The Great Depression is usually remembered for introducing extremely high progressivity into the federal income tax system. This shift actually began as a misguided revenue measure by Herbert Hoover, who raised the top marginal rate from 25% to 63% in 1932 in a failed attempt to combat growing budget deficits.
But Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the progressive tax structure into a permanent feature of New Deal policy, premised on the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. Roosevelt signed legislation hiking the top marginal rate to 77% in 1936, and successive increases raised it to an astounding 94% by 1944 (although wealthy earners seldom actually paid these statutory rates due to a much lower effective tax rate, particularly after 1940).
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