Who believed in limited government action to address the great depression?

Answer 1

hoover and US Treasury (Hoover adopted many of the same policies Roosevelt did, but they did have a number of points of disagreement.)

Wendell Willikie was the Republican presidential nominee for 1940. He ran Commonwealth & Southern, a major power company in the same area that Roosevelt's Tennessee Valley Authority wanted to start providing subsidized power to the residents. He was well-aware of just how much damage Roosevelt's wild experimentation with the economy was doing to business confidence, and how costly all of Roosevelts regulations were.

Samuel Insull was a protege of Thomas Edison, and was widely regarded as "the man who lit Chicago's streets," and who provided venture capital for thousands of businesses over the course of his career. When his long-time nemesis on the puplic/private power generation question Harold Ickes was appointed Secretary of the Interior, Insull left the United States knowing that Ickes would come after him. Ickes filed mail fraud and antitrust charges against Insull, who was found not guilty on all counts after he returned to the US.

There was Andrew Mellon (of the Carnegie-Mellon set of foundations and charities.) Andrew Mellon was the Treasury Secretary under President Coolidge, and he was a big believer in free markets. He argues against the fiscal policy of both Roosevelt and Hoover, and it turns out he was totally correct. Roosevelt seems to have really hated Mellon, and subjected him to an unprecedented two-year grand jury investigation of his taxes, after which the grand jury declined to press charges.

Former President Coolidge, a free marketer as well, strongly objected to almost everything Roosevelt did, but said very little about it.