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I'm going to try and not defend "that man in the White House", but it is difficult, if not impossible, for those of us who didn't live through those times to even begin to understand what the mood and climate was during the depression.

Millions of people thought about revolution, and communism -thought to be inevitable. A person with an empty stomach is *dangerous*, now think 24% unemployment. In those days, there was no welfare (called "relief") or unemployment, social security, health care - anything. If you didn't work, you'd likely starve. Churches and aid agencies provided some help, but not enough.

With all that, the NRA program has far more in common with national socialism (fascism) than communism. I don't tend to see any difference appreciably between the "isms" however, not enough to argue about anyway. But Roosevelt was clever - if a Liberal introduces legislation he says is Liberal, why it must be!

I do understand that. Personally, I'm very grateful that I live in the 'information age', where I have access to enough information to make reasonable decisions. Nonetheless, they were sold a bill of goods by the first 'media savvy' president, and there is a growing amount of evidence that the actions FDR took were bad, not good, for feeding people and getting them back to work. He had too many socialist ideas in his head, and the opportunity to try them out. As usual, socialism failed. Today we can look back and clearly see that. Back then, the fact that no one knew how deeply involved government was in the banking industry, or the obvious consequences of the kind of choices FDR made makes it reasonable that the people accepted it then. I have a harder time with them not being able to look back and say maybe those choices weren't so good. I do understand why people then couldn't necessarily see it - they lacked hard information. Today, we have access to almost all the info we need, and there are STILL people siding with socialism!

"I'm going to try and not defend "that man in the White House", but it is difficult, if not impossible, for those of us who didn't live through those times to even begin to understand what the mood and climate was during the depression."

My Grandma raised 6 kids - alone, her husband left - in the depression. I have no idea how she did it, but she did, working then and kept on working until she was in her 80s.
She stayed a Republican the whole time and up to her death did NOT have kind words for FDR.