fact that centralised banking, as opposed to privatised, through the artificial manipulation of interest rates, caused the problems to begin with, and the subsequent interventions, first by Herbert Hoover and then by FDR, exploded those problems astronomically, as testified by the unprecedented unemployment rates that decade saw: 

"In other words, 14 per cent unemployment, is, by any legitimate standard, ghastly, and only a lunatic or a fool would call it “a success.”

Quoting economists Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway, who used statistical models to evaluate the results of FDR’s New Deal:  

“The Great Depression was very significantly prolonged in both its duration and its magnitude by the impacts of New Deal programmes."

Compare that to the eight million in 1931. 

Continue in Part III.