President Obama is cozying up to the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, intending to make resentment of big business a central theme of his re-election campaign. Here he’s following the lead of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who tried to convince the public that Wall Street was to blame for the double-dip recession that plagued his second administration.

In late 1937 the American economy, which had been recovering slowly since 1932, contracted even more sharply than it had after the stock market crash in late 1929. Industrial production fell by a third, stock prices fell by 50%, durable goods production by almost 80%. Payrolls fell 35%, and unemployment climbed back to 20%.

Roosevelt was initially nonplused, slow to appreciate the severity of the downturn. But once he saw the need for action, he called Congress into special session and undertook a massive new public-spending program.

Roosevelt and his advisers blamed the recession on a “capital strike,” trying to deflect public alarm about the United Auto Workers’ sit-down strikes—really illegal occupations of assembly plants—onto the shoulders of corporations. They even claimed that big business was deliberately refusing to invest and increase payrolls as part of a political gambit to destroy the New Deal.

Privately, FDR told Robert Jackson, head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division (and a future Supreme Court justice), “Bob, I’m sick of sitting here kissing [businessmen’s] asses to get them to” invest and increase employment. Publicly, Jackson agreed in a December 1937 speech that the country faced a “strike of capital” by business in order to get New Deal legislation repealed. He denounced the notion that the president’s program was antibusiness. Given the “astounding profits under the present administration,” he said, “big business will never be able to convince the American people that it has been imposed on, destroyed, or even threatened. It has merely been saved from ruin and restored to arrogance.”

Interior Secretary Harold Ickes upped the ante, claiming that the economy was dominated by a handful of interlocked plutocrats who were on a “sit-down strike” against the government. “It is happening here,” he said in an NBC radio speech, alluding to Sinclair Lewis’s novel, “It Can’t Happen Here,” about a fascist takeover of America. The nation really did face the specter of “big business fascism.”

In his 1936 re-election campaign, Roosevelt had likened big business to “autocratic institutions that beget slavery at home and aggression abroad” and “a power-seeking minority.” Now, with the economy in a serious downturn, he returned to this theme, calling on Congress in April 1938 to investigate industrial concentration, reiterating his first-term complaint about “banker control of industry.”

Later that year, with the midterm election looming, he claimed that “the growth of private power [reaches] a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism.” A few days before the election, the president said that “if American democracy ceases to move forward . . . to better the lot of our citizens, then Fascism and Communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in our land.”

American students are all familiar with the “Red Scare” that followed World War I, and even more with the one led by Joseph McCarthy in the early years of the Cold War. But they almost never hear of the “Brown Scare” of the 1930s, when liberals painted political opponents as incipient fascists.

FDR told former speechwriter Rex Tugwell late in 1937 that he “wanted to scare these people into doing something.” It was an odd strategy, trying to vilify business into creating jobs. And it didn’t work well.

While his lieutenants were trying to depict American industrialists as brownshirts, Roosevelt’s 1937 efforts to “pack” the Supreme Court and to purge conservatives in the 1938 Democratic primaries made him look like the real threat to democracy. In March of that year he felt compelled to tell the press that he had “no inclination to be a dictator.” Nevertheless, the Republicans recovered from near-extinction in the midterm and the New Deal came to a halt.

President Obama is perfectly capable of resorting to antibusiness demagoguery. In his 2010 State of the Union he berated the Supreme Court for allegedly reversing “a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.”

And in one of his speeches last summer on debt reduction, the president singled out “corporate jet owners and oil companies” for allegedly unfair tax breaks, and he asked “how can we ask a student to pay more for college before we ask hedge fund managers to stop paying taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries?” We may hear more, much more in coming months, if the economy continues to flounder.

Mr. Moreno is a professor of history at Hillsdale College and the author of “Black Americans and Organized Labor: A New History,” (Louisiana State University Press, 2006).