I've heard both that it worked to help pull the country out of the Great Depression and made it worse keeping the US stuck in it until WW2. I assume it is a great deal more complicated than people have been telling me but I am just wanting to know if overall it helped or hindered the recovery of the US.
The general consensus is that the New Deal shortened the Great Depression, and improved economic indicators across the board. Historian Eric Rauchway of UC Davis (one of the foremost experts on this particular topic) has written an excellent article entitled "New Deal Denialism," where he talks about some of the dishonest methods that people use to give a misleading picture of the New Deal's impact (such as counting WPA workers as "unemployed," in order to claim that unemployment was not reduced).
Getting into the specific indicators, the New Deal reduced mortality rates, improved consumer confidence, increased consumption, reduced corruption, and lowered crime rates. GDP was also improving substantially. To quote Rauchway:
GDP sank throughout Hoover’s term in office and rose throughout Roosevelt’s first two terms, with the exception of the dip in 1937-1938. During Roosevelt’s presidency, and well before the war, the economy was recovering. Any assessment of the New Deal as a failure at promoting recovery assumes that this improvement could and should have happened faster. But this is not a terrifically reasonable supposition. As Christina Romer has pointed out, annual rates of economic growth during the New Deal (1937-1938, as always, excepted) averaged 8 percent to 10 percent; “these rates of growth are spectacular, even for an economy pulling out of a severe recession.”
Unemployment was also substantially reduced. Rauchway summarizes the general economic impact of the New Deal as follows:
[Whether] you look at the performance of GDP or at current scholarship on unemployment, you see significant recovery during the New Deal. You could only believe the New Deal did little to aid the ordinary American if you went out of your way to cite the older, Lebergott data on unemployment and utterly ignored the performance of GDP.
Of course, the New Deal was not perfect; indeed, one could argue that it was far too modest, as the turn to austerity from 1937-1938 resulted in a dip in economic performance. However, the overall picture painted by the data is one of substantial improvement throughout the New Deal period, driven by the Keynesian policies pursued by the Roosevelt administration.