<P> Keynesian economists stated that the recession of 1937 was a result of a premature effort to curb government spending and balance the budget . Roosevelt had been cautious not to run large deficits . In 1937 he actually achieved a balanced budget . Therefore, he did not fully utilize deficit spending . Between 1933 and 1941 the average federal budget deficit was 3% per year . </P> <P> In November 1937 Roosevelt decided that big business were trying to ruin the New Deal by causing another depression that voters would react against by voting Republican . It was a "capital strike" said Roosevelt, and he ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to look for a criminal conspiracy (they found none). Roosevelt moved left and unleashed a rhetorical campaign against monopoly power, which was cast as the cause of the new crisis . Ickes attacked automaker Henry Ford, steelmaker Tom Girdler, and the super rich "Sixty Families" who supposedly comprised "the living center of the modern industrial oligarchy which dominates the United States". </P> <P> Left unchecked, Ickes warned, they would create "big - business Fascist America--an enslaved America". The President appointed Robert Jackson as the aggressive new director of the antitrust division of the Justice Department, but this effort lost its effectiveness once World War II began and big business was urgently needed to produce war supplies . But the Administration's other response to the 1937 dip that stalled recovery from the Great Depression had more tangible results . </P> <P> Ignoring the requests of the Treasury Department and responding to the urgings of the converts to Keynesian economics and others in his Administration, Roosevelt embarked on an antidote to the depression, reluctantly abandoning his efforts to balance the budget and launching a $5 billion spending program in the spring of 1938, an effort to increase mass purchasing power . Roosevelt explained his program in a fireside chat in which he told the American people that it was up to the government to "create an economic upturn" by making "additions to the purchasing power of the nation". </P>

What did the recession of 1937 indicate about the success of the new deal