Which Presidents ended making the Great Depression start and worse poll

[vanguard96]

Hoover was an interventionist and FDR only continued his policies.

Much has been written about the Roaring 20's being a time of profligate spending and the 'evil' capitalist speculators.

Meanwhile GOP supporters mention Hoover not having a Republican Congress but then FDR prolonging it with the New Deal.

In my view the greatest blame lies with Herbert Hoover who should be castigated not as a laissez-faire espousing president who 'did nothing' till much too late but as one who favored keeping wages high after the crash, manipulating farm prices (thereby reducing supply), deporting immigrants, and inflating the money supply.

Of course what FDR did prolonged it (the unemployment numbers at the start of his term and the start of the war were essentially the same level - bearing this out). The command economy & restrictions of WWII cannot be viewed not a true recovery - the consumption was shifted to the government and somehow that produced the greatest gain in GDP seen to date. Yet people were on rations and had to limit use of metal and other items.

The New Deal was a flowering of the state intervention which accelerated under Hoover who had shown signs of interventionism even while serving as Commerce Secretary.

As another counter to the traditional blame the other party we have the Chicago school view. It was not as extensive in its analysis but more widely accepted by the traditional right at the time. Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz maintained in their work in the 50's & 60's that the actions of the Fed with regard to the bank failures of 1930 following the crash of '29 were not consistent with what they did in response to the severe but short lived recession of 1920-21. Had they responded per their standard M.O. a much shorter lived recession may have resulted. This view works well within the framework of the activist Fed and thus was seen as a understandable one by many of the William F Buckley and Goldwater crowd.

Notably, J.M. Keynes did not see any warning signs even after the Stock Market Crash. Meanwhile, Ludwig von Mises was acutely warning of issues.

The latter-day Mises scholar and revisionist economic historian Murray Rothbard's interpretation of the money supply issues under the Hoover administration in his book The Great Depression are a heavy financial read surely but an eye-opener given all the data backing it up. This is in contrast to the often mentioned criticism of Austrians relying on less data driven, theoretical oversimplified models as seen in other books by Rothbard earlier philosophical books by Mises and Karl Menger. The work is an essential counter after many years of both the political views of 2 main parties and their partisans, Milton Friedman's once widely hailed monetarist views (he won the Nobel largely due to this), and various leftist-Socialist dogmatic views on exploitation, speculation, and the failure of the capitalist bourgeois state using isolated evidence to paint their picture to espouse the end of capitalism.

The 1930's were a very tough time for those who supported laissez faire as it was given a black eye by the establishment at the time. It was only with the rise of modern conservatism in the late 1950's and 1960's that the atmosphere more receptive to not only the monetarist views of Friedman but the data-backed revisionism of Rothbard and his business cycles that we saw a counter to prevaling logic.