Uncle Academic: "Did FDR prolong the Great Depression? Homework for the burr headed bullies in the village. Pop quiz when busted broke."

A few suggestions for getting orienting (i.e., not drowning at the outset):

1. Read the item in Section I.
2. In Section II, read the Wall Street Journal op-ed by Cole and Ohanian (2 Feb 09) and the last item in the section (by Reed).
3. In Section III, read the Salon piece by Sirota and Lilly's "Selective Keynesians."
4. Skim the list of reviews and interviews in Section I and try a few.  If you're feeling ambitious, include the encyclopedia article by Smiley.
   
5. Decide what else you want to read.
6. Eventually take on Dan Hind's irreverently entitled essay, in Section IV.  Be warned:  it's around 10K words -- 37 pp. in pdf format.  [It's also witty and incisive:  it holds attention well.])
   

I. Here's a brief introduction to the controversy, from a conservative website:

• "Ideas to Go:  The Great Depression" (pdf at IntellectualTakeout.com).

II. Here are some arguments that FDR's policies prolonged the Great Depression.  

Links to book titles are to Amazon.com.  In some cases I've added links to discussions (reviews, interviews, op-eds by book authors).  With few exceptions, positive reviews tend to summarize (radically or at length) the author's argument, and endorse it -- i.e., to dispense (perhaps for reasons of editorial economy) with taking up possible objections (an exception is Gordon's positive review of Folsom's book; another, to a degree, is the Amazon reader review by Meyrick of Smiley's book).  Page references to customer reviews at Amazon may shift upwards as new reviews are added to the ones I referenced today.

• Gene Smiley, Rethinking the Great Depression: A New View of Its Causes and Consequences (Ivan R. Dee, Dec 02).  Smiley is Emeritus Professor of Economics at Marquette University.
  
• A capsule summary of Smiley's picture of the course of events is available in his article "Great Depression" at the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics at the Library of Economics and Liberty (n.d.).
  
• Excerpts of editorial reviews at Amazon.com (the link above).
  
• [Advance] Review by Richard M. Ebeling (Freedom Daily, Dec 02).
  
• Review (with synopsis, and generally approving) by David C. Wheelock, Assistant Vice President and Economist, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (EH.net, Feb 03).
• Review by Alexander J. Field (Journal of Economic History [2003, 63:1: 288-289], available by subscription from Cambridge Journals Online).
• Review by George C. Leef (Foundation for Economic Education, Sept 03).
  
• Review by Rick Szostak (The Historian, 22 Jun 04); also, by subscription, from HighBeam Research(which link offers access to additional reviews of the book -- by and by David E. Hamilton in Journal of Southern History [1 May 04]).
• Review by Howard Bodenhorn (Business History Review (1 Apr 04).
• Review by Jim Couch (Public Choice, Oct 04, pp. 257-259; available via subscription [e.g., in libraries] from IDEAS or EconPapers).
• Note:  none of the Customer Reviews at Amazon attempts to critique this book.
• A useful one, however, is the longer of two by Francis Meyrick, "Short and sweet; good bedtime reading for insomniacs" (RRs, p. 1 [ scroll way down]), which gives a detailed run-down of some key theses; see also Mark Mills, "Brief monetarist review of 1930s US economic policy" (23 Nov 07).
  
• Notable is the puff (RR, also p. 1 [even further down]) by Amity Schlaes (cf. below), "This is the Primer" (21 Sept 08):  "This book is simple, clear and accurate. I've turned to it over and over again and can't recommend it too highly. Smiley is especially good when he gets to the second half of the 1930s. I have one copy at the office, one copy at home and carry one around in my backpack when there's room. Also great: Jim Powell's "FDR's Folly," "The Great Depression" by Thomas E Hall and J David Ferguson, Allan Meltzer, and of course Friedman and Schwartz. Superb but hard to get: Lester V Chandler."

• Jim Powell, FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (Crown Forum, 2003).  Powell is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.  
  
• on p. 1 of the Amazon Customer Reviews:  Francis Meyrick, "A heavy read, but well worth the effort" (5 Feb 09).
• on p. 7 of the ACRs:  E. Husman, "Nothing surprising, yet" (7 Jan 04).
  
• Cf. Powell's article "How FDRs New Deal harmed Millions of Poor People" (cato.org 29 Dec 03).
  
  
• Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian, "New Deal Policies and the Persistence of the Great Depression: a General Equilibrium Analysis".  The article is accessible online only by subscription, but there is a freely available a working paper (2001) of this title (No. 587, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Research Dept., May 01).  The press release initially attracted attention in the blogosphere (cf. Science Blog, [16 Aug 04],NewsBusters.org []) and the authors' recent WSJ op-ed piece (see below) has resuscitated interest on investment advice sites (Seeking Alpha).
  
• Cf. Coles & Ohanian's op-ed piece, "How Government Prolonged the Depression" (WSJ, 2 Feb 09).
  
  
• Amity Schlaes, The Forgotten Man: A new history of the Great Depression (HarperCollins, 12 June 07).
• Interview with Amity Schaes by Nick Gillespie, "Remembering 'The Forgotten Man"'; discusses FDR/s "baleful economic legacy, the growth of government, and the death of classical liberalism" (Reason, Jan 08).
• Review by Michael V. Namorato (eh.net [Aug 08]).
• Review by James O'Neill (Blogcritics Magazine, 25 Sept 08).
• See for sure:  Amity Schlaes, "A Chilling Uncertainty: The Lessons of Roosevelt's Experimentation"(Washington Post, 31 Dec 08; p. A15).
  
  
• Burton W. Folsom, Jr., New Deal or Raw Deal: How FDR's Economic Legacy has Damaged America(Threshhold Editions, 2008).  
• Discussion at Book tv (C-SPAN2)
• Review by Eric Daniels (The Objective Standard, Winter 08-09).
• Review by David Gordon (Mises Review, Winter 08).
• Cf. Folsom's recent essay, "Financial Crisis - Yes; Great Depression - No" (Ashbrook Center, Sept 08).
  
  
• See also endnote 1 to Lilly's "Selective Keynesians" (next section, below) for links to other articles holding FDR's policies to account for prolonging the GD.
  
  
• Laurence W. Reed, "Great Myths of the Great Depression" (Foundation for Economic Education, 21 Dec 09).  A succinct synthesis of the revisionist scholarship, in anticipation of the coming fight with the Obama Administration.
  

III.  Here are some rejoinders.  I've called attention to reader reviews at Amazon.com only when these go into enough detail to qualify as presenting an argument.

• I didn't turn up any academic critiques focused specifically on Smiley's Rethinking the Great Depression or of Powell's FDR's Folly.  I may just have not been assiduous enough.  (I've so far only done Google searches -- not systematic searches using electronic tools available at a standard university library.)  It may be that criticism of the revisionist studies of the Great Depression by people with economic training had to wait for that trend itself to gear up for opposition to Obama.  Or perhaps you'll be inclined to put it down to the possibility that these 2 works are simply unassailable.
  
• The Amazon customer reviews of Powell's FDR's Folly are quite various.  Reasoned critiques (in some specific argumentative detail) include (you'll generally have to scroll down) the following.  (That they are generally judged "unhelpful" by other readers suggests something of the ideological preferences of those who cast a vote.)
  
• p.2 of CRs:  watzisname, "Powell deserves an F in economics" (29 Nov 07).
• p. 3 of CRs:  R. Schwartz, "Economic Orthodoxy versus Social Achievements (29 Oct 05).
  
• p. 6 of CRs:  A Customer, "the Economic Statistics ahd History Disagree with this Book" (11 Apr 04); Amy Ford, "Fed Chairman Bernanke's Great Depression Economics Bood Refutes FDR's Folle.  Research the Data Yourself" (3 Apr 09); A Customer, "Creating the Middle Class, Stability and Prosperity was Bad!" (31 Mar 04).  The brief remark by George Liquor (14 Feb 04) gives some possibly important reading suggestions I haven't followed up.
  
• p. 7 of RR: geaurilla, "extremist politics masquerading as history" (5 Feb 04); A Customer, "OK, Where's the Tables?" (26 Jan 04);
• Conrad Black, "Capitalism's Savior; Franklin D. Roosevelt, freedom-fighter" (WSJ, 2 Nov 03).
• Powell's rejoinder, "Tough Questions for Defenders of the New Deal" (LewRockwell.com, 15 Nov 03).
  
• Addressing Coles and Ohanian:
  
• David Sirota, "Did you hear FDR prolonged the Great Depression?" (Salon.com, 2 Jan 09).  
  
• Picked up at various venues (e.g., SFGate [SF Chronicle online], OpEd.net [19 Jan 09])
  
• On Schlaes's The Forgotten Man:
• Eric Rauchway, "FDR's Latest Critics: Was the New Deal un-American?" (Slate.com, 5 Jul 07).
• Anne Perkins, "Dream snatcher"; review of TFM (Guardian, UK, 18 Aug 07).
• Review by David Leonhardt, "No Free Lunch" (NYT, 26 Aug 07).
  
• Scott Lilly, "Selective Keynesians" (Center for American Progress, 3 Feb 09).
  
• Scott Lilly, "Apparatchiks in the Right Wing Misinformation Machine" (Huffington Post, 4 Feb 09).
• Paul Krugman, "On the Edge" (NYT, 5 Feb 09).

IV.  Since our current interest in the question of whether or how FDR's policies might have prolonged the Great Depression stems from our interest in what to do about the situation we're in now, and since what to do about that depends on our understanding of how we came to be here, we might conclude with some discussion of various explanations of the current recession (if that is not too light a term).

• Dan Hind, "Jump! You Fuckers!" (Verso, 1 Feb 09) is witty, comprehensive, and impatient with pseudo-explanations.  Be warned:  it runs to around 10K words (37 pp. in pdf format).  But it will hold your attention.