President Franklin D. Roosevelt is commonly thought of as a liberal and President Herbert C. Hoover as a conservative. To what extent are these characterizations valid?

Also, this essay was originally written as a DBQ essay. I tried to sift through and change things accordingly, but be sure to keep an eye out for references to documents that I may have missed. The delineations of the words "liberal" and "conservative" shifted at the start of the Great Depression. Although laissez-faire policy was thought to be liberal in the Roaring 20's, the year 1929 quickly changed America's idea of liberalism entirely. The hardnosed …

…fight poverty with many new programs considered liberal. Because of this result, Roosevelt received all the credit for ending the Depression. However, even though expenditures tripled during FDR's administration, the economy didn't fully recover until the second World War. While Roosevelt can be characterized as a liberal using today's standards or the standards of the 1930's, Hoover's characterization changed with the public's idea of "liberal"; the standard for liberal became increasingly conservative during the Depression.