….and it reads like current history.
One thing was certain. The Second New Deal (1934–1936) was a flop. The First New Deal (1933) had been abandoned, as we have seen, immediately after his inauguration. A wholly new approach and a completely unheralded series of devices were put together to the roll of the drums and the blaring of the trumpets. This was the Second New Deal. One by one all of its parts had been discarded save a few well-meaning but quite ineffectual social reforms.
The president had settled down to a realization that after all priming the pump — spending billions — had by itself done the job and he hoped to skate along on that to the end of his term. But now even that had failed. Despite the billions and the debt, the depression was back. And it was not a new depression. It was the old one, which had not been driven away but merely hidden behind a curtain of 15 billion dollars of new government debt.
And, worst of all, he did not have a single new idea that he could use. He actually faced at this moment the appalling prospect, after all the ballyhoo, of going out of office in a depression as great as the one he found in 1932. The prospect was humiliating in the extreme, especially to a man whose vanity had allowed him to be blown up into such a giant depression killer.
(From the Mises Daily quoting John Flynn’s The Roosevelt Myth, 1948)
