Bruce Bartlett, an original Reagan adviser and supply sider who has become much more of a Keynesian, provides an excellent history of economic theories and the people who pushed for the theories in this interview at Salon.com.
My only quibble with Bartlett is his still taking the conventional view that WWII, not the New Deal, ended the Great Depression. Fact is people in the New Deal job programs were still considered "unemployed," as southern Dems and conservatives who went along demanded they not be deemed "employed." It allowed for political arguments that the New Deal was not working. If one counts those in the WPA, PWA, CCC, etc. as employed, unemployment in 1939 was between 5-7%, and 6% in 1941, as the nation was transitioning from domestic production to war production. Conrad Black, in his majestic biography of FDR, lays this out, and can be seen through word searching various pages with the word "employment." Also, why is it any less "New Deal" to build a tank in 1942 than a library or a road in 1936? The key is government programs to employ the unemployed, and to have people doing useful work, whether that is building or fixing roads, building dams, bridges, canals, libraries, public buildings, restoring forest land, developing parks, etc., as well as building rockets, tanks, and other munitions.
There is a reason we know the official unemployment rates make no sense to draw a conclusion about the New Deal, and that is the largely spectacular growth in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which began within a year after FDR took office in 1933. See the chart in this otherwise conventional and therefore misleading and wrong article about FDR's New Deal and WWII leadership (The author fails to note the sharp decline in GDP in 1938, owing to FDR cutting back on the New Deal jobs programs, and thinking the private market was ready to take back the workers; FDR then put the pedal to the metal in putting people back to work on useful public works, as Black explains in his FDR biography). In short, GDP growth that is often in double digits makes no sense if unemployment is in double digits and demand for products and services is assumed to be down from high unemployment rates.
Anyway, Bartlett provides important background to understand the last 90 years of political economy, with insights into the 2008 Great Recession and subsequent bailout, the bad faith his then former colleagues in the Republican Party continue to exhibit, and the importance of velocity of money to get things truly moving again. He recognizes demand side economics makes much more sense, and a robust infrastructure program (he doesn't mention the Green New Deal, but it fits with his velocity of money point) would do wonders for the nation and our people. Just as the original New Deal in the 1930s greatly increased money velocity, and had positive collateral effects--people had money to go out and spend at local businesses--, so would a Green New Deal, as Bernie Sanders has envisioned. Heck, even Scientific American agrees there would be a significant net increase in employment.
