My mother was nine years old when the Depression hit, my father 18. So they saw it and the war close up. It was the defining event in their lives, as it was for anyone who lived through it. There was never any doubt in their minds that the New Deal got us out of the Depression, or in the eyes of most of their contemporaries, either. If FDR had been such a failure, the people of that era, suffering from those events, would have been in a much better position to call him on it than the revisionist historians who started their campaigns of denial well after most of the eyewitnesses were conveniently dead.

Of course, for those in the thirties who weren't touched by the Depression, and who resented the tax hikes brought on by the New Deal, everything looked very different.

Hell, there are people today who don't even think there's a real estate crisis.