The New Deal, instituted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, and conventionally dated as having continued until the outbreak of the European war in 1939, marked an epochal change in American domestic policy and in the role of the Federal government in American life. It also marked a major transition in Western economic thought. Until the New Deal era, the range of economic choices available was starkly simple: classical orthodoxy or Marxism. For policymakers in Western countries, that was effectively no choice at all, so for practical purposes classical laissez-faire economics reigned supreme. Government was admitted to no major role in economic life.