Roosevelt and his team would later repudiate the pessimistic assumptions of the Commonwealth Club speech and opt instead for economic growth. It did not take long for both generations of the family to start warning darkly about the wrong direction in which FDR was leading the country. For them, administration, redistribution, bigger government agencies, and planning were all anathema. They directly contradicted the frontier values and virtues they still thought relevant in a modern industrial society. To the degree that she was political at all, Laura had grown up as a Democrat, but by the 1930s she viewed the direction of the Democratic party with ever greater alarm and became an outspoken critic of Roosevelt and his minions. Her expressions of concern, however, paled in comparison to those of her de apoplectic at the thought of where the New Dealers were leading the country. By mid?decade, Rose had gravitated to an extreme right?wing, anti?New Deal position, and by the early 1940s she emerged as one of the conservative right’s most vociferous and effective opinion?molders. 10