Unemployment was still at a high even after the Second New Deal It wasn’t until Roosevelt cut the New Deal Budget in 1937 that the country went back into recession.
The New Deal’s achievements are evident in sources D, E and F as these sources give evidence that America had been improving since the New Deal was created, and that the public were mostly happy that the New Deal had achieved what its main goals were. When USA entered the Second World War, the New Deal carried on improving America’s economy. Analysing the data in source I, closely evidence can also be found that the New Deal did help America overall. The New Deal helped to get production lines back on track, and the statistics also improved between 1935 and 1938 slightly. The fact that the economy did recover and improved shows that the statement is true to some extent. When Roosevelt cut the budget in 1937, it proved that the country may have been relying to much on the New Deal. This leads me to a theory that the country perhaps became slightly too dependent on the New Deal and in fact that the New Deal was not a myth at all in the long run.
The war may not have helped as much as the general public and American figurehead’s made out. Economy had started improving before the world war anyway, at a steady rate. This therefore means that it wasn’t purely because of the world war that the economy recovered, as it was already showing signs of improvement before America entered the war. Unemployment was falling greatly until Roosevelt cut the budget on the New Deal, after which it started to rise again slightly. Therefore, this does give proof that the New Deal did help the economy recover again because a year after the budget was cut, unemployment figures went up again.
The war did help a great deal on improving the economy a great deal and this is shown mostly in source I as when America enters the war the unemployment decreased a lot, this is probably because of all the job openings in the army due to lack of soldiers and the fact that they had to supply armaments and food supplies to the rest of Europe and themselves as well.
Looking at the sources that are generally against the New Deal and Roosevelt they are not very reliable, and are potentially very biased. This is because the sources are no more than propaganda sources, and only portray what the Republicans want the public people to believe. This is because the Republican’s were mostly old fashioned and believed in the old fashioned ways.
From analysing the sources closely and looking at the statistics given in the sources from World War Two and the New Deal it is possible to see that they show overall that both helped the recovery of the USA very much. The New Deal cut unemployment drastically, and unemployment was still going down before the war even started. When America entered the world war, it cut unemployment from 19 per-cent to 4.7per-cent. This almost wiped out unemployment completely, and created thousands of jobs.
I conclude that it is for the above reasons that I believe that the statement, “The achievement of the new deal is a myth. The USA’s economic recovery came with the outbreak of the Second World War,” is not very true and is bias. The sources are useful in helping interpret this, especially source I although some sources are not as helpful as others. If I had to place their support on the view in a scale of one to ten I would place it around 4 because they do not actually support the view in general, although they do help to put forward the opposite argument. The figures and data given before the America entered war give evidence which proves that the New Deal did reduce the unemployment rate, and entering the war just sped up the process and created many more jobs therefore chopping unemployment. Although the war may have helped to speed up the economic recovery, it is unfair to state that the New Deal was entirely a ‘myth’ as it clearly did help America and the unemployment problems created within the country as a whole.
