[Kay Ludlow]

I was born in 1940 and I never have met a single person who lived through the depression who thought that FDR ended it.

I was just talking to my 80 year old aunt (born 1923) this week. My husband made some disparaging remark about FDR, and she leaped to his defense, saying that "there's a lot of us that would've starved without him". I told her that many people now believe that he actually made the depression last longer, but she believes it would have been a lot worse without him. After all, he started social security so old people wouldn't have to starve...

[Freedom4US]

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!