Critics of the New Deal
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During the Great Depression, which took place between 1929 and 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's instituted a series of programs called the New Deal. The New Deal attracted a number of critics from both ends of the political spectrum. These include:
- James P. Cannon, the leading American Trotskyist and founder of the Socialist Workers Party (USA)
- Charles Coughlin, who had a weekly radio program to criticize the New Deal. Coughlin was originally a Roosevelt supporter in 1932 but by 1935 had become an opponent.
- John T. Flynn, muck-raking journalist, New Republic columnist, former liberal
- Thomas Fleming, Historian
- William Z. Foster, Communist Party USA presidential candidate in 1932 and leader of the hardline Stalinist faction within the CPUSA
- Garet Garrett, journalist who traveled the country exposing what he called the negative effects and corruption of the Roosevelt Administration
- Herbert Hoover, former President of the United States
- William Lemke, North Dakota congressman, who ran a populist third-party Presidential campaign against Roosevelt in 1936 on the Union Party ticket.
- Huey Long, Governor and Senator from Louisiana. Note that, unlike most notable New Deal critics, Lemke and Long criticized it for not going far enough. Long proposed a more radical plan called Share Our Wealth.
- Albert Jay Nock, libertarian author and social critic
- Isabel Paterson, author
- Jim Powell, economic historian
- Ayn Rand, novelist, founder of Objectivism and one inspiration for libertarianism
- Al Smith, Governor of New York
- Gerald L.K. Smith, an evangelist widely considered a demagogue.
- Robert Taft, son of former President William H. Taft, future Senator from Ohio
- Francis Townsend, a California doctor who, like William Lemke and Huey Long, criticized the New Deal for not going far enough, and proposed his own guaranteed income plan for senior citizens.
- Wendell Wilkie, Republican presidential candidate in 1940
- Gerald B. Winrod, an evangelist known for his anti-Semitism, who railed against the New Deal and called Roosevelt "the Devil". He was prosecuted in 1944 under the Smith Act for his pro-Hitler stance.
Books with an anti-New Deal point of view
- FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression by Jim Powell (2003)
- Defend America First: The Antiwar Editorials of the Saturday Evening Post, 1939-1942 by Garet Garret Edited by Bruce Ramsey (2003)
- Rethinking the Great Depression by Gene Smiley (2003)
- The New Dealers' War: FDR and the War Within World War II by Thomas Fleming (2002)
- Salvos Against the New Deal: Selections from the Saturday Evening Post: 1933-1940 by Garet Garrett, Edited by Bruce Ramsey (2002)
- The Roosevelt Myth by John T. Flynn, (1948) (rev 1952)
- Garet Garrett's: The People's Pottage by Garet Garrett (1953)