But now that you've brought it up, just what was the Hoover administration doing that would have stopped the Great Depression if FDR hadn't been elected?

It is impossible to feed out everything here that I've learned over many years about these issues.

The conventional wisdom of course, enshrined by the American Left, is that Hoover was all about sitting on his hands and "laizzes faire", until the brilliant FDR came in with the government and initiated the socialist ideas that are now the backbone of much of our society and culture.

The reality is a lot messier. I went through my files and finally found an interview touching on this from a source you might accept as credible.

Here's an article from 1982:

Nostalgia portrays Roosevelt as the smiling and confident man who knew the answers, but in 1932 there was no such omniscience. "If you had to start a campaign trip within ten days, we'd be in an awful fix," Speechwriter Rosenman told the would-be President. Roosevelt assigned Rosenman to recruit the idea men who were to become known as the Brains Trust, notably Columbia Professors Raymond Moley, Rexford Guy Tugwell and Adolf A. Berle. But the Democratic platform of 1932 committed Roosevelt to Hooverian solutions: a balanced budget and a 25% cut in Government spending.

Indeed, while Hoover fulminated against "socalled new deals," it was Roosevelt who accused the President of "reckless and extravagant" spending, and of thinking "that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible." Roosevelt's running mate, Congressman John Nance Garner of Texas, 63, even claimed that Hoover was "leading the country down the path of socialism." Eleanor Roosevelt best summed up her husband's uncertain command of the future when she wrote at the time of his Inauguration: "One has a tremendous feeling of going it blindly, because we're in a tremendous stream, and none of us knows where we're going to land."

To the 100,000 citizens assembled before the Capitol on that bleak and windswept Inauguration Day of 1933, and to millions more clustered around their radios, Roosevelt offered not a series of remedies but a new spirit of assurance. It was this spirit that inspired him to seize a phrase from Henry David Thoreau ("Nothing is so much to be feared as fear") for his famous declaration that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." There had been three years of Government dithering since the Crash, and a new course was to be set. Said Roosevelt: "This nation asks for action, and action now." To end the crisis, he would seek from Congress a "broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe." This was the passage that, somewhat ominously, drew the loudest applause.

We got very lucky back in the 1930s. Someone with a different outlook than FDR, and healthier, could have founded a dictatorship in this country. As I have pointed out so many times, imposing totalitarianism on a nation is frighteningly easy.