"The New Deal Ended the Great Depression"
A candidate drafts a document-based question: "The New Deal ended the Great Depression." She supplies a table of U.S. unemployment rates:
| 1933 | 1937 | 1938 | 1941 | 1944 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ~24.9% | ~14.3% | ~19.0% | ~9.9% | ~1.2% |
Two students argue. One says the New Deal failed, because unemployment was still near 19% in 1938. The other says it succeeded, because unemployment fell from 25% to 14% by 1937. The candidate has to decide whether the prompt is usable, and how to teach the disagreement.
1. Why is the prompt as written unanswerable, and how should it be reframed?
Read the worked answer
"Ended" is doing three jobs at once. Reframe it into claims that can be tested:
- Recovery: did output and employment return to 1929 levels, and when?
- Relief: did federal programs reach the unemployed, and how many?
- Reform: did the New Deal change the institutions that produced the Depression (banking, securities, labor law, old-age provision)?
Each has its own metric. Reform can be judged by legislation and by whether the 1937–38 contraction repeated the 1929–33 collapse - it did not, and deposit insurance is a plausible reason. Recovery is judged against a baseline, which is exactly where the students' disagreement lives.
A usable prompt: "Evaluate the claim that New Deal policies promoted recovery from the Depression." That forces students to define the baseline and the time frame, and to say what evidence would count against them.
2. How does the 1937–38 recession bear on the argument, and how should it be explained?
Read the worked answer
The 1937–38 relapse is the pivot of the whole question: unemployment rose from 14.3% to 19.0% in a single year, after four years of decline.
Students should weigh several mechanisms rather than pick one:
- Fiscal and monetary tightening. Federal spending was cut in 1937 and the Federal Reserve raised reserve requirements - a contractionary combination.
- New payroll taxes. Social Security contributions began in 1937, withdrawing purchasing power.
- A fragile recovery. The 1933–37 gains may have rested partly on federal spending, so removing it exposed underlying weakness.
Notice what this does to each student's case. The first student gains real support - it is evidence that the recovery was not self-sustaining. The second student must now explain why the trend reversed. Neither can use the table alone; both need the policy evidence, which is why the prompt should require documents, not just a chart.
3. How should the candidate address the measurement problem and the wartime years?
Read the worked answer
Two confounding issues that strong answers flag:
- Who counts as unemployed. Work-relief employees (WPA, CCC) were often counted as employed in the headline series, so the 1937 figure of 14.3% may overstate recovery. Students should ask how the rate is constructed before drawing conclusions from it.
- The 1941–44 collapse in unemployment is wartime. Attributing it to the New Deal requires an argument, because it coincides with mass mobilization and conscription. A defensible line is that the New Deal built institutional capacity (and that the war applied the fiscal stimulus), not that New Deal spending alone ended the Depression.
The candidate should also require a counterfactual sentence: what does the student think would have happened without the New Deal, and what evidence supports that? Any answer that simply reads the table in one direction is doing recall, not historical judgment.