ams which were criticized for their failures, the record as analyzed by Leuchtenburg shows such criticism to have been exaggerated. With respect to the National Recovery Administration, for example, we read that the price policies of the NRA were "blamed unfairly for the acceleration of industry toward concentration" which "hurt small business." Leuchtenburg acknowledges that the NRA could have done more to "speed recovery" and lost much of its effectiveness as the crisis of the Depression faded, but that author adds that
the main grievance of small businessmen against the [NRA] lay not in the fact that they were oppressed by monopoly but that the government would not permit them to continue to exploit labor. . . . The NRA . . . gave jobs to two million workers; it helped stop a renewal of the deflationary spiral that had almost wrecked the nation; it did something to improve business ethics and civilize competition; it established a national pattern of maximum hours and minimum wages; and it all but wiped out child labor and the sweatshop (Leuchtenburg, New Deal, 69).
The New Deal was trying to correct profound flaws which had been festering in the country for decades, and the fact that Roosevelt was able to make the changes and produce the results that he did is a remarkable accomplishment. To say that he could have done more than he did, or done it more effectively, ignores the tremendous strides that his New Deal made in correcting those shortcomings of capitalism. The NRA did lose its effectiveness as the crisis passed, but it was the NRA and other such programs which caused the crisis to ease in the first place.
Criticism is also leveled by historians at the shortcomings of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the Public Works Administration, and some of these criticisms are justified. The PWA was "operated . . . with such extreme caution that it did next to nothing to stimulate the economy," a failure of Rooseve...