“The convention will be very dull, everyone says,” Lou Hoover wrote Allan in anticipation of the June 1932 Republican Party gathering at which her husband was to be nominated for a second term. That Lou was correct, and that the national convention would be very dull in part because the president’s renomination was a foregone conclusion, does not make her comment any less odd. Her husband was charged with rousing the Republican Party for its quadrennial battle against the rejuvenated Democrats. “Very dull” did not bode well for his chances.1
Lou was also under the impression that the president was concentrating on the state of the economy to the exclusion of partisan affairs, which was not entirely the case. Anxious about his prospects, he was discussing with insiders the possibility of replacing Vice President Curtis with General Charles Dawes to recharge the ticket, a plan that fell apart when the latter bolted to Chicago to save his family bank. Hoover was also meeting regularly, and in secret, so as to maintain his disinterested pose, with party officials drafting the Republican platform. He was obsessed with the Prohibition plank.2
In the days before the delegates gathered at Chicago Stadium, home of the National Hockey League’s new Blackhawks franchise, Hoover tried to engineer a straddle on the Eighteenth Amendment. He could feel the wet tide rising across the country, and he expected the Democrats to run on repeal of Prohibition. He still leaned dry himself. To his many friends and advisers asking him to soften his stance, he offered bits of cherry-picked evidence suggesting that Americans were preponderantly with him. He sent Secretaries Mills and Stimson to Chicago to wring a straddle out of the Republican platform committee, but they ran into a wall of opposition within the committee. “That convention is dripping wet,” Hoover fumed to Joslin. “We can’t do anything with them. But they have got to adopt the right kind of plank. It cannot be too wet.”3
Support for outright repeal was so strong among conventioneers that the president, in a histrionic fit, drafted a letter withdrawing his candidacy. “If the convention goes for repeal,” he told Joslin with eyes flashing, “I shall refuse to accept the nomination.”
“You can’t do that, Mr. President.”
“Yes I can. I shall have to.”
Joslin advised him to accept the platform as drafted and repudiate the Prohibition plank during the campaign, as Smith did in 1928.
“I won’t stand for repeal. My conscience would not permit me to do it.”4
The withdrawal letter was almost certainly a bargaining tactic; nothing was going to keep him from his chance at reelection. In any event, Hoover eventually got his way. The plank stated that a Republican administration would redraft the Eighteenth Amendment to allow states to deal with Prohibition as their citizens saw fit, a compromise that satisfied few besides Hoover. Polite Republican papers called it “weak and ambiguous.” The Chicago Tribune saw a product of “political cowardice and hypocrisy,” as “futile as it is fraudulent.”5
The rest of the Republican platform was given over to a defense of the president’s record and critiques of a Democratic agenda that had yet to be announced. That left, as its headline, the Prohibition half-measure, an outcome that put more pressure on Hoover and his leadership to carry the party through the election.
At noon on June 16, the president sat in the Lincoln Study in the White House listening to the Republican nominating speeches with Lou and a handful of staffers. “His eyes twinkled and he laughed and joked as the orators cut loose,” said Joslin, although he turned serious when the balloting began. He received 98 percent of the votes, slightly higher than the 96 percent Coolidge had taken in 1924, and not quite the 100 percent Theodore Roosevelt had managed in 1904. It was a remarkable showing given the challenges of the times and the persistence of the Republican insurgency. “Well, it wasn’t exactly unexpected,” Hoover said when the totals were announced. “I guess I will go back to the office now.” There were no congratulations, not so much as a smile, as he walked out of the room to work on his convention speech.6
The delegates in Chicago renominated Curtis as vice president, putting to rest a minor and nonsensical panic among the Hooverites that Coolidge might be drafted to the bottom of the ticket. That was the final substantive note of the convention. An admirer of Hoover, William Allen White, was disappointed that the whole affair had indeed been very dull. “If ever there was a time in American history which called for challenge, for combat, and for criticism, constructive or otherwise, it would seem to be now.”7
If Hoover could have handpicked his opponent from among the Democratic contenders in 1932, he would have selected New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Groton- and Harvard-educated scion of a wealthy and socially prominent family from Dutchess County, New York, and the fifth cousin of the former president.8
Hoover had been rooting for Roosevelt at least since January, partly because they had been friendly in the years after Hoover’s return from Europe, and partly for reasons best articulated by the journalist and administration insider Mark Sullivan after watching FDR deliver a speech over the winter:
He does not possess the imagination of leadership. He does not fit the picture. He is not what the hour demands. He will not pass muster. There is nothing to Franklin Roosevelt.9
The Hoover camp feared Al Smith, believing that the Prohibition issue was less damaging to him in 1932 than it had been in 1928, and that he would put up a better fight a second time around. Joslin guessed that the Democrats would turn to Smith when it dawned on them that the paralytic Roosevelt, an adult victim of poliomyelitis, did not have the strength to handle the presidency. Hoover agreed that health was an issue. FDR, he said, was a sick man who would not last a year in the White House. Lou, while also sizing up Roosevelt as a lightweight and an invalid, feared that many people admired him for his grit in overcoming his affliction: “And heaps of people would vote for him just because he has put up such a game fight.”10
At the opening of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago at the end of June, Hoover was still lamenting that things looked “bad for Franklin.” He improvised bold speeches that FDR or his supporters could make to improve his chances. “Our salvation,” said Hoover, “lies in his nomination.”11
Roosevelt triumphed on the fourth ballot, setting up what one news service called the first contest in U.S. history between two millionaires for free rent at the White House. An usher carried the message to the president at dinner. He smiled more broadly than he had in months. House Speaker John Nance Garner rounded out the Democratic ticket and, as expected, the party embraced repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.12
Hoover’s low estimation of Roosevelt was conventional wisdom in the summer of 1932. He was “Feather Duster Roosevelt,” the foppish postwar generation’s answer to Warren Harding, with benefit of royal blood. Lippmann considered him a parody of a politician, allergic to hard stands, brimming with “two-faced platitudes,” attempting the ridiculous feat of straddling the whole country. Two independent surveys of newspaper opinion in the wake of his nomination found few editors willing to credit Roosevelt with much more than ambition, geniality, and a magical name. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette believed Hoover’s odds of reelection were improved by FDR’s triumph.13
One of the reasons Roosevelt was held in such middling esteem was that his speeches during the nomination race were indeed inconsistent and half-baked. He pronounced the American system sound, and promised to fundamentally change it. He adopted Hoover’s call for renewed public confidence, yet was frankly pessimistic about the nation’s future. America, said Roosevelt in an astounding address at Oglethorpe University, had crossed a threshold, leaving its best days of economic growth in the past: “It seems to me probable that our physical economic plant will not expand in the future at the same rate at which it has expanded in the past.” Americans needed to turn their attention from making their way in the world to remaking society to permit a “wiser, more equitable distribution” of wealth. This was a reality, he said, that the benighted Hoover administration lacked the courage to face.14
Given his evident weaknesses, it was easy to miss the fact that Roosevelt had a firm two-handed grip on one of the central issues in the election. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the failures of the Republican administration and the vulnerabilities of its leader. He threw the book at Hoover, in grand prosecutorial style, and left it for the court of public opinion to decide what would stick. He sometimes attacked from the right, excoriating Hoover for his deficits and demanding cuts “of not less than 25% in the cost of the Federal Government.” He sometimes attacked from the left, promising long-term economic planning and a more generous, interventionist government. He ridiculed the president’s judgment and leadership, lambasting him as a general out of touch with his troops, bailing out bankers and financiers while doing nothing to restore the purchasing power of farmers and working-class Americans. He faulted the Republican tariff for protecting the profits of businessmen while raising prices for consumers.15
In the manner of Michelson and Raskob, Roosevelt laid entire blame for the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression at Hoover’s feet, to the extent of refusing to acknowledge its international dimensions. He portrayed the president as a slow and tentative executive, all but inert in the face of crisis. To dramatize his own contrasting dynamism, he traveled almost ten hours from Albany to Chicago in a Ford tri-motor airplane to accept his nomination in person, a brilliant stroke.16
Roosevelt’s acceptance speech, together with another address weeks later in Columbus, Ohio, doubled down on his attacks on the president. Hoover now emerged as a witless, heartless sluggard clinging to self-evidently absurd policies as the nation’s mothers scrounged for food. Roosevelt gleefully recited every prediction of prosperity and recovery that Hoover had ever uttered. He mocked the president’s stance as a champion of individualism: it was a fraud, he said, a “ghastly sham.” Hoover was in fact a dangerous and dishonest man exploiting the American people on behalf of the “not more than five human individuals” who controlled America’s wealth. He was abetting the “crooks” in high finance as they robbed hardworking citizens of their savings.17
Over the previous three years, Michelson and Raskob had succeeded in “whittling Hoover down to our size,” as Jack Garner said. Roosevelt had now upped the ante, viciously and ingeniously casting Hoover as the villain. It was smoothly executed. Roosevelt was always careful to regret the necessity of his blows. He took pains to separate Hoover from the Republican herd, blaming leaders, not followers. He developed a confidential, intimate rapport with voters, exhibiting a highly developed political talent that could make the smarmiest of phrases radiate with sincerity: “You and I as common-sense citizens know…” Perhaps most importantly, Roosevelt acknowledged the genuine hardships endured by millions of Americans in the depression, a welcome message that Hoover, bearing more responsibility for the situation, choked on.18
As with Harding, another compromise candidate, pundits were reluctant to credit Roosevelt’s political gift. Lippmann sneered that FDR’s evasions and equivocations were “probably shrewd politics.” Thoughtful critics of the democratic system, including Hoover, have always struggled with the reality that a man of second-rate intellect and questionable character could by a keen appreciation of the real business of politics—the assembling of voting constituencies in pursuit of power—outperform more accomplished or admirable individuals.19
Roosevelt shared Harding’s talents for projecting confidence, for radiating comfort and cheer, and for assuming whatever shape voters required of him. He had a deeper self-assurance than Harding, and he was far more ruthless, prepared not merely to elevate himself but to tear others down by any available means, not least a class war.
The tone of the Democratic campaign rhetoric soon had Hoover reconsidering his preference for Roosevelt as a candidate. He was slow to fight back: if it had been beneath Hoover’s dignity to mount a vigorous campaign for the presidency as a nominee in 1928, it was more so for an incumbent in 1932. He was under the impression that no president seeking reelection had ever campaigned (he had been out of the country when Taft and Wilson had stumped for second terms), and he refused to tour the country. He planned to make, at most, three speeches before voting day. Wanting to impress upon the people that he was still working hard on their behalf, he rarely left his office in the two months following his renomination. This was not entirely out of step with the campaign rhythms of the day. Roosevelt had left the Democratic convention for a sailing expedition.20
There was also a measure of necessity to Hoover’s attachment to his desk. In the last days before the adjournment of the Seventy-Second Congress, two powerful Democrats, House Speaker Garner and New York senator Robert Wagner, were determined to enact one more piece of legislation to relieve human suffering in the depression. Hoover supported their intent, with strong reservations on some of their specifics. Garner’s plan for public works entailed new post offices in key Democratic congressional districts, which the president opposed as pork-barreling. There was a similar intent in Wagner’s proposal to allocate money to states on the basis of population as opposed to their share of the unemployed. After weeks of lively negotiation and one presidential veto, Congress approved a compromise version of what came to be called the Emergency Relief and Construction Act in July. It directed another $1.5 billion into the RFC, made $300 million available to the states, and answered all of Hoover’s important stipulations save one.21
Garner had refused to let go of a clause that publicized the names of banks seeking RFC funds. This was in part due to the fact that the Dawes family bank in Chicago had recently received a huge loan, a legitimate yet politically unseemly use of public money, given Dawes’s connections to the administration and the RFC. Garner’s insistence on exposing borrowers ensured that troubled institutions would lose public confidence by applying to the RFC, aggravating rather than alleviating their problems. By now second on the Democratic ticket, Garner did not care: he was frankly pleased to force the president to defend secret loans to his friends in high finance. Hoover signed the bill on July 21.22
The Emergency Relief and Construction Act delivered on Hoover’s long-standing promise to use all the resources of the national government to backstop depression relief, even to the extent of direct aid to states if conditions warranted. The RFC, universally recognized as the president’s creation, was with this new injection of capital a massive $4 billion depression-fighting behemoth. The New York Times credited Hoover with the only “positive achievements to come out of the session.” The Democrat-controlled Congress was widely seen to have embarrassed itself at the trough.23
Another issue keeping Hoover at his desk, quite literally, was the so-called Bonus Army. Unemployed veterans of the Great War, some accompanied by their families, had been gathering in Washington from all points of the compass through the summer to once more press their case for an early payout of the war service funds due them in 1945. By July, they numbered more than ten thousand, camping throughout the capital in tents and makeshift shacks, or squatting in abandoned buildings. The presence of so many unoccupied men, many of them begging on street corners, and the suspicion that political radicals and communists had infiltrated the movement, cast an ominous spell over the city, notwithstanding a remarkable lack of civil unrest in America during the first three years of the depression. There were rumors of impending violence and rioting. In yet another way, the Great War was haunting the Hoover presidency.24
Unsettled by the veterans, Hoover and his staff canceled at least one public appearance. There were “too many fellows in town who are willing to throw bricks,” he said privately. At the same time, he quietly distributed food, clothing, blankets, and camp kitchens to their encampments, and the Sixth Marine Barracks provided medical care to hundreds of veterans a day. This assistance was provided without publicity so as not to invite more veterans to the city, and also to forestall criticism from the likes of the Washington Post, which warned that it would be “a stupid and deadly mistake to coddle the communists.”25
On July 7, the Senate soundly defeated a bill that would have distributed $2.5 billion to the veterans. Its members agreed with Hoover that the veterans represented a small segment of the depression’s victims, and that paying out the bonus would preclude other plans for relief. Most of the Bonus Army called it a summer and returned home. Hoover authorized $100,000 in transport subsidies to ease their way. A militant minority, however, refused to leave, and in the weeks that followed, tensions heightened, rumors spread that veterans planned to storm the White House and were arming themselves with machine guns and grenades. Security at the executive mansion was stepped up, the gates closed, the curtains drawn, and more agents put on patrol.
District of Columbia police tried to evict veterans squatting in several buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue on the morning of July 28. A riot ensued. Two marchers were shot dead and six policemen were hospitalized. District of Columbia authorities asked for the help of federal troops in clearing the buildings, and Hoover obliged, with strict instructions that the veterans were to be gently herded back to their main camp across the Anacostia River.
Army chief of staff General Douglas MacArthur, sniffing “incipient revolution in the air,” organized a detachment of mounted cavalry, six tanks, and a column of infantry and met a ragged band of veterans at the foot of Capitol Hill. Tear gas and bayonet points were used to push the protesters over the Eleventh Street Bridge. Ignoring his orders from the president, MacArthur followed them across the river, drove the men and their families from their tents and shacks, and torched the entire encampment of Anacostia Flats. He then held a press conference congratulating Hoover on his firm hand: “Had the President not acted within twenty-four hours, he would have been faced with a very grave situation.” Secretary of War Hurley backed MacArthur and insisted that a large proportion of the “mob” were criminals and communists who had never served their country.26
Decades after these events, Roosevelt partisans Rexford Tugwell and Felix Frankfurter would separately claim to have been in the presence of the Democratic nominee as he absorbed news of the armed rout of defenseless veterans. He is said to have immediately concluded that reports of a callous president loosing the dogs of war on victims of his own economic incompetence would turn the country against the Republicans. Tugwell, who visited the candidate as he read his morning papers on July 29 in his Albany bedroom, wrote: “If Roosevelt had had any doubt about the outcome of the election, I am certain he had none after reading the Times that day.” Frankfurter recorded that FDR turned to him on the porch of his Hyde Park home and said, “Well, Felix, this will elect me.” These accounts have heavily influenced the historiography of the 1932 campaign.27
The stories of Tugwell and Frankfurter ring false. The editorial attitude of the New York Times in the wake of the clearance was vehemently pro-Hoover. The Bonus Army, it said, had been acting in “violent defiance of the law and the public authorities.” The protest had become “a national reproach and even [a] danger.” The Washington Post and the Washington Herald were similarly complimentary to Hoover. The Associated Press surveyed editorial comment among America’s leading dailies on July 29 and found them “practically unanimous in expressing the opinion that President Hoover was justified in his course.” A Literary Digest roundup of newspaper opinion on August 6, 1932, reached the same conclusion. The principal exceptions to this line of comment were the Hearst papers, and their dissent from the administration’s management of the incident was slow to emerge.28
More tellingly, Roosevelt, never one to miss an opportunity to bash the incumbent, was silent about the Bonus Army during the campaign. He was savvy enough to see that the first duty of a chief executive is to uphold the law, and that the American people would applaud decisive action against drifters and agitators menacing the peace. Weeks later, after it emerged that the proportion of communists and criminals within the ranks of the Bonus Army had been much smaller than MacArthur and Hurley and, on their advice, Hoover had led the public to believe, Roosevelt still held his tongue. Indeed, before election day, he sided with the Senate against early payment of the veterans’ funds. The New York Times synopsis of the major issues in the campaign would omit any mention of the Bonus Army clearance. There is no compelling evidence that it was a decisive or important factor in the campaign of 1932.29
Roosevelt, rather, continued to chronicle the “failure,” the “folly,” and the “futility” of Hoover’s economic record, and here he had a wealth of material. Coming out of the conventions, gross national product was at $60 billion, down from $75 billion a year before, and a peak of $105 billion in 1929. Unemployment was higher than ever. Later estimates would put it over 20 percent in the summer of 1932. The Dow Jones Industrial Average that month bottomed at 41.2 points, a sickening slide from its peak of 381.2.30
The numbers, however grim, tell only part of the story. Among those who retained their jobs were millions who had seen their hours or their wages drastically cut. They were struggling to pay the rent and to feed their families, living daily in dread of joining the less fortunate who squatted in Central Park, or who camped in vacant lots in Philadelphia, on public roadsides in Los Angeles, or in caves in Arkansas. They knew they were one bad day from joining the needy scavenging for edibles in the St. Louis dump or waiting for table scraps in the alleys behind Chicago restaurants. Private charity was by now exhausted in many cities and states. New York was offering a measly two dollars a week to people in distress. Dallas and Houston were refusing aid to blacks and Mexicans.
The public still had no exact understanding of what was happening to the economy, nor did the experts. The Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia hosted a 560-member roundtable discussion that summer on the topic of the Hoover administration’s performance during the financial crisis. Right-wing critics condemned the president for retarding recovery by “driving the government deeper and deeper into the business structure.” The left assailed him for refusing to admit the collapse of capitalism: “The time has come,” said Dr. William Jett Lauck of the Bureau of Applied Economics, “when the Federal Government must take control of private industry, start it into operation and put the unemployed of the country back to work.” After six days of discussion, the attendees reached no agreement on what Hoover should have done differently. They announced an insipid sixteen-point program of relief, calling for more unemployment offices and more subsistence farming. They were nevertheless unanimous in their verdict that Washington had failed.31
Here was Hoover’s major problem: Given the manifest state of the economy, who could say he had succeeded? Who would accept his assertion that things could have been much worse without him? Roosevelt recognized the president’s predicament and allowed him no quarter. Hoover was out of touch, incompetent, a fraud, a tool of the plutocrats, and an enemy of the common man. Increasing numbers of Americans found Roosevelt’s message compelling and grew more inclined to interpret the president’s notes of optimism and resilience as cluelessness.
That Roosevelt’s messages were hitting home with voters was confirmed by Lou Hoover, always a reliable barometer of both public receptivity to attacks on the administration, as well as the state of her own household’s morale. She had been trying to stay calm in these months, reading the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius. He does not seem to have taken. Of all the misrepresentations, insinuations, and falsehoods she heard, nothing stung quite like Roosevelt’s distinction between himself as a man of generosity and humanity and her husband as an elitist Scrooge. She was sufficiently moved to write another long letter to her boys.
Her missive is in part a recitation of Hoover family mythology, in which “Daddy” is a saintly figure whose animating purpose, since his earliest jobs swinging pick and shovel underground, has always been the welfare of “people less fortunately situated than himself.” The safety and comfort of his miners had been his first concern. He had never suffered a labor disruption as a mine manager. He had never sought public office. His climb to the presidency had been one long and barely endurable sacrifice for the good of humanity.32
Obvious embellishments and elisions aside, Lou made a strong case for the unfairness of Roosevelt’s characterization of her husband. He had fought the “big men” on behalf of starving millions in Belgium and Northern France. His philosophy of government was built around the provision of equality of opportunity for all, and he had long been a tireless champion of the rights and needs of “the most-needy members of the population,” be they laborers, children, prisoners, flooded-out sharecroppers, struggling farmers, or Native Americans. He was also an enemy of great fortunes, working with titans of capital to right the economy out of necessity rather than by choice. “Look back through the past three years,” demanded Lou, “and recognize that…it is the ‘small man’ that the President has been ceaselessly working for.”
In her anguish, Lou was coming to hate Roosevelt. In a separate letter, she called his caustic Columbus speech “downright untruthful.” She was outraged that a man who would not publicly admit that he could not stand or walk without support would call her husband a fraud:
This posing before the world as a normal, sturdy man, and going to any amount of trouble and subterfuge to hold the truth of it from the public, shows up painfully a flaw in the man’s own truthfulness and forthrightness. Incidentally, doctors say that almost invariably that disease does affect the brain and nervous system structure, the first symptoms of which are to develop an overpowering ego in the patient. And this probably accounts for the desire to appear so much stronger physically than he is.33
While Hoover had his own misgivings about Roosevelt’s health, he insisted his campaign make no mention of the challenger’s physical handicap and refrain from personal abuse. He disliked ad hominem politicking, and he was not keen to make a martyr of Roosevelt.
Meanwhile, it was Republicans who were at the brink of physical collapse. Mrs. Eugene Meyer pleaded in vain with Hoover to release her frazzled husband from the double load of chair of the Federal Reserve Board and head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Stimson, “frightfully stale,” unable to sleep, worried that he had reached “the end of my tether.” Secretary Hyde was on the verge of a nervous collapse until the president ordered him to take a fishing trip. “I guess there are no other casualties for the moment,” Hoover said to Joslin, “but it’s a wonder there are not more.”34
His closest associates worried about the state of the president’s health. Secretaries Stimson and Hurley grabbed Dr. Boone after a cabinet meeting and demanded he examine Hoover’s “mental condition.” They considered him to be exhausted and suffering from some variety of nervous conditions. Boone agreed to keep a close watch.35
On August 11, hours after Hoover had delivered his speech officially accepting the Republican nomination, Stimson visited Hoover in his office and found him at his desk, wrapped in thought. “I feel more depressed and troubled,” said the president, “than I ever have been in my life.” He was especially upset about the Republican straddle on Prohibition, which he had dictated and, moments before, publicly endorsed for the first time. He was conscience-stricken at having broken a promise on which he had been elected in 1928, and at having broken faith with the dry tribe. “All my life,” he said, “I have been connected with the God-fearing people of this country. I believe that they represent all that is best in this country, and I feel now that I have made a decision which will affront them and make them feel that I have betrayed them.” The secretary was struck by the president’s earnestness. He had for four years “worked to the limit” on behalf of the American people. Stimson compared him to “the untried, rather flippant” Roosevelt, so disjointed and opportunistic in his policies, and grew depressed himself.36
It was clear by the time the president finally launched his fight for reelection that he was spent. Joslin had invited twenty-six newsmen out to Rapidan in August for what was supposed to be an intimate gathering and photo opportunity. Hoover was coaxed onto horseback and, additionally, made to sit, supposedly relaxing, in an easy chair next to Lou. He was glum all day long, however, and he would not answer questions from the reporters. His staff was crushed, knowing that an opportunity had been wasted.37
When he finally took to the stump after Labor Day, Hoover was virtually alone in his campaign. MacLafferty’s warnings about the unpreparedness of Republicans to meet adversity had been apposite. The dullness of the June convention had leaked to the hustings and there was little in the way of organization or fund-raising behind the candidate. Whereas in 1928, Republican luminaries such as Borah and Charles Hughes had campaigned exuberantly for Hoover, none but his cabinet members would do so now, and chosen for their administrative competence rather than their political acumen, they had their limits. Stimson was appalled to be asked to criticize Roosevelt’s record as governor of New York. He at first claimed that it was beneath the dignity of the secretary of state to engage in such activities. He next protested that it was unwise to hold to account “a presidential candidate who is a cripple.” He ultimately decided that in a campaign of personalities, the president had to speak for himself.38
Regardless of the state of his party, Hoover believed he could win the election. He had thought so in the wake of the conventions, and nothing since had changed his mind. Indeed, the spasmodic economy, by September, again seemed to be turning up, and in more convincing fashion than ever. The passage of Hoover’s reform packages and the settling of the federal budget before the conventions had put virtually every important economic indicator on a positive track. The outflow of gold from the United States was dramatically reversed. Industrial production had arrested its three-year slide and improved by 15 percent in the third quarter. Three-year slumps in production of consumer goods, production of durable goods, and production of machinery, of capital expenditures for plant and equipment, of the general price index, of the wholesale price index, and of employment, had all been broken and turned around. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had shot from its June low of 42.8 points to 71.6 in August, an astounding 67 percent gain. Real gross national product, which had declined an average of 9.3 percent a year in 1929, 1930, and 1931, fell a mere 1.3 percent in 1932 and was likely flat in the second half of the year given everything else going on in the economy. The more finely calculated metric in the thirties was industrial production, and it would never again reach the lows of July 1932; nor would the Dow repeat its bottom of June 1932. After three years of backbreaking work, Hoover had in fact stopped the depression in its tracks and by most relevant measures forced its retreat.39
It remained to be seen if the improvements would last. Perhaps the best measure of the febrile temper, the maddening volatility of the times comes from the 130-year-old Dow Jones Industrial Average. Fourteen of its top twenty single-day percentage increases occurred on Hoover’s watch, as did six of its top twenty record losses. There was no predicting anything in such an environment.
It also remained to be seen if economic gains would repair Hoover’s political standing. The immediate signs were mixed. He was shaken in mid-September by the strength of the Democrats in Maine, which held a separate state election. They had upset the established Republican order by taking the governorship and two of Maine’s three congressional seats. A week later, Hoover was buoyed by the first edition of the influential Literary Digest national poll, which on September 24 gave him 28,193 straw votes to Roosevelt’s 27,654. “It is not the crushing blow that I had feared,” he told Joslin. An internal poll commissioned by the Republican National Committee showed the Democrats ahead in voter intention. The massive Hearst presidential poll indicated Hoover had a slight lead in electoral college votes. There was cause for concern. There was no objective cause for despair.40
Convincing the Republican Party that it was still in the fight nevertheless proved difficult. Iowa organizers tried to talk Hoover out of making an October 4 speech in Des Moines, less than a two-hour drive from his hometown. They were “panic-stricken,” said Joslin, that angry farmers, armed with eggs, or worse, would do “bodily harm” to the president. When Hoover would not be deterred from the appearance, they tried to convince him to cut his proposed eleven-thousand-word, two-hour speech to give him a chance of holding his radio audience. This was useful advice. Again he refused, and boarded a train to Iowa with the long draft in his pocket.41
Hoover’s entourage, including the Secret Service, was jumpy on the train. Lou chattered nervously at dinner about the McKinley assassination. The president, unperturbed, continued to work on his speech. It was his most interesting effort of the campaign, more a stubborn apologia than a conventional campaign address. It had two principal objectives. First, Hoover wanted acknowledgment that his depression-fighting efforts had been fruitful. The relief program installed during the first half of 1932, he insisted, had restored confidence in the American dollar:
Since June, $275 million of gold has flowed back to us from abroad. Hoarders in our own country, finding our institutions safeguarded and safe, have returned $250 million to the useful channels of business….The rills of credit are expanding. The pressure on the debtor to sacrifice his all in order to pay his debts is steadily relaxing. Men are daily being reemployed. If we calculate the values of this year’s agricultural products compared with the low points, the farmers as a whole, despite the heartbreaking distress which still exists, are a billion dollars better off. Prices have a long way to go before the farmer has an adequate return, but at least the turn is toward recovery.42
Second, and more important to him than the “dreary” and complex matters of currencies and budgets, he wanted Americans to know that Roosevelt had no monopoly on concern for their welfare. “We have fought to preserve the safety, the principles, and the ideals of American life,” he wrote. The overriding objective of his policies had been to protect “the interest of the people in the homes and at the firesides of our country…the millions of homes of the type which I knew as a boy in this State.”43
We are not a nation of 120 million solitary individuals, we are a nation of 25 million families dwelling in 25 million homes, each warmed by the fires of affection and cherishing within it a mutual solicitude for kinfolk and children. Their safety is what we are striving for. Their happiness is our real concern.44
There was much more to the speech, on the causes and the course of the depression, on how he had avoided the “class bitterness” that Roosevelt was fomenting, on the virtues of the tariff policies Roosevelt had attacked. On it went for ten thousand words, an earnest, fascinating attempt to justify the ways of the Hoover administration to Americans. He was also trying to justify himself to Roosevelt, on whose terms Hoover was now conducting his campaign: he was writing a two-hour speech denying that he was a heartless fraud, looking backward at the ruins of his term, and defending actions and policies that, however bold, however well intentioned, and however promising, had patently failed to avoid calamity.45
As it turned out, Hoover had no cause to be concerned for his safety in Des Moines. He arrived, he delivered his long speech, it was carried by radio to over one hundred cities, and he left the next day without a single egg thrown in anger. There had been a minor protest with farmers bearing signs reading IN HOOVER WE TRUSTED—NOW WE’RE BUSTED. Police were called, not to quell the protest but to protect the farmers from angry Hoover sympathizers. Septuagenarian senator James A. Reed, Hoover’s bête noire from his days as America’s food czar, came out of retirement to follow the president to Des Moines and remind Americans that as the son of a blacksmith he knew nothing of farming, and that as a man who had spent most of his adult life abroad, he knew nothing of America.46
All in all, Joslin was elated:
We are on the way back East from Des Moines, after the most successful day imaginable….At Des Moines we headed a parade that was witnessed by 125,000 people. The Coliseum was packed and what a response the President got. He deserved it for his speech was the best he ever made, not only in substance, with a lot of fight in it, but in delivery. He threw himself into it, revealing himself as he never has before in public. The crowd responded instantly to him. I believe he has helped himself a great deal.47
Hoover made at least sixteen stops on the way home from Des Moines, speaking to crowds ranging from one thousand to fifteen thousand. Joslin saw them as uniformly warm and enthusiastic, and a tonic for the president. The newspaper response was similarly uplifting. The New York Times:48
It will be said that it was a new Hoover who disclosed himself yesterday in Iowa. It was at least a Hoover standing up with a new vigor of language in his own defense, and making an appeal to his countrymen which was touched with an emotion not hitherto supposed to be characteristic of him. Whatever the effect of the speech upon the presidential campaign, he may rest in the belief that in it he has put forth the best that is in him.49
The president returned to the White House groggy, exhausted, eyes bloodshot. A reporter who saw him up close in this stretch of the campaign said he looked like “a human creature desperately hurt and pained,” a man “tortured intolerably and interminably.” Hosting a judicial reception on October 13, he shook hands with at least two thousand people and, seeing as many yet to come, said, “I can’t go on. I don’t want to faint here.” The receiving line was broken up and the president shepherded to his study.50
Within thirty-six hours, he was back on the campaign trail, bound for Cleveland. The crowds were less friendly on this trip. Boone recorded that somewhere around Pittsburgh they became “dangerously hostile.” There was heckling, and an egg splattered against the window of the train as it rolled by the steel mills. Regardless, Hoover insisted on walking among the people at most stops, a practice that terrified the war hero Boone. In the doctor’s estimation, the citizenry was in a “very highly agitated, inflammatory, abusive state of mind.” He worried that someone in despair might take a shot at Hoover, even as he stood on the platform.51
With two weeks left in the campaign, Hoover learned that his party, accustomed to vastly outspending its opponents, had run out of money. His Chicago organizers told him that paid staffers had to be dismissed, and that his upcoming speech in Detroit could not be broadcast for want of funds. The president gave $20,000 of his own money to book the hall and pay for the radio. Ogden Mills and Stimson each chipped in $5,000, and Mills was instructed to demand $150,000 of Andrew Mellon. Hoover, still convinced that he could win if he could refill his war chest, returned to his office to personally dial up more donations. “My God,” said Joslin, “what a job.”52
After having insisted for months that he would not make the great pilgrimage across the country his staff had urged on him, Hoover relented at the eleventh hour and announced that his one-man show would travel by rail to Palo Alto in the last week of the race, meeting a heavy schedule of speeches and platform appearances along the route. That the Literary Digest survey as well as internal Republican polling now had Roosevelt with a substantial lead undoubtedly helped to change the president’s mind. He was to leave Washington on November 3. On that day, Lou piled into their limousine under the north porte cochere at the White House and waited for him to join her for the short ride to Union Station. He had been working frantically all morning to clear his desk. She waited an unusually long time, and when he finally appeared, he slumped in his seat, drained and pale. “I am so exhausted,” he whispered, “I do not believe I will survive the trip.” When they arrived at the station, Lou instructed the physician Boone to remain at his side every step of the journey.53
The mounting evidence of Roosevelt’s momentum undermined Hoover’s commitment to wholesome campaigning in the last days of the race. Before leaving for Palo Alto, he had pounded his opponent for irresponsible appeals to class and sectional differences, enumerating Roosevelt’s inconsistencies and damning him as “a chameleon on the scotch plaid.” He had warned that the elimination of protective tariffs would cause “grass to grow in streets of a hundred cities, a thousand towns,” a piece of hyperbole in league with the Democrats’ claim that Smoot-Hawley had caused the Great Depression. He now continued in this vein through the heartland, deriding Roosevelt, accurately and forgettably, as “nebular and inconsistent” to an audience in St. Louis.54
Stung by Democratic emphasis on his faulty economic predictions, Hoover tried to turn the table, reaching back to the last time the Democrats had held the White House and quoting President Wilson and Treasury Secretary William McAdoo as stating that the creation of the Federal Reserve System would prevent all future panics. This made the president feel better. As a political message, however, it was old news that served only to remind voters that he had been wrong in his own forecasts.55
Edgar Rickard listened to a broadcast of Hoover’s speech in St. Paul and was “stunned” by the weakness of his friend’s delivery. He feared he might collapse before the end of the campaign. Joslin, who saw the performance in person, said that Hoover’s voice “was worn out and so were his eyes for he spoke haltingly and frequently lost his place.”56
Boone, as per Lou’s instructions, had the most intimate view at St. Paul. Seeing the president lose his way in the middle of the speech, he stepped quickly to his side and put his finger at the right section. Hoover stood there without saying a word, looking like he was going to faint. Boone used his foot to push a chair behind the president in case he toppled backwards. Instead, Hoover took a deep breath and continued on his way. The doctor afterward tried to excuse the mishap, noting that the light over the podium had been weak. “There was nothing wrong with the light,” said Hoover. “I reached a point where I couldn’t see the damn print.”57
The most memorable moment on the home stretch happened at a dusty railroad siding in the one-street town of Elko, Nevada, on the last day of campaigning, November 7. The train stopped at twilight, and Hoover spoke to the nation from a radio hookup in the dining car, with Lou, his retinue, and his escort of journalists all crowded around. It was an unremarkable little speech made remarkable by the circumstances. It seemed a wonder to everyone on the train that they could pull up in the middle of nowhere, in a town whose name in the original Shoshoni means rocks piled on one another, and with the flip of a switch allow the president to address the whole of the American people.58
It also seemed a fitting finale for a man who throughout his time in Washington had ushered in one technological wonder after another. There was dead silence in the car as he spoke:
Four years ago I stated that I conceived the Presidency as more than an administrative office: it is a power for leadership bringing coordination of the forces of business and cultural life in every town, city, and countryside. The Presidency is more than executive responsibility. It is the symbol of America’s high purpose. The President must represent the Nation’s ideals, and he must also represent them to the nations of the world. After four years of experience I still regard this as a supreme obligation.
Hoover by now knew he was finished, yet he betrayed nothing of what he was feeling about the election until the very end of his address, when he stopped, looked straight ahead, and, with a slight quaver in his voice, said, “Good night, my friends, good night.”59
It is unsurprising that Hoover, who could never gather enough data, commissioned the research that best explains his defeat. The New York firm Houser Associates undertook what appears to have been the first scientific national election poll for either party. Face-to-face interviews with a random-sample of five thousand American voters were conducted in and around fourteen metropolitan areas. The survey report was delivered to Lewis Strauss, Hoover’s friend and the vice treasurer of the Republican National Committee, with three weeks left in the campaign. It is an invaluable document, perhaps the only empirical tool capable of penetrating the heaps of supposition and conjecture under which the 1932 campaign was fated to be buried.60
The Houser survey indicates that the Democrats had a sizable lead among decided voters, 1,692 to 1,431. It found that Prohibition, more than any other issue, was driving Republicans into Roosevelt’s arms. Among those defecting, 83.6 percent believed that repeal would be good for the country (a position shared by the vast majority of traditional Democrats). Majorities of both defectors and Democrats believed that opening the taps would create jobs and fire the economy. The Republican base was split on the benefits of repeal, suggesting that the president’s agony over the issue was warranted. That so many voters saw a connection between the Eighteenth Amendment and economic recovery shows that the issues were connected, and makes it tricky to weigh the relative impacts of Prohibition and the depression on the final outcome.61
The depression undoubtedly did its own damage, although in different ways and perhaps to a lesser extent than is generally supposed. Fifty-eight percent of defectors held Hoover “at least somewhat responsible” for the downturn. At the same time, 68 percent believed that his government had done something to make the depression less severe, with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation receiving much of the credit. The majority of respondents, and 64 percent of decamping Republicans, said financiers and businessmen were “most to blame” for the ruined economy. Wall Street, vilified alongside Hoover by Roosevelt, was the greater bogey.62
The poll’s most interesting revelation on the depression is that the vast majority of Americans believed it was over. Almost two-thirds of respondents agreed that “business in general is picking up,” as Hoover had insisted during the four months of the campaign. His final upturn had been no mirage. It held until Election Day. Eighty-two percent of Republican defectors looked forward to declining unemployment in the year ahead. Republican regulars were slightly more confident. The expectations of regular Democrats are not provided, but it is reasonable to assume they would have aligned with the defectors, as they did on almost every other question.63
For all the discussion in Congress about unemployment relief, a mere 5.4 percent of Republicans and 16.5 percent of Democrats thought “the government should give money directly to the unemployed.” This suggests that Hoover was not much damaged by the particular issue of his opposition to the dole.64
There are other insights to be gleaned from the Houser survey. Hoover was injured by his tariff stance: 70 percent of Republican deserters objected to existing rates, no doubt inspired by the Michelson/Roosevelt demolition of Smoot-Hawley. The defecting Republicans evinced some of the same contradictions as Roosevelt. They tended to believe more strongly in a generous, activist national government and, at the same time, were more inclined than the Republican base to want the national budget balanced through spending reductions. They also shared Roosevelt’s professed isolationism, doubting a European role in the depression, and feeling less of an obligation toward aiding European recovery.65
In a pyrrhic victory for Hoover, a slight majority of Americans now accepted his long argued point that business could be “planned and arranged” so as to offset depressions. It was Roosevelt, however, who had made an issue of economic planning in 1932.66
Valuable as it is, the Houser survey has severe limits. Most significantly, it asks no questions about leadership and is therefore mute on the impact of Roosevelt’s manifest political skills and Hoover’s shortcomings. The president was undoubtedly injured by his inability to project empathy for the victims of the depression, and he failed to place the same blame on Congress that Roosevelt had laid upon him. His credibility was reduced by his three years up and down the depression roller coaster. It would be unwise to underestimate the role of leadership in the campaign.
At home in Palo Alto on election night, November 8, the Hoovers presided over a throng of friends and neighbors in their oversized living room. One guest said the couple looked tired and thin, “as though they had been pulled through a knothole.” Around 9 p.m., as Stanford students gathered outside on the street to serenade the president, he slipped off to his study to compose his letter of congratulations to Roosevelt.67
There was no ambiguity about the result. The man who had won election by an emphatic margin of victory four years earlier lost by an even greater margin. Roosevelt took 472 electoral college votes and 57.4 percent of the popular vote to Hoover’s 59 and 39.6 percent. The Democrat carried forty-two states to the Republican’s six, all of which were clustered in the northeast. Hoover suffered the humiliation of seeing his home state of California and his native states of Oregon and Iowa each give 58 percent of their vote to the challenger. At 9:30 p.m., the crowd in the living room hushed as the concession telegram was read aloud. A few minutes later, Hoover, with Lou by his side, appeared on the front balcony of the house to address the students. They gave him a solid four minutes of applause and lit fireworks until the sky was bright as day and the president was enveloped in smoke. He stood smiling and waving. After a series of boom-rah cheers, the students were hushed by a cheerleader.68
“I thank you for your fine loyalty,” said Hoover with emotion, “and I deeply appreciate this very hearty greeting. Thank you.” He turned away and walked back into the house.69
“Democracy,” he later wrote, “is a harsh employer.”70
Hoover was not long in Palo Alto. Defeated or not, he had four months left in his term. There was scant opportunity to regain his bearings and salve his wounds. The pace of events seemed only to increase after the election.*1
The one-year moratorium on war debts and reparations Hoover had negotiated in 1931 was to run out at the end of 1932. International sentiment was largely in favor of outright cancellation of the debts, an outcome still objectionable to the American people. Not wanting to write off the $10 billion owed the U.S. Treasury without receiving anything in return, Hoover advanced an imaginative scheme to establish a commission that would link further concessions on indebtedness to limits on military spending. He believed the proposal, if accepted, would help to stabilize Europe’s politics and finances, and forestall revolution in Germany.
The major roadblock to his plan was that Congress had placed strict limits on the executive’s ability to renegotiate the debt payments, and congressional leaders were now looking to Roosevelt rather than him for guidance. Hoover thus made an unprecedented approach to the president-elect, asking his cooperation in advancing the international debt plan, even offering to create a bipartisan working group to see the measure through. Editorial opinion was firmly in the president’s court: Democratic papers wrote that “no one but a churlish partisan could have failed to feel a glow of satisfaction” on reading Hoover’s offer, inspired as it was by “unselfish and non-partisan and public-spirited motives.” This was largely, although not entirely, the case. Hoover would have been happy to have Roosevelt accept his scheme and implicate himself in an international solution to a depression that he had insisted was a domestic phenomenon.71
While publicly crediting Hoover with excellent intentions, Roosevelt was unenthusiastic about the debt plan, which his adviser Raymond Moley compared to an “explosive” package left at the president-elect’s door. Roosevelt appears to have sincerely believed that a domestic solution to the depression was possible, and many of his supporters were against debt concessions of any kind. He also had no interest in helping Hoover solve the depression, and he did not want responsibility for the outcome of any negotiations that Hoover would conduct with the Europeans. Resolving not to cooperate with the president, he agreed only to an informal courtesy call at the White House.72
The meeting was held in the Red Room of the White House on November 22. The mood was tense. There was, by this time, palpable animosity between the two old friends, now president and president-elect. Eleanor Roosevelt, in a memoir written almost two decades after these events, suggests that it dated to the Governors’ Conference of the previous spring when Hoover had left Roosevelt, whose weight was supported by crippled legs encased in heavy steel braces, waiting in a predinner receiving line for an agonizing half hour. This appears to be overstated.*2 More likely, the ill feelings were mostly on Hoover’s side and attributable to the jabs he had caught on the campaign trail. He was as unable to forgive Roosevelt’s rhetoric as Roosevelt was unwilling to believe that a politician could hold a grudge over words uttered for partisan advantage. They would remain mutually suspicious, questioning each other’s motives and missing each other’s points, for the rest of their lives.
Roosevelt used the White House elevator and entered the Red Room with his usual bonhomie. His adviser Raymond Moley found the president “grave, dignified, and somewhat uneasy.” Hoover, sitting alone on a divan, dominated the conversation, rarely looking at Roosevelt, choosing instead to watch the afternoon light retreat from the seal of the United States on the deep red carpet. Moley admired Hoover’s “mastery of detail and clarity of arrangement,” and doubted that anyone understood the issues better. Roosevelt asked a few brief questions and left it for Moley to explain on his behalf that the incoming administration disagreed with Hoover’s assessment of the debt problem and his proposed solutions.73
The meeting was a bust, with Hoover later telling Stimson that he had spent much of his time “educating a very ignorant…well-meaning young man.” Roosevelt publicly suggested that Hoover do what he liked with the remainder of his term. Asked by reporters about the debt issue, the president-elect answered that he would “leave that baby on Mr. Hoover’s lap,” and noted that there was no constitutional provision for the involvement of an incoming chief executive in his predecessor’s work.74
Hoover, in fact, could not do as he liked, given the limits Congress had placed on his ability to renegotiate the debt payments. He had already met with congressional leaders and learned, as he had suspected, that they would not change their stance without Roosevelt’s support. Seized with the urgency of the moment, he continued to bombard his opponents with proposals for cooperation toward solutions, going so far as to suggest that Democratic nominees, not Republicans, be sent to Europe to engage in negotiations, all to no avail. Notwithstanding what editorialists called his “personal and moral responsibility” to engage with the outgoing administration, Roosevelt had instructed Democratic leaders in Congress to not let Hoover “tinker” with the debts. He had also let it be known that any solution to the problem would occur on his watch—“Roosevelt holds he and not Hoover will fix debt policy,” read the headlines. Thus ended what the New York Times called Hoover’s magnanimous proposal for “unity and constructive action,” not to mention his twelve-year effort to convince America of its obligation and self-interest in fostering European political and financial stability. League of Nations spokesmen in Geneva expressed dismay and wondered what hope there was for international cooperation when outgoing and incoming American administrations could not work together.75
As it happened, England made its next payment on time, France defaulted, and Germany, sensing that the United States was turning inward, announced that it was seeking to cancel all of its reparations.
During the debt discussions, and to some extent as a result of them, the economy turned south again. Several other factors contributed. Investors were exchanging U.S. dollars for gold as doubt spread about Roosevelt’s intentions to remain on the gold standard. Gold stocks in the Federal Reserve thus declined, threatening the stability of the banking sector. Confidence in the banks was further undermined by an ill-timed, widely publicized Senate investigation into skullduggery on Wall Street. The chamber would have been wiser to heed Melchior Palyi’s advice to wait until the dust had settled to “punish the bankers.” What’s more, the effectiveness of the RFC, which had succeeded in stabilizing the banking system, was severely compromised by Congress’s insistence on publicizing its loans, as the administration had warned. For these reasons, Hoover would forever blame Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress for spoiling his hard-earned recovery, an argument that has only recently gained currency among economists.*3, 76
Alarmed at these threats to recovery, Hoover pushed Democratic congressional leaders and the incoming administration for action. He wanted to cut federal spending, reorganize the executive branch to save money, reestablish the confidentiality of RFC loans, introduce bankruptcy legislation to prevent foreclosures, grant new powers to the Federal Reserve, and pass new banking regulation, including measures to protect depositors. He also wanted to extend federal regulations to banks operating on an interstate basis, and to separate investment banking from commercial banking. He was frustrated at every turn by Democratic leaders taking cues from the president-elect. While pretending to stay out of Hoover’s way, Roosevelt, reported the New York Times on January 1, was calling the shots, “more and more assuming, in a political sense, the domestic section of the burden which will be officially his on March 4.” As Garner, Democratic Speaker of the House and incoming vice president said, “it is a waste of time to try any legislation to which [Roosevelt] will not agree.”77
On February 5, Congress took the obstructionism a degree further by closing shop with twenty-three days left in its session. Virtually all work was put off until the incoming administration was in position to introduce its own sweeping reconstruction program. It was common knowledge in Washington that Roosevelt had asked the next Congress to give him a free hand to implement his as-yet-unannounced plans.78
Hoover was meanwhile pilloried by the same Democratic congressmen who refused him cooperation over the size of his deficit and his unwillingness to reduce it. Not going down without a fight, he surprised Congress on February 20 with a special message repeating many of his requests, only to be told by Democratic leaders that he was too late. He tried once more to have the publication of RFC loans discontinued and briefly gained the crucial support of Senate minority leader Joseph Robinson until he, too, decided to stand down and await the advent of Roosevelt.79
The president, by this time, would have been content to admit defeat and quietly play out the string on his term. He was in a wretched mood. His Research Committee on Social Trends had just delivered its awe-inspiring two-volume report on the state of America. It was easily the most comprehensive study of its kind ever attempted, examining demographic patterns, education, moral attitudes, childhood, family life, urban life, the status of women, consumerism, labor issues, the arts, health and medical practice, religion, and public administration, among many other issues. It had been intended to provide a factual basis for the promotion of actively managed change in all of these areas, to help the country “see where social stresses are occurring and where major efforts should be undertaken to deal with them constructively.” This had been the work Hoover had most wanted to undertake during his presidency. Distracted by the depression and deprived of a second term, all he could do was append his signature to the report’s 1,600 pages and leave it to the fates.80
He would not have contacted Roosevelt again until the inauguration had not conditions deteriorated further. A full-blown banking crisis in February forced president and president-elect into another unwanted embrace.
The scene of the crisis this time was Detroit, where the mammoth Guardian Group, headed by Edsel Ford, the arrogant and irresponsible only son of Henry, was in desperate need of capital. The firm had blown a great deal of money on a towering Art Deco, Mayan Revival headquarters on Griswold Street in Detroit, funded the stock speculations of its officers, and overextended itself in home mortgage loans, among other objectionable practices. Ford applied for RFC funds and after a series of meetings with administration officials, he was told that he would need to make several concessions and to inject some of his own money as security for RFC assistance. Ford balked. No such demands had been made upon the Dawes family bank when it hit the rocks the previous summer, he complained. He had a point, but Congress had been less alert then. Believing that Washington would never risk systemic chaos by allowing his bank to fail, Ford refused to cooperate. The RFC, over Hoover’s strong objections, bowed to congressional pressure and refused Guardian Group the loan, and down it went.81
Its failure triggered runs on other banks, in Michigan and throughout the country. Individual depositors hustled to their local tellers and filled their pockets and purses with what was left of their savings, compounding the stress on the system. Among them were two Hoovers: Lou withdrew $2,000 in cash because it was very possible, she told Allan, “that any or all banks in the country might unexpectedly stop cash payments one of these days”; her husband had meanwhile filled a safe deposit box with cash drawn on February 13, a day before Michigan declared an eight-day bank holiday.82
All of the positive indicators that Hoover had been so relieved to see in the second half of 1932 were by now dismal again. In the last half of February, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York saw almost a quarter of its gold evaporate. Wholesale prices declined. Industrial production sank. Unemployment increased. State after state followed Michigan’s example of implementing a bank holiday. Robbed of his long-awaited recovery, Hoover blamed Democrats for the new slump and Congress more generally for dismissing his three years of calls for bank reform. He prepared a legislative package to meet the bank runs and gold withdrawals. Of course, it, too, would require congressional assent, and Congress would not yield without the president-elect’s approval; so, once more, he picked up his pen.83
At 4 p.m. on the afternoon of February 18, 1933, Secret Service operative John S. West was called to the White House, where Lawrence Richey handed him a sealed envelope and instructed him to place it in the hands of President-elect Roosevelt that evening. West boarded the five o’clock train, arrived in New York at 10 p.m., tracked the president-elect to a banquet at the Astor Hotel, and placed the package in his hands.84
Roosevelt took one look at the envelope and noticed that Hoover had dropped the first e from the spelling of his name. He took this as a personal slight, unaware that Hoover was capable of misspelling his son’s name. Inside the envelope he found the president’s handwritten letter announcing that “a most critical situation has arisen in the country of which I feel it is my duty to advise you confidentially.” Fear and apprehension, wrote Hoover, were once more rampant in the country. “I am convinced that a very early statement by you upon two or three policies of your administration would serve greatly to restore confidence and cause a resumption of the march of recovery.”85
In particular, Hoover wanted Roosevelt to commit to balancing the budget, and to promise that there would be “no tampering or inflation of the currency.” It would also help, said Hoover, if congressional leaders were to cease publication of RFC business. With the exception of the last point, Hoover asked nothing that had not been promised by Roosevelt during the campaign, and by the Democratic platform. Indeed, Roosevelt had lambasted Hoover for his deficits and for employing inflationary tactics that had weakened “public confidence in our Government credit both at home and abroad.” Hoover did not directly accuse Roosevelt of reneging on his promises. He blamed the public fright on loose talk in congressional circles raising concerns that the platform might be abandoned, and insinuated that the president-elect and his circle had contributed through words or actions to the general hysteria. On the whole, the letter was condescending in tone and unnecessarily provocative in laying responsibility for the immediate crisis at the feet of the Democrats.86
Moley was quick to note in the letter Hoover’s desires to legitimate his own management of the financial crisis and to handcuff the incoming administration. It would later come out in private correspondence that Hoover hoped to scare Roosevelt into endorsing Republican views on the depression and renouncing New Deal promises of change and experimentation. He would be disappointed. Roosevelt, said Moley, either “did not realize how serious the situation was” or “preferred to have conditions deteriorate and gain for himself the entire credit for the rescue operation.” The latter is the more likely explanation. Bernard Baruch and Carter Glass, two of the Democratic Party’s most respected voices, together with the Federal Reserve Advisory Board, echoed Hoover’s requests of the president-elect, with the same sense of urgency. Glass had refused to sit as FDR’s Treasury secretary over the same policy uncertainty identified by Hoover. The seriousness of the situation was abundantly clear. Roosevelt responded as he did out of his frequently articulated belief that “the goad of fear and suffering” facilitated his “progressive purpose.” A totally devastated U.S. economy, along with any credit he might receive for an upturn, would bring Roosevelt the political capital he needed for the legislative onslaught he had in mind for his first hundred days. He deliberately left Hoover’s letter unanswered for eleven days, by which time more than thirty states had closed their banks.87
Moley was impressed at Roosevelt’s sangfroid. He showed no more concern for the imminent collapse of the nation’s banking system than he had for the assassin’s bullet that had missed him by a few inches in Miami on February 15, killing Chicago mayor Anton J. Cermak instead. Moley kept waiting for Roosevelt to break out in a sweat, or for him to at least produce a hint of “false gaiety.” It did not seem an unreasonable expectation. “Terror,” said Moley, “now held the country in grip.” Yet he saw nothing from Roosevelt except poise and unshakable confidence.88
The day before the inauguration, Hoover hosted Roosevelt for a traditional pre-inaugural tea at the White House. The New Dealers, under the mistaken impression that custom dictated a dinner, took the tea as a slight. Hoover used the occasion to again beg Roosevelt’s assistance. He proposed they resort to a relic of the Great War, the Trading with the Enemy Act, to restrict gold shipments and bank withdrawals. The attorney general had advised Hoover that he required approval in advance from Congress to invoke the act. Congress would still not move without a signal from the president-elect, and Roosevelt again answered Hoover with polite evasions.
Later in the evening, the president made a telephone call to Roosevelt. Hoover had come under pressure from the Federal Reserve to declare a nationwide bank holiday to relieve the pressure on the system. Hoover thought the idea unnecessarily drastic, punitive to unaffected regions of the country, and unfair to his successor in that it limited his options in managing the crisis. Perhaps most of all, Hoover was not keen to leave office with the heart of the national economy stopped. Believing that the states should be left to decide whether or not to close their banks, he spoke to Roosevelt, who claimed to agree that a national holiday was unwise.
The Hoovers said good-bye to the White House and its staff on the morning of Roosevelt’s inauguration. Lou had packed up their things, placing boxes in storage, where they would lie forgotten for many years. She gave away hundreds of books on economics her husband had collected and studied during his great trial. Hoover and Roosevelt drove together the next morning down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. Magazine covers would portray a chill between them, which was undoubtedly present, although several photographs show Hoover greeting the president-elect warmly. Hoover, on the whole, behaved much as he had when riding with Coolidge in 1928.
Sitting stone-faced through the inaugural, he had to have noticed Roosevelt’s clear, mellifluous voice and charismatic delivery. He had to have been wounded by Roosevelt’s indictment of “the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods” who had failed “through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence,” and who had been “rejected by the hearts and minds of men.” He had to have been annoyed at Roosevelt’s declaration that Americans had “nothing to fear but fear itself.” The line, which did not cause a ripple in the crowd, or receive prominence in newspaper summaries the next day, would have stuck out for Hoover simply because he had expressed the same sentiment ad nauseam throughout his term only to be mocked as a Pollyanna by Roosevelt during the campaign. When Roosevelt told the American people that they could now expect to hear truth from their president, Hoover, according to Boone, “looked as though somebody had cracked him across the face with a riding crop.”89
Hoover left the Capitol directly for Union Station. Because of the recent Bonus Army fiasco and the attempt on Roosevelt’s life, there had been heavy security at the inaugural, including machine-gun nests up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. Having at least as much reason to feel vulnerable as Roosevelt (the man who took a shot at the president-elect had been originally targeting Hoover), he had asked the incoming administration for a Secret Service detail to accompany him on the train home. He was angered to learn that he would be covered to Union Station and no farther.
In this spirit of mutual antagonism, with each man nursing slights real and imagined, with the country frightened and demoralized as never before in peacetime, Roosevelt and Hoover parted, never to meet again.
*1 Hoover’s was the last of the long interregnums. The Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in February 1933, would move up the start of the presidential term from March 4 to January 20. The new dates would take effect in 1937.
*2 Mrs. Roosevelt admitted that staffers had twice offered her husband a chair at the Governors’ Conference, and that the cause of his wait was late-arriving guests. She also allowed that accusing Hoover of deliberately torturing FDR seemed preposterous but added that “in political life you grow suspicious.” Alonzo Fields of the White House domestic staff casts doubt on her story. He recalled in detail (also much later) his encounter with Franklin Roosevelt at the Governors’ Conference, saying that he was given instructions and training on how to assist the governor, who arrived early, was promptly placed in an elevator, and conveyed to the upstairs dining room where he was immediately seated. This is consistent with Hoover’s decision to break protocol in the Senate chamber during Roosevelt’s inauguration so that FDR would not need to stand waiting for him. Alonzo Fields Oral History, 1970, HHPL; Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember (Garden City, NY: Dolphin Books, 1961), p. 69.
*3 Eichengreen in Hall of Mirrors explains how Roosevelt’s apparent inclination to tamper with the monetary standard drained gold from the Federal Reserve and the country, undermining the banking sector. Butkiewicz illustrates how the Reconstruction Finance Corporation was working effectively until Congress began publicizing the identity of borrowers, reducing its volume of loans in September and leading to a decline in industrial production in October. Barry Eichengreen, Hall of Mirrors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 164; James Butkiewicz, “The Impact of a Lender of Last Resort During the Great Depression,” Explorations in Economic History 32 (2005), pp. 197–216.