If I'm not mistaken, I believe it was large government expenditures that stimulated consumer demand and triggered economic recovery for the Great Depression.
Respectfully, I believe you are mistaken, and that the belief expounded on above is one of the reasons Depression was as long as it was.
I had an entire mini-rant here about consumer demand and how it's inherent into the economy, and how supply has always been, and will always be, the difficult part of the equation, but this post touches on plenty of other topics, so I'll stay focused on those for now.
Yoda, you are mostly unfairly criticizing the New Deal and the success it had, imagine where we'd be if not for the implimentation of the FDIC or the passing of the NLRA (Guarenteed the right of every worker to join a union, an essential right. You can argue for unions but there is no denying it is a breech of the consitution to not allow citizens to join unions).
Whatever the initial merit of unions, they've mutated into something far different these days. But regardless, by "New Deal," I'm referring more to the "government as instigator of economic progress" and "public spending as a means to growth" ideology, and not every policy of Roosevelt's (I'm sure we could find plenty I agree with).
Also your memory has certaintly failed you as unemployment /did not /double. In fact it's quite the opposite. It fell from 25% to 14.3% during 1934-37. The only time the unemployement rate increased during Roosevelts administration was when Roosevelt believed the depression was easing and scaled back on goverment programs in 1938.
Also, the GNP increased every year under Roosevelt's administration except for the same 1938 year.
Also, before the Great Depression we had a completely Republican decade in economic and political policy. Hm, what resulted after that? Oh, right. During Hoover (a Republican president with a "leave it alone" attitude) was the worst of the Great Depression.
That's when the unemployement rate managed to soar from 8.6% to 23.6% and when the GNP fell 31% since 1929.
I made a mistake in my phrasing; you're right in that the literal "New Deal" didn't double unemployment, but Hoover enacted a number of policies before he left office that were consistent with the idea that you could spend and tax your way out of the downturn. I was a bit sloppy in lumping this in with the "New Deal" -- my bad. The similarity is impossible to ignore, however; after the crash he fast-tracked public building projects and raised taxes. The phrase "leave it alone," which you reference, came from his Treasury Secretary, and he denies embracing it. Whatever he thought of it personally, his policies after the crash are not even remotely consistent with the idea. They bear far more resemblance to Roosevelt's own ethos.
Ironically, Hoover ran on a platform of increased regulation, favored lowering taxes on lower-income taxpayers (though he didn't manage to), and encouraging volunteerism -- sound familiar?
By the by, the tax-raising after the crash which I mentioned above was progressive, IE: higher for higher incomes, and implemented an additional tax on businesses. He also implemented massive trade tarrifs (Smoot-Hawley, which I'm sure you've heard of), which were/are the antithesis of supply-side philosophy. So, the idea that Hoover's policies bore even the slightest resemblance to supply-side philosophy, lassez-faire economics, or anything of the sort, is an utter myth.
I also think that the insistence on focusing on each politician's party, rather than their policies, only confuses the matter. Republicans and Democrats are plenty varied as-is, nevermind 80 years ago.