Scholars and statesmen have at least one characteristic in common: the projects they embark upon seldom materialize in quite the shape they anticipated. This study began as an inquiry into the way the Keynesian revolution was assimilated into the policy-making processes of the U.S. government during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. To set the stage for that discussion, an introductory chapter on the legacy of the Hoover administration to the New Deal seemed to be in order. What was originally intended to be a brief sketch of the bankruptcy of the economics of Hooverism has now become something else.

Most people below the age of sixty have been brought up to believe that the Great Depression was the watershed event of the twentieth-century history of the American economy and that all that went before is “premodern.” Certainly the generation of economists acquiring professional status since World War II has been schooled in the view that a great burst of light broke through with the publication of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936 and that the intellectual era preceding it was largely one of darkness (or at least of very limited vision). The manner in which we report data on the aggregative performance of the economy reinforces this impression. All of the regular publications of the statistical services of the U.S. government begin their series with 1929. By implication, the economic world before that is of no interest.