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The Roosevelt reforms went far beyond previous legislation. They had to meet two pressing needs: to reorganize capitalism in such a way to overcome the crisis and stabilize the system; also, to head off the alarming growth of spontaneous rebellion in the early years of the Roosevelt administration- organization of tenants and the unemployed, movements of self-help, general strikes in several cities.

That first objective-to stabilize the system for its own protection- was most obvious in the major law of Roosevelt's first months in office, the National Recovery Act (NRA). It was designed to take control of the economy through a series of codes agreed on by management, labor, and the government, fixing prices and wages, limiting competition. From the first, the NRA was dominated by big businesses and served their interests. As Bernard Bellush says (The Failure of the N.R.A.), its Title I "turned much of the nation's power over to highly organized, well-financed trade associations and industrial combines. The unorganized public, otherwise known as the consumer, along with the members of the fledgling trade-union movement, had virtually nothing to say about the initial organization of the National Recovery Administration, or the formulation of basic policy."

Contrary to much mythologizing, President Roosevelt sought to harness the working class to capitalism, not emancipate it from the exploitative system, and he actually started out more conservatively than Herbert Hoover. He handed government authority to people who wanted to control workers and retain power in the business classes.

Finally, only the massive war orders of the 1940s lifted the economy out of the Depression, so if anyone deserves credit for curing that catastrophe it is Adolf Hitler, not Franklin Roosevelt.

As for the grotesquely lopsided distribution of wealth that precipitated this and every other economic crisis under capitalism, researchers have found that income inequality persisted unchanged through the Hoover, Roosevelt and Truman years.

Such policies were only to be expected from FDR’s appointees, most of whom were decidedly anti-working class. His first Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, was from the overtly racist and anti-labor wing of the Democratic Party. Jesse Jones, a conservative millionaire newspaper owner, headed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and later the Commerce Department, and was a great friend of the monopolists. War Secretary Henry Stimson was a Wall Street attorney who negotiated General Somoza into power in Nicaragua. The under-secretary of State was Edward Stettinius, a U.S. Steel millionaire. The Chief of the National Recovery Administration was General Hugh H. Johnson, who went to San Francisco and declared the 1934 general strike there a “menace to the government,” which it certainly was. But he offered no clue why government that ushered in economic collapse shouldn’t be menaced with workers’ control.