I'm old enough to have known a lot of people who lived through the Depression _because_ of FDR's programs. Whether the New Deal alone could have saved the country is literally academic to the tens of millions who were saved by jobs in the CWA, WPA and CCC, or the relief provided by the FSA, SSA and economic aid to businesses under the NIRA. It seems unusually cold hearted for any historian or economist to ignore the tremendous suffering those measures spared so many, just because they didn't meet some theoretical threshold for full recovery.