To the editor:

Perfunctory caveats aside, the adulatory message of the Jan. 25 Journal-World front page story, “The New Deal revisited,” by Christine Metz creates the impression that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal brought the country out of the Great Depression.

The truth is that FDR’s interventionist policies and belief that government spending could underwrite prosperity actually prolonged the Depression. Unemployment was 25.2 percent in 1933, 17 percent in 1936, 14.4 percent in 1937, 19.8 percent in 1938. (While in 1938 the world unemployment index was 11.4 percent, that for the U.S. was 19.8 percent). In 1939, unemployment was 20.7 percent.

In May 1939, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau confessed: “We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.” I urge readers to read Burton W. Folsom’s recent study “New Deal or Raw Deal?” for the rest of the story. Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them.

Craig Smith,
Lawrence