Rejecting the traditional notion that government was the handmaiden of business, the New Deal Congress had enacted an unprecedented series of laws which regulated the securities market, established a minimum wage, originated a new system of social security, guaranteed labor’s right to collective bargaining, and established control over the nation’s money supply. “It is hard to think of another period in the whole history of the republic that was so fruitful,” historian William Leuchtenberg has written, “or of a crisis that was met with as much imagination.”
