What finally brought the Great Depression to an end? We've seen that, whatever it was, it took place not during the 30s but sometime between then and the end of World War II, when a remarkable postwar revival occurred instead of the renewed depression many feared. We've…
By the start of 1937, things were looking up for the U.S. economy. Although the Supreme Court had struck down both the NIRA and the AAA—the chief pillars of the original New Deal's recovery plan—some time earlier, like a glider released by its tow plane, the recovery…
Having devoted the last two posts in my New Deal series to the NRA, I may have given readers the impression that I had nothing to say about the consequences of the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) passed more than a month before the National Industrial Recovery Act….
In assessing the New Deal's contribution to economic recovery, I've naturally tended to draw on fairly recent research. That keeps me from being accused of being out of date. But it makes me vulnerable to the charge of overlooking the testimony of experts who studied the New…
"Without Roosevelt’s intervention, the economic recovery that lasted from 1933 to 1937 would have been weaker and shorter—-not unlike our own recovery after the Great Recession." (David Weiman, "Imagining a World without the New Deal," The Washington Post, August 12th, 2011.) *** In the previous installment to…