The facts on FDR and the depression

William H. Westhoff
Published: October 5, 2008

“FDR’s Bad Deal”, first published in The (Waynesboro) News Virginian, lacks factual balance. The author selected data to criticize Democrats. Truth is — it’s not whether FDR’s policies or World War II brought us out of the Great Depression because both were indispensable to economic recovery.

Researchers know the decade leading up to the stock market crash in 1929 saw the value of farmland fall about 40 percent, 1200 mergers swallow up 6000 companies, taxes on the rich continue to fall
until by 1929 one percent of the population owned 40 percent of the nation’s wealth while more than half of all Americans lived below a minimum subsistence level and construction and automobile sales
decline by a third in the nine months before the crash.

FDR was inaugurated in March 1933 and began his “First 100 Days” of intensive legislative activity change. The GNP had been in free fall, but was significantly arrested, and decreased only 2.1 percent in
1933. By 1934 the GNP grew by over 7 percent, by 1935 it grew 8 percent and in 1936 by 14 percent. By 1937 the GNP rose another 5 percent and unemployment fell to 14 percent. This is significant
because during the worst of the depression unemployment was about 25 percent.

Fluctuations in the economy continued until 1939 when the allied nations began to gear up for war. This preparatory war spending was the last economic event that ended the Great Depression.  For
Americans, those were very hard times that, not unlike today, required great changes. FDR’s belief in working Americans was so fundamental he declared Americans had “...nothing to fear but fear itself.” 
His crisis-changing leadership helped Americans to keep faith and save themselves.

All these facts are known to Democrats, Independents and Republicans alike.

WILLIAM H. WESTHOFF

Woodbridge