Hoover and Roosevelt disagreed fundamentally on how to tackle the Great Depression. Hoover was very much wedded to the prevailing economic orthodoxy, which held that periodic slumps were inevitable and that there was very little that the government could do in terms of direct involvement in the economy. That's not to say that Hoover believed that nothing could or should be done. He authorized indirect aid to local banks and local public works projects, but the scale and scope of such government intervention were severely restricted and proved wholly inadequate to the sheer size of the task. Hoover believed that individual initiative and private enterprise would ultimately get the country out of its economic difficulties and that too much government intervention would undermine the ability of people to stand on their own two feet.

Roosevelt, on the other hand, was committed to a much more extensive program of government involvement in the running of the economy. Many of the New Deal agencies he established to tackle the Great Depression were modeled on those already attempted by Hoover, but they were much more ambitious in scope. Unlike Hoover, Roosevelt supported the provision of Federal funds directly as well as government control over large sectors of the economy. Private philanthropy and charity were not enough to deal with the unprecedented crisis; for the first time in American history, the Federal government needed to take a direct, active role in managing the economy. Under Roosevelt's New Deal the role of American government fundamentally changed.