U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Kiron) penned an op-ed for today’s Register in which he explains that his opposition to the President’s economic stimulus bill stems from research he did as a student at Denison High School.  He says that his research revealed that the New Deal actually prolonged the Depression rather than helping to end it.

I started my research believing in the success of Roosevelt’s economic-recovery programs. To support this claim, I spent hours at the Carnegie Library in Denison reading past editions of the local, biweekly newspaper.

My reading began with the 1929 stock-market crash, and I examined every issue through the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Those stacks of old papers turned upside down everything I had been taught in history and government class about the New Deal. As I searched for information proving the New Deal stabilized the American economy, I instead found the exact opposite: high unemployment, a struggling stock market and continued hard times.

Later statistical findings confirm my 11th-grade research. Throughout the 1930s, the unemployment rate never dipped below 14 percent. FDR’s tinkering with the free market frustrated investors, and the 1929 high point for the Dow Jones industrial average was not reached again until 1954.

While few economists and historians deny that the entire period in American history from 1929 to 1941 saw plenty of hardship, most will admit that answering a question like “Did the New Deal cause the end of the Great Depression?” is incredibly difficult.

And trying to answer a question like, “Was it the New Deal that ended the crisis, or was it World War II?” is pretty much impossible, since we will never be able to create controls for each variable and run tests in a real-world environment.

Still, most economists are convinced that the New Deal was at least part of the reason why the Great Depression ended.  The high unemployment rate during the New Deal that King cites — roughly 14 percent at its lowest point — was relatively low when compared to unemployment rates from earlier in the depression.

As liberal commentator (and Oxford Ph.D.) Rachel Maddow notes in the video below, the unemployment rate was 25 percent in 1933, so bringing it down to 14 percent could be considered a success for the New Deal.

For a good roundup of the New Deal revisionism that many Republicans in Congress have embraced, check out this piece in the Washington Independent.