John Moser

On the theory that if those go down, they're going to completely tank the economy.

Yeah.

Well, the problem with that was it opened up the Hoover administration to the accusation that he just cared about his buddies in big business.

What about...

Joe Sixpack on Main Street and struggling families.

So the Garner-Wagner relief bill was going to have RFC put all sorts of money into relief.

Hoover said, this is the most economically irresponsible thing I've ever heard of.

I'm absolutely going to veto it.

And he did, although just a few weeks later, he signed another bill that was smaller.

So he was definitely not opposed in principle to large-scale federal spending.

He just believed that Garner-Wagner crossed the line.

Yeah, absolutely.

One thing you could say about the Great Depression, it totally changed Americans' expectations of what the federal government's supposed to do.

The idea that the federal government is responsible for the health of the economy

That's a product of the 1930s.

Exactly.

And it was very controversial then.

Even for FDR, FDR hated what he called the dole.

He was all in favor of work relief programs, put people to work on works projects and pay them for that at a low scale.

But he believed no less than Hoover that what we would call today welfare would destroy the initiative of the American people and their independence.