UPDATE: I went back and checked the numbers. Unemployment his abotu 14 percent in 1937 but bounced back up to 17 percent by the time the war started. IN 1933, the rate was about 24 percent, so in four years, unemployment did drop ten percent. Some might call that dramatic, but I"m not sure I consider a decrease of 2.5 percent a year a great achievement considering the incredible amount of money spent to get there.

But I'm not here to argue that; I'm here to to make a more radical argument: the New Deal saved World War II. Unless you grew up in a steel town, you'd never even think of it, but it's real. And it's strangely the argument that my grandfather made. He was an executive at Bethlehem Steel, so he's pretty credible in making it. He was also the president of his local chapter of the John Birch Society, so he hardly made a liberal argument, which is why his argument is so strange. The argument is simple: without the New Deal infrastructure projects, Bethlehem Steel surely would have collapsed. US Steel may have collapsed as well. Our biggest contribution to the war effort was not in the contribution of troops, but in the contribution of weapons and materials. Those weapons and materials were made of steel. Without steel, it just doesn't happen. If we had followed the Hooverite philosophy that you recommend, the steel industry would have collapsed before it could have made the weaponry that won the war. Yes, the steel mills could have been restarted, but that isn't an easy proposition. I know this because my father was the guy in charge of managing maintenance shutdowns for Bethlehem Steel. Restarting a plant after a week's shutdown is very complicated, but manageable with months of planning. Hell, the plant is still warm then. After a year, it's really hard because of the thermal contraction. And you have to restart the mines that supply it first. Then you have the restart the coke ovens, and then you can restart the mill. Had we allowed the steel industry to collapse as Hoover wanted, we'd have ramped up military production 18 months later than we did. Japan was only months away from a nuclear weapons when we nuked them. They already delayed their surrender a few days to see if they were ready on their nuclear weapon. An extra 18 months would have made it possible for Japan to win the war. Germany was further behind on nuclear weapons because their own scientists were sabotaging the project. But 18 months might have made the difference. Allowing the steel industry to collapse would have made the war much worse. Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seatlle would have been completely annihilated. Maybe New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore along with it. And we may not have even won. You can't win a war without steel, but that's what conservatives wanted us to do. Granted, a lot of conservatives (like, say Prescott Bush) wanted Hitler to win, so they were acting in their best interests.