The contest was not merely about electric power but also about control of the American future.

From The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes.  Page 9.

The big question about the American depression is not whether war with Germany and Japan ended it. It is why the Depression lasted until that war. From 1929 to 1940, from Hoover to Roosevelt, government intervention helped to make the Depression Great. The period was not one of a moral battle between a force for good—the Roosevelt presidency—and forces for evil, those who opposed Roosevelt. It was a period of a power struggle between two sectors of the economy, both containing a mix of evil and virtue. The public sector and the private sector competed relentlessly for advantage. At the beginning, in the 1920s, the private sector ruled. By the end, when World War II began, it was the public sector that was dominant.

The contest was a brutal one, fought across the land, through famines and floods, and in a Washington that knew neither air-conditioning nor angiograms. Roosevelt was clear about it. As he put in his second inaugural address, he sought “unimagined power.” He, his advisers, and his congressional allies instinctively targeted monetary control, utilities, and taxation because they were the three sources of revenue whose control would enlarge the public sector the most. Since the private sector—even during the Great Depression—was the key to sustained recovery, such bids did enormous damage. Today we even have an economic theory, public choice economics, that sheds light on this. Public choice economics says that government is not higher than the private sector but rather a coequal combatant. Public choice theory tells us as much about the New Deal as the traditional economics Americans have been taught.

This particular school postdates the Depression, but the notion that something destructive was going on was evident, even to Roosevelt’s allies. A number of them tried to articulate the problem. Ray Moley and Tugwell, two of Roosevelt’s original brain trusters, dedicated years to grappling with the hypocrisy and damage of Roosevelt’s actions. Wendell Willkie, at first a Democrat and enthusiastic reformer, would demonstrate that the contest between the TVA and his Commonwealth and Southern was not merely about electric power but also about control of the American future.