In fact, they were spoken by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932.

A precipitous collapse in stock market prices, millions defaulting on mortgage repayments, an unpopular president blamed for neglecting the plight of ordinary Americans. As the current economic crisis in the US unfolds, many people are asking whether this is history repeating itself. Are we witnessing a rerun of the stock market crash and subsequent Great Depression? What lessons can be, or should have been, learned from that earlier national emergency?

And there are certainly clear parallels between the present crisis and events of almost eight decades ago. In both cases, the economic collapse came after a period of dominance by the Republican party. The 1920s saw three successive Republican presidents: Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. These administrations shared a fervent commitment to laissez faire capitalism, encouraging growth through tax cuts, low interest rates and minimum business regulation. Coolidge encapsulated Republican faith in the free-market economy in the aphoristic observation: "The business of America is business."

Similarly, the past three decades have been another period of Republican hegemony, interrupted only by Bill Clinton's two terms as president. Successive administrations, including Mr Clinton's, have championed the growth of commerce unfettered by government regulation.

In the 1920s, as now, political leaders created the conditions that precipitated economic crisis. In both instances, a lack of effective regulatory oversight fostered a climate of reckless market speculation. And, just like in 1929, the incumbent administration failed to see the emergency coming.

"I have no fears for the future of our country," said Hoover at his inauguration in March 1929. "It is bright with hope. We shall soon be in sight of the day when, God willing, poverty will be banished from this nation."

Seven months later, the Wall Street crash precipitated an economic crisis unprecedented in the nation's history.

In a speech last November, President George W. Bush emphasised the continuing growth of the US economy. "Sure, there's some challenges facing us," he suggested, "but the underpinnings of our economy are strong."

Even as warnings that the country was heading towards disaster became louder, the president emphasised his administration was "on top of the situation". The recent televised address in which Mr Bush predicted that the US faced a "long and painful recession" was a painful admission of his lack of foresight.

The US economy has a long way to fall before it reaches the depths of the 1930s, of course. The US is technically still not even in a recession, and only just over 6 per cent of its workers are out of a job, though the economic situation is nonetheless hurting many. But it is also important to recall that the worst excesses of the Great Depression did not occur until several years after the stock market crash.

The suffering that followed the crash of 1929 was appalling. From 1929 to 1933, farm income halved, industrial production was at 40 per cent of capacity and unemployment rose to one in four Americans. Hungry men and women lined the streets for their next meal from the local soup kitchen, the homeless huddled in hastily erected shantytowns on the outskirts of cities, and thousands hitched rides on goods trains in search of a job.

The collapse of the agricultural economy drove farmers from the land. Dust storms and evictions displaced more than 1 million rural labourers, whose plight John Steinbeck portrayed in The Grapes of Wrath. Factory workers fared no better. The coal and textile industries were first to suffer, but other sectors soon followed. Homeless families in Arkansas huddled in caves; in California they found refuge in sewers. "We saw want and despair walking the streets," observed a Chicago social worker, "and our friends, sensible, thrifty families, reduced to poverty."

The American birth rate fell to its lowest level while the suicide rate reached its highest.

One woman from New York state sent a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt in which she asked for a loan to buy clothes for her baby. "Please, Mrs Roosevelt," she begged, "I do not want charity, only a chance from someone who will trust me until we can get enough money to repay the amount spent for the things we need."

For blacks, things were even bleaker. The collapse of the cotton market displaced thousands of sharecroppers in the south. Many migrated to urban areas but racism restricted their access to jobs and government relief programmes.

Once again, minorities, still overrepresented among America's poor, have borne the brunt of the economic burden. Subprime mortgage lenders aggressively targeted minorities who were otherwise unable to afford their own homes. According to Harvard University's Joint Centre for Housing Studies, 55 per cent of black Americans and 45 per cent of Latinos who became homeowners in 2005 did so through subprime mortgages, compared with only 17 per cent of whites.

Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza, a Latino rights organisation, affirms that high-interest loans to poorer minorities are "eroding the hard-earned wealth our communities spent decades fighting for".

In 1929, there were few safety nets to catch people whose livelihoods collapsed. With his New Deal, Roosevelt revolutionised the role of government as a provider for the dispossessed through the introduction of such measures as the minimum wage, unemployment relief and aid to dependent children. Despite severe cuts to the provision of welfare in recent times, there are far greater protections in place for ordinary people than in the 1930s.

Perhaps as a result, there are also no indications that the current economic crisis is tearing at the social fabric of the US in the same way as the Great Depression. Demonstrations by unemployed and homeless people shook many cities during the 1930s. Fears grew that a fascist demagogue could use grass-roots unrest as a means to seize power in Washington, a scenario enacted in Sinclair Lewis' satirical novel It Can't Happen Here. There is no likelihood of such a scenario now, but social unrest is a possibility.

Mr Bush's handling of the economy may prove decisive to this year's presidential election, as was true in 1932. The dour Hoover appeared to many Americans uncaring and unable to appreciate the scale of the problem that beset the country.

In 1930, Hoover introduced higher trade tariffs to protect American manufacturers from foreign competition. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act led to a protectionist war between the US and other countries. Exports and imports fell sharply, crippling businesses, which laid off workers in ever higher numbers.

The public perception that Hoover had failed either to avert or remedy the economic crisis led to his resounding defeat by Democratic challenger Roosevelt in the election of 1932. Roosevelt won a landslide victory with 22.8 million votes to Hoover's 15.7 million.

A striking contrast between the past and present economic crises concerns presidential rhetoric. "The only thing we have to fear," proclaimed Roosevelt in his 1933 inaugural address, "is fear itself".

The Great Depression had a profound psychological as well as material impact, shattering individual and collective self-confidence. In times of unprecedented trouble, Roosevelt sought to restore public optimism through his regular radio broadcasts, the "fireside chats" in which he presented himself as not only a politician but a personal friend to ordinary Americans.

In sharp contrast, the address that Mr Bush delivered to rally support for the bailout plan exploited public fears. "Our entire economy is in danger," he warned. "Without immediate action by Congress, America could slip into a financial panic and a distressing scenario would unfold."

A fundamental weakness of the American economy in the 1920s was the unequal distribution of wealth. Although the average wage of workers increased during that decade, the economic elite benefited far more from cuts in personal and corporate income taxes. Rather than borrow more, ordinary Americans cut back on consumer purchases, creating chronic deflation. The situation is strikingly similar today. Millions of debt-ridden Americans cannot afford to repay mortgages, triggering a collapse in the housing market.

In a campaign speech in 1932, Roosevelt spoke of the failure of the federal government to address the needs of the "forgotten man". Washington, he asserted, had "sought temporary relief from the top down rather than permanent relief from the bottom up".

This is precisely the criticism that many are now making about the bailout of the banking industry.

There is one further lesson from history that the US federal government will need to consider.

Although much of the blame for the current crisis is attributable to the recklessness of Wall Street, bailing out the economic elites will not address the problems that afflict Main Street.

Roosevelt's New Deal programmes represented an unprecedented government intervention in the economy. But, despite providing relief and opportunities to millions, they failed to rescue the US economy, which remained in perilous state until the second world war.

Only the mobilisation for war and the factory-employment opportunities could pull the US out of its long slump. By contrast, its current military entanglements only compounds its problems. Their enormous cost drains resources that could be spent at home, imposing a tax burden on ordinary people that restricts disposable income. Nothing less than a radical restructuring of the economy will do.

The Guardian