It was fortunate for the historical legacy of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that the initial military success of the Third Reich in Europe in 1939-1940, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 took attention away from his record in dealing with America’s Great Depression. Had Roosevelt not ended his Presidency as a victorious war President, he would instead be remembered as the President whose policies all but ruined the inherent economic vitality of the American economy for decades after.

A retrospective examination of the economic policies of Roosevelt's New Deal from March 1933 to onset of World War II in late 1941, reveals extraordinary failure and incompetence viewed from the perspective of whether they succeeded in restoring healthy real growth and robust employment to the economy. So blatant was the failure of these policies, over such a period of years, the question must be asked whether in fact a policy other than fostering normal recovery was priority.
New Deal

The core group of FDR's early advisers centered around the figure of Harvard Law School Professor, Felix Frankfurter, an FDR intimate since World War I days. The inner circle included at the outset also Columbia University Prof. Rexford Guy Tugwell, author Stuart Chase, Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace, and a small number of others, including Harold Laski at the London School of Economics. These were the men who had the private ear of the President on economic issues in 1933-1937.

'A new deal'

In his Presidential acceptance speech in 1932, Roosevelt promised "a new deal for the American people." The term was taken from a 1932 book by the same name, "A New Deal," written by Stuart Chase. That book rapidly disappeared from the shelves after Roosevelt's election. Its contents were the currency of White House economic policy discussion by Tugwell and other central planners around the new President.

Chase, along with Tugwell and Robert Williams Dunn, had jointly written a report, "Soviet Russia in the Second Decade," following their 1927 travel to Stalin's Russia.

In his 1932 book, "A New Deal," Chase argued that the earlier transition out of feudalism into what he called laissez-faire capitalism, was essentially over. The era of Trusts, monopolies, capital concentration by large banks, must now give way to central or collective planning. Chase wrote, "modern industrialism, because of its delicate specialization and interdependence, increasingly demands the collectivism of social control to keep its several parts from jamming. We find a government meeting that demand by continually widening the collective sector through direct ownership, operation and regulation of economic functions." He adds, "Competition is perhaps a good thing—in its proper place. Where is its proper place? Collectivism is beyond peradventure on the march."

Much of Chase's book was filled with fulsome praise for Stalin’s Russian model of central planning and its achievements, reflecting the fascination of numerous younger American intellectuals in the early 1930's.