“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” said Franklin D. Roosevelt. Those words were used during the Great Depression to bring the spirit of the American people up. Majority of the American people at that time and now believed that the New Deal brought America out of the Great Depression. However, historians are divided over if the New Deal took American out of the Great Depression. Actually, the New Deal did not help America during the Great Depression, but the World War 2 brought America out of it.
During the Great Depression, people were in desperate times. Many banks closed, workers became unemployed, businesses ended, and the suicidal rate rose. Americans were desperate for a way out. FDR proposed the New Deal and gave Americans
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Out of that group of people, some believed that the New Deal did not help at all. Jim Powell says to John Blake that the, “Some of the time during the 1930s, the economy expanded, but chronic high unemployment persisted throughout the period. It averaged 17 percent. The best the New Deal could do was 14 percent (double what we have now), and at times, New Deal unemployment was over 20 percent.”. The reason for unemployment rates during the depression only dropped to 14% was because the New Deal made it expensive for employers to hire workers. This proves why historians are split over the New Deal since there was not a dramatic drop in unemployment after the New Deal. It was not until the war that there was a significant drop. This was because the war gave America’s economy a boost. During the war, regular car factories would transition into war truck factories. A canning factory could turn into a food rationing factory. America sold weapons, oil, food, vehicles, ammo to whoever they can. Jim Powell says in his own article, “Even in 1941, amidst the military buildup for World War II, 9.9 percent of American workers were unemployed.”. The unemployment rates dropped more with WWII than it did with the New Deal. Jim Powell also said that New Dealers filed 150 lawsuits against employers if they were not going to hire workers during the