At least one progressive writer complains that Donald Trump is taking the country backward to the time of Warren Harding, who undid Woodrow Wilson’s huge expansion of federal power, cutting spending and abolishing regulations. Harding was also an advocate of free speech (which Wilson emphatically was not), releasing Eugene Debs from prison. But progressives view any retreat from the megastate as dangerous.

In his latest Bastiat’s Window post, Bob Graboyes sets the record straight about the three Republican presidents between Wilson and FDR.

Responding to the claim that the three were failures, Graboyes writes, “They’ve been judged failures and mothballed [by] left-leaning partisan ideologues [who] created a false perception that Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover were nearly identical in terms of policy and that FDR was a radical departure from all three — a progressive visionary along with a highly vaunted Woodrow Wilson.” The truth is that “Harding’s and Coolidge’s styles of governance were similarly constrained, whereas Hoover was an aggressive interventionist who effectively launched the New Deal before FDR in all but name.”

The laissez-faire administrations of Harding and Coolidge lowered the government’s drag on the economy, leading to boom times, as Graboyes notes. But Hoover’s incessant meddling once the economy slid into recession (as it had briefly under Harding) made things worse and worse. Harding and Coolidge, far from being presidential failures, were among our best.

Graboyes continues, “Harding and Coolidge were not cold-hearted with respect to economic downturns — they simply did not believe that the federal government had the capacity to tame business cycles and feared that meddling could do great damage.”

FDR’s New Deal was not the magic elixir for the economy that today’s progressives claim it was. As we approach the 100th anniversary of the New Deal, it’s important to get the facts straight.