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Foes of the New Deal condemned its alleged waste, incompetence, confusion, contradictions, and cross-purposes, as well as the chiseling and graft in the alphabetical agencies — "alphabet soup" sneered Al Smith. Roosevelt had done nothing, it was said, that an earthquake could not have done better.
Hardheaded businessmen were shocked by the leap-before-you-look, try-anything-once spirit of Roosevelt. They accused him of confusing movement with progress.
"Bureaucratic meddling" and "regimentation" were also bitter complaints of anti-New Dealers; and in truth bureaucracy did blossom. The federal government, with its hundreds of thousands of employees, became incomparably the largest single business on earth. Unhappily, many of the ill-trained newcomers to the political payroll represented a setback for the merit system. Promises of budget balancing, to say nothing of other promises, had gone out the window — so foes of the New Deal pointed out. The national debt had mounted from the already enormous figure of $19,487,000,000 in 1932 to $40,440,000,000 by 1939. The government was becoming, its critics charged, a "handout state" trying to squander itself into prosperity. Such lavish spending was undermining the old virtues of thrift and initiative.
In the 19th Century, the hard-pressed American went west; now he went on relief.
The business world was bitter. Accusing the New Deal of fomenting class strife, it insisted that the laboring man and the farmer-especially the big operator-were being pampered. Countless businessmen, especially Republicans, declared that they could pull themselves out of the depression if they could only get the federal government off their backs. Private enterprise, they charged, was being stifled by "planned economy", "creeping socialism", and the philosophy of "Washington can do it better". States' rights were being ignored, and the government was competing in business with its own citizens.
The aggressive leadership of Roosevelt — "one-man super-government" — also came in for denunciation. Heavy fire was especially directed at his attempts to browbeat the Supreme Court and to create a "dummy Congress". He had even tried in the 1938 elections, with backfiring results, to "purge" members of Congress who would not lock-step with his policies.
The most damning indictment of the New Deal was that it had failed to cure the depression. It had merely administered sedatives. Despite some twenty billion dollars poured out in six years of spending and lending, of leaf raking and pump priming, the gap was not closed between production and consumption. There were even more mountainous farm surpluses under Roosevelt than under Hoover. Millions of dispirited men were still unemployed in 1939, after six years of drain and strain.
