Ok. Here’s a brief description of the presidents from the beginning of the depression until the beginning of World
War two.
So, at the beginning of the depression in October of 1929, you got Hoover in office. At first, everyone thinks its just another depression, that happen every so often. At that point, no one had any idea how bad it would be. Hoover believed in the concept of “rugged individualism” where basically, he disagreed with
socialism/communism (more basically, he was
conservative). So he started out with no
special programs, as any president would have done (including FDR) in his position. He started out with encouragement towards business management, then when everyone started to realize it was bad, he started to move towards more drastic measures, such as his lowering of mortgage rates and the
government buying crops from farmers. The only
time that
people realized the actual issue the nation was facing was at the end of his presidency, which is when he came up with his plan that he would have used had he been reelected. Well, he wasn’t. So, after FDR took office, he went to him and showed him his plan. FDR went and used it as if it were his own idea. His “New Deal” was an edited (edited for the worse, more towards
socialism) version of the plan that Hoover had shown him. The thing is, the New Deal didn’t do much. It was somewhat successful in helping the economy, but not all that much more than that of what Hoover had done (that is if you consider that FDR could have done a lot more in office because he had been in during the depression for much longer, so you have to look at how much they did proportional to how
long they were in). His New Deal was all good and fine, but if you look at the charts (trust me, I have), you see that World
War Two was the major contributor to the economic recovery. You see that starting in 1942, there was a dramatic increase in GDP (Gross Domestic Product). This was completely a result of
America’s well known success at times of
war. The American economy always performs better and more efficiently during times of
war, as it did in WWII and took us out of The Great Depression.
Ok, so this is basically FDR's contribution: He didn’t do all that much, WWII did all everyone though that he did. All the good he did do, was because Hoover told him what to do.
Thank you for taking the
time to read what took me a somewhat considerable amount of
time, long enough for me to do it in Word so I wouldn’t lose it by accident if some stupid shit happened.