Both were terrible for the median worker. I know that's not who you are concerned about, and that's why you think Scott Walker is great.
Actually, Coolidge was pretty great for the median worker. Broad prosperity breeds opportunity.
FDR on the other hand was a complete disaster. He cartelized industries, destroyed agricultural products, attempted artificially to raise prices (in the wake of the Great money Contraction, no less!), launched entirely new regulatory agencies headed by cronies, spent and ran up government debt orgiastically, pumped labor unions with more arbitrary power to behave monopolistically, and demonized entrepreneurs and industrialists.
Hoover actually started all those things except for the last, which makes the revisionist caricature of him as some kind of laissez-faireist rather more ridiculous.
I'd say he's probably the most genuinely good person to have ever been President, and has a good claim to being the smartest one, too. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough to make him a *good* one at the time he was in office.
