Following his election in 1932, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had served as assistant secretary of the navy under President Woodrow Wilson, sought to revive the US economy by means of a peacetime version of wartime mobilization. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation, created under Hoover and expanded under FDR, was a reincarnation of the War Finance Corporation of World War I, just as the Securities and Exchange Commission was inspired by the World War I–era Capital Issues Committee.
