The White House had been one of the firmer bases of operations in the Hoovers’ thirty-four-year marriage. They had lived under its roof almost constantly through his term, rarely traveling farther than Rapidan for work or pleasure. It was their intention on leaving Washington to finally make a home of the Stanford mansion Lou had built a decade earlier. She had doubts about how long the arrangement would last, knowing her husband’s attraction to the East Coast, but she was convinced that California would serve his recovery. He was “utterly brain tired,” she wrote Allan, having endured “a long, dull, deadly grind, and it will be a slow process getting back to normal…like recovering from an illness.”1
Although the Palo Alto house, he confessed to friends, was not to his taste, Hoover tried to make it work. He truly occupied his study for the first time, using it to deal with his voluminous correspondence, as many as 1,500 letters a day. He also became a regular visitor to the nearby Hoover War Library, an institution he had founded and filled with books, posters, and documents from the Great War, the Versailles conference, his relief administrations, and earlier conflicts and famines that interested him. He followed the news and kept a close eye on the “anti-Hoover literature” that was accumulating at a depressing rate in the library. Doing his best to appear relaxed and busy, he spoke of “a complete exultation and release at no longer having to make ten vital decisions a day. I now could get into my automobile and drive anywhere I liked.”2
The trouble was that he had nowhere to go. Ray Lyman Wilbur visited Hoover in April, a month after his arrival at Stanford, and found him “lonely beyond measure” and “terribly isolated.” Edgar Rickard wrote of Hoover’s epic letdown after twenty-two years of intimacy with “national and international affairs and men of importance and position.” Another acquaintance used the term “broken-hearted” to describe him: “When I went to see him I would find him playing solitaire by himself. It made one feel like crying to see his low state of mind.”3
Having been delivered from West Branch as a boy due to circumstances beyond his control or understanding, Hoover had managed through will, resourcefulness, and strong native intelligence to establish an identity, build a life for himself, regain his sense of self-worth, and find a series of communities to which he belonged and in which he was appreciated. With drive and astounding self-discipline, he had put himself in a position to successively care for himself, his family and friends, for tourists stranded by war, for starving populations in Europe and Russia, and ultimately the whole of the American people. He had sought power and control as antidotes to his own sense of vulnerability and out of a solemn sense of duty to improve the lives of others, to give them the sense of connection and community that he had come through painful experience to understand as fundamental to life. When the markets blew out in 1929, he had genuinely believed that his mastery and hard work could keep the economy on its hinges. He had wanted nothing more than to triumph over the Depression or, at least, to help the American people, at their self-reliant and community-minded best, to recognize it as a temporary setback, one they would overcome before marching further down the path of advance and achievement they had trod for 150 years. In the end he had been adjudged a failure, beaten again by circumstances beyond his control or understanding, rejected in the hearts and minds of voters, drummed out of office, and made both a punching bag and punch line by the people he had sought to serve. The tender psyche that so desperately wanted an honored place in the American story was devastated.
Hoover now resembled, in all but corporeal ruin, his old friend Franklin Lane who at the start of Hoover’s political career had written from his deathbed wondering if all the anxiety, insult, and humiliation of public life had been worthwhile when, at the end of the day, his high hopes and ambitions had led him into a world “awry, distorted, and altogether perverse,” where he could only stare in wonder at the gap between intent and effect.4
California was the wrong place for a man who rarely ate a meal alone, who needed to belong, who dreaded rejection and isolation. He knew few people in Palo Alto, and he had nothing much to do beyond suffer the full weight and pain of his repudiation, and make lists of people he felt had been disloyal to him.
It would have been a difficult adjustment even without the defeat. The American presidency is a pinnacle like no other. What follows is necessarily a descent or, at best, an eclipse. Certainly none of Hoover’s recent predecessors offered much to emulate in the way of a postpresidential career. Not Harding (died in office), Wilson (all but died in office), or McKinley (assassinated). Cleveland and Coolidge (the latter had died during the Hoover-Roosevelt interregnum) had each retired to the quiet obscurity of a country home in declining health, again nothing Hoover would want. He was fifty-eight, not yet old, in the prime of life as leadership goes. He would reclaim his physical vitality with a week or two of decent sleep. He wanted a future of purposeful toil commensurate with his abilities. He might have envied Taft, who made a successful transition to the Supreme Court, an avenue closed to Hoover, who had not studied the law.
The only remaining example from recent presidential history was Theodore Roosevelt, who on leaving office had traveled, hunted like a madman, and haunted his party until he broke it. Hoover had begun his term with the example of the great Bull Moose in mind. He would now follow loosely in his postpresidential footsteps, nursing the same sense of unfinished business. He would fish, travel like a madman, and haunt the successor who had broken him.
He considered, at least momentarily, taking a job. His finances were in poor shape; four years in office had been a major expense, and he had given a fifth of his salary back to the government in 1932 (the amount allowed by law) and donated the rest to charity in an unprecedented yet futile gesture of solidarity with the American people. He had continued to be generous with friends, family, and associates, supplementing incomes and lending cash that would probably never be repaid, and the Depression had devastated his investments. His nest egg, by one estimate, had been reduced from several million to $700,000.*1 Given the state of the economy, it would no longer provide the level of income to which the family had grown accustomed.
Henry Ford offered to secretly underwrite a ten-minute weekly radio broadcast by Hoover to the tune of $3,000 a week. Always conscious of his dignity, and uneasy about appearing before a public that had discarded him, Hoover dismissed the opportunity. He also rejected the alternatives of salaried positions with financial institutions or mining firms: putting himself on the payroll of corporate America would tend to confirm his alignment with Roosevelt’s crooks and enemies of the people, and he was as yet unwilling to admit that his political career was over. He decided instead to trust his own business savvy to rebuild his fortune and took a more active part in his investments.5
Lou, stout as ever, took the loss of the presidency and their reduced circumstances in stride. “For the coming year or years I am going to have very little money to run our family on,” she wrote Allan. “We have spent in the past, instead of being thrifty.” She mused whimsically about using the sums of cash she had squirreled away to purchase a cheap plot of land where they could all live simply with chickens and a cow. “It will be rather fun,” she said, “and not any hardship really.” In the same breath she asked Allan to inquire about the cost of a grand piano. All things considered, the Hoovers remained well-to-do.6
The boys were more or less self-supporting. Herbert Jr., turning thirty, had followed his degrees at Stanford and the Harvard Business School with a Guggenheim fellowship to study aviation economics. A key figure in the growth of commercial aviation, he had made the cover of Time magazine in 1930 as the first president of Aeronautical Radio Inc. He resigned that position months later, after the 1930 elections, when it was alleged that he owed his success and his firm’s contracts to his father’s influence. After a long convalescence from a bout of tuberculosis, he worked at Transcontinental Air Express and taught economics to engineering students at the California Institute of Technology.*2 Allan Hoover had followed his brother through Stanford and Harvard Business School. After a spell in the Los Angeles financial industry, he took over management of the family’s farming operations in California’s Imperial Valley.7
Had there been some crisis in his finances or in his family, something urgently requiring his attention and energy, Hoover’s transition out of the battle on a thousand fronts might have been easier. As it was, his days were relatively empty. He craved news, despite reading dozens of newspapers a day. He was constantly in touch with Washington through the mails and by telephone. His friends transmitted gossip about Roosevelt: how he stayed in bed until 10:30 in the morning; how he addressed newspapermen by their first names; how his adviser Louis Howe, living in the White House, came down to breakfast without shaving and gave orders to domestic staff as though he owned the place. They kept Hoover abreast of the progress of the New Deal, which would have done little to alleviate Hoover’s suffering, both because it was popular and because he was skeptical of Roosevelt’s policies.8
Hoover meanwhile retained full ownership of the Depression. Every job lost, every mortgage foreclosed upon, was noted on his side of the ledger. Every ray of hope and all credit for effort fell to the new president. Economists and political scientists developed the habit of charting the economy’s gains from Roosevelt’s inauguration rather than from his election, not an unreasonable practice given that March 3 was FDR’s official start date, but one that exaggerated Hoover’s culpability and absolved the Democrats of any responsibility for decisions during the interregnum.
Hoover spent an immense amount of time behind the wheel of his car, not in complete exultation, as he claimed, but in a desperate, primal response to hostile circumstances. Travel had been his resort when legal troubles had smashed his nerves during his business career, and it was his resort now. He sped through Grass Valley, the High Sierras and Yosemite, and down along the Pacific Coast, putting eight thousand miles on his odometer in the spring of 1933 in a vain effort to outrun his failure and his feelings, and for the sheer need of something to do.
He seems mainly to have been drawn to the Sierra Nevada, the same 40-million-year-old granite peaks he had visited as a geology student in the company of Professor Lindgren. It was there he had gotten his first “whole jug full” of learning and experience, where he had become intoxicated by the majesty of the scenery, and where he had forged his romantic sense of identity and destiny as an indomitable man of science. It was there he had nurtured his ambition, the intent that he had fulfilled to such awful effect. Just what he wanted in his return is impossible to say: answers, inspiration, nostalgia? It is unlikely that Hoover, largely a mystery to himself, had a clear idea. He was aware of little more than his hurt.9
He returned to Bohemian Grove along the Russian River in the summer of 1933 for the first time since Coolidge had announced that he would not seek reelection. Anxious about how a man who had lost the country would be received by this pack of power brokers, Hoover would not stray from his cabin and the loneliest of the Grove’s redwood trails during his first week in attendance. It was only when he was introduced to a standing ovation at a Saturday-night gathering of a thousand campers that he finally let his guard down. At Bohemian Grove, at least, he still belonged.10
Strangers he continued to avoid. One of the appeals of the many short fishing trips Hoover took in this period was that he could hide from the world. In October, he was in Oregon with the Iowa cartoonist J. N. “Ding” Darling and others. Their long black limousine pulled up in front of a village grocery near the Oregon border so the driver could pick up supplies. Hoover slouched in the back seat, fearing the lash of judgment in the eyes of the locals. To his dismay, the arrival of so unusual a vehicle in rural Oregon drew the townspeople from their lairs. The local newspaper editor came out, under his green eyeshade, with a box of pink pears. A group of students descended on the car with pencils and paper, asking for autographs.
“Now look what you’ve done,” Hoover snapped at Darling.11
The townsfolk kept coming, among them a kindly elderly lady in a lace cap and shawl who elbowed her way to the front of the crowd and stuck her hand in the car.
“Is that really you, President Hoover?” she said. “We all love you and I just want to go home and tell my family that I have seen you and shaken your hand.”
Hoover would not look up. He briefly clasped the woman’s hand as the limo pulled away.
“Did you see that sweet little old lady, who only wanted to shake your hand?” asked Darling.
“Yes,” Hoover answered.
“Well you didn’t act like it.”12
The rest of the drive passed in silence.
Several days after that unhappy episode, with the fishing party camped on the Klamath River, a local schoolteacher approached one of its members and asked if the former president would honor her students with a visit to her one-room schoolhouse. Informed of the request at dinner that evening, Hoover was vehement: “I won’t do it.” Unintimidated, his fellow fishermen told him he had a duty to the children. Hoover became peevish and silent.13
The next morning he toured the school. He noticed that the children seemed underfed. The teacher confessed that she used part of her salary to keep a soup kettle on the woodstove so that her charges would be guaranteed at least one hot meal a day. Hoover returned to camp and asked his friends to help him donate $100 to the school, sufficient to buy the children lunches for a year, and they did.
As Lou expected, time would heal much of Hoover’s pain, although it is doubtful that she anticipated how long it would take, or that parts of him would never entirely recover. It certainly did not help that in the first years of his postpresidential life, Hoover had reason to consider himself a hunted man.
The Roosevelt crew and the Democratic Congress did their best to scandalize his administration, one of the cleanest on record. The tax bureau was loosed on Andrew Mellon in a determined although ultimately unsuccessful effort to prosecute him for tax evasion. The distribution of airmail contracts under Hoover’s postmaster general, Walter Brown, was probed. The investments and tax returns of all four Hoovers were closely inspected. Nothing was found, much to the relief of Edgar Rickard, who had done Hoover’s taxes since the Great War.14
The main effect of this unusual attention was to heighten paranoia in the family and the Firm. They were convinced that they were being watched, that Rickard’s letters to Hoover were being opened prior to delivery, and that their offices would be raided. They often communicated in cypher, under assumed names. Rickard, most loyal of the Hooverites, looked forward to separating his own financial relations from those of his best friend in part to avoid further scrutiny. Herbert Jr. said that his father’s presidency had been the “worst thing that ever happened to the family.” They would all have been better off if he had “rested on his oars with his European engagements.”15
Inevitably, Hoover’s hatred of his successor grew. Roosevelt was constantly in his thoughts as he wore out his odometer, racking up forty-five thousand miles and visiting twenty-eight states in his first two years of retirement. He noted and abhorred each of FDR’s broken promises, each revision of or departure from the Democrat’s New Deal platform, and every contradiction of word or deed committed by Roosevelt and his “starry-eyed young men,” the “collegiate oligarchy” that would come to be known to history as the “brains trust.”16
The New Deal, as manifest in Roosevelt’s famous Hundred Days of legislative activity, was an odd amalgam of policies, some initiated by Roosevelt, others urged upon him by advisers or circumstance. Its constituent parts were intended to either promote economic recovery, relieve victims of the Depression, or reform government, or to achieve some combination of the three. It never amounted to a coherent program, not least because his recovery, relief, and reform measures often conflicted with one another, especially when it came to budget matters. Nevertheless, there were important consistencies to it.17
Roosevelt delivered on his promise of bold, persistent experimentation. He also clung to his view of the Depression as an essentially American phenomenon requiring domestic solutions. Convinced that the U.S. economy was past its prime, he paid more attention, as promised during the campaign, to the alleviation of distress and the distribution of national wealth than to spurring growth. And running through the whole of the New Deal as perhaps its most consistent feature was a bright thread of partisanship. Roosevelt was determined to use policy to weld together a formidable, durable Democratic advantage in America. The political calculus of the program often introduced contradictions and incoherencies that to this day flummox both its critics and supporters. Roosevelt nevertheless succeeded in his objective. His party would dominate national politics through the middle decades of the twentieth century. His partisanship was disgusting to Hoover, whose noble and self-defeating view was that legislation should never be written in service of political agendas.18
Roosevelt’s most important moves in the days after his inauguration concerned the banking crisis. He immediately declared a national banking holiday, closing all of the banks in the United States while their books were inspected. Although the examinations were cursory, the four-day holiday served to break the spell of panic. The vast majority of banks reopened a week later in an environment of renewed confidence. Roosevelt also called a special session of Congress, which passed the Emergency Banking Act, an amendment to the Trading with the Enemy Act, granting Roosevelt increased power over the economy including the ability to curb gold and capital outflows from the United States. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was permitted to inject new capital into banks by taking equity positions in them. Congress, in a stunning volte-face, voted to make RFC loans confidential. These were all components of Hoover’s plans, with the exception of the bank holiday, which proved a strong tonic and which he had refused to enact with Roosevelt’s apparent agreement. Hoover’s Treasury secretary, Ogden Mills, stayed on to steer the new administration through the crisis while Arthur Ballantine, Hoover’s undersecretary of the Treasury, helped to write Roosevelt’s first fireside chat in which he explained the program.19
This initial blast of activity was a great success. When the New York Stock Exchange opened along with the banks on March 15, the Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up 15 percent, its largest single-day increase in history. Gold and bank deposits returned to the financial system.*3 The banking sector would remain stable for the duration of the Depression, and the new administration received credit for solving the crisis. Hoover would always believe that Roosevelt had pushed the economy off the dock so that he could play the life saver after his inauguration.20
In any event, a pattern was established that would play out time and again over the next four years, with New Dealers taking applause for initiatives that had been fathered by Hoover. “When we all burst into Washington,” wrote Raymond Moley, “we found every essential idea” of the New Deal anticipated, in whole or in part, by the previous administration. Especially at the start, Roosevelt had hewed closely to Hoover’s program of bank relief, agricultural aid, labor reform, industrial cooperation, federal aid to local government, and cuts to conventional spending. He was at least as keen as Hoover to produce balanced budgets. FDR also invoked the spirit of wartime collaboration to encourage adoption of his initiatives, some of which were in whole or in part voluntary, and most of which were considered emergency measures, and therefore temporary. “We must not take the position,” he said, “that we are going to have permanent Depression in this country.”21
The New Deal’s justly celebrated Glass-Steagall banking reforms, which divorced commercial from investment banking and introduced a federal deposit insurance program, were another example of Roosevelt presenting Hoover’s initiatives as his own. Such new agencies as the Civil Works Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps followed Hoover’s example of using public works to create new employment. Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, dubbed by one of Roosevelt’s advisers “the greatest recovery agency” of the Depression, would become indispensable to the New Deal. Another administration insider, Rexford Tugwell, later traced a long list of New Deal ventures to Hoover’s years as secretary of commerce and as president and concluded that “the New Deal owed much to what he had begun.”22 This is to say nothing of the invaluable lessons from Hoover’s three years of effort, successful or not.
Moley and Tugwell still overstate the case. Roosevelt did proclaim the banking holiday, going further than Hoover thought advisable. He legalized beer in his Hundred Days, after the lame-duck Congress had already passed a bill repealing Prohibition. Roosevelt also created the Tennessee Valley Authority, a public corporation designed to create and distribute hydro power at Muscle Shoals and the centerpiece of an ambitious plan to develop the Tennessee Valley. Hoover had opposed all of this. In other policy realms, Hoover had merely dabbled where his successor shot the moon. Roosevelt’s Civil Works Administration put five times more people to work in one winter than Hoover had employed at the peak of his efforts. Whereas Hoover had asked business to maintain wages and encouraged voluntary planning to reap efficiencies in industry, Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act permitting the imposition of hours-of-work standards and minimum wages, and empowering a bureaucracy to regulate industrial competition. Hoover’s efforts at farm price manipulation, daring at the time, were eclipsed by the New Deal’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which paid farmers to kill 6 million piglets and destroy 10 million acres of cotton in a bid to increase prices through forced scarcity.23
Some New Deal measures, most notably the bank holiday and the ending of Prohibition, were successful. Others, like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, had mixed results. Some, like the National Industrial Recovery Act, were abject failures. Hoover despised them all. He was further outraged by FDR’s funneling of relief funds to strategic Democratic districts, a vote-buying scheme that smacked of Tammany Hall. (Al Smith would join Hoover in denouncing Roosevelt for playing Santa Claus with public money.) The rhetoric used by the administration to justify the New Deal also infuriated Hoover. It was socially divisive and unapologetically antibusiness. Republicans and the captains of industry were rechristened “social Neanderthals” and “corporals of disaster.” Their “murderous doctrine of savage and wolfish competition” was cited as the cause of the Depression.24
On top of all this stood the single issue that drove the sharpest divide between the two administrations and confirmed Hoover’s opinion of Roosevelt as a dangerous radical: the gold standard. Hoover was not obstinate about gold. He understood that much of the Depression’s pain was caused by a monstrous global deflation transmitted from nation to nation by means of the gold standard. Elements of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, together with his tinkering with the Federal Reserve System, were intended to loosen gold’s shackles and expand the U.S. monetary base. He had talked with Stimson and French prime minister Pierre Laval about the possibilities of bimetallism, using silver to supplement gold in order to relieve debts, raise prices, and restore economic confidence. His consideration of the Trading with the Enemy Act also envisaged a disruption of the usual workings of the gold standard. He nonetheless believed that there was no workable long-term alternative to gold as a basis for international exchange.25
Roosevelt, during the campaign, and again after his inauguration, had claimed to be “absolutely” committed to gold. Hoover, unconvinced of FDR’s sincerity, felt vindicated when the new president crowned the Hundred Days by announcing that the United States would adopt a managed currency, its value untethered to gold or any fixed international rate of exchange.26
Roosevelt, on this tack, was operating on political instinct more than on sound monetary knowledge or theory. At the time, elite world opinion was solidly behind coordinated action to stabilize the global monetary environment, avoid inflation, and return to the gold standard. Some of Roosevelt’s own advisers considered his departures from consensus economics as “harebrained and irresponsible.” Regardless, the new president, eager to win the political loyalty of the heavily indebted farm belt, bet that suspending gold and inflating the currency would ease the farmer’s debt burdens, raise commodity prices, and help put the country back on track. The bet paid. The move to a managed and, ultimately, a significantly devalued currency eased debt burdens and allowed an expansion of the monetary base, a crucial step toward recovery.*4, 27
Hoover had two principal objections to inflation. First, it benefited speculators, bankers, foreigners, landholders, and stockholders, while degrading the incomes of workers on fixed wages and salaries, as well as the investments of prudent Americans who had carefully saved and purchased insurance policies and avoided debt. Second, and more importantly, Hoover believed that America’s place in the world demanded its participation in efforts to reestablish global exchange rates and achieve a coordinated international reflation. “Ever since the storm began in Europe,” he said, “the United States has held staunchly to the gold standard….We have thereby maintained one Gibraltar of stability in the world and contributed to check the movement of chaos.” Unilateral U.S. inflation would render these objectives, and American leadership, impossible.28
This was an important point. Roosevelt’s refusal to collaborate with Hoover on the debt issue, along with his pursuit of a nationalist economic policy, had led Nazis, fascists, and other militarists to infer that they had nothing to gain or fear from America. Japan promptly dropped out of the League of Nations and continued its assault on China. After the torching of the German Reichstag, Adolf Hitler assumed absolute powers in Berlin and began his attacks on academics, clerics, labor unions, and Jews. Roosevelt’s declaration of July 3, 1933, that the United States would not return to gold in the foreseeable future, nor participate in any joint effort to stabilize exchange rates, further confirmed that the nation had turned its back on the world. It may be that there was no deal to be had on international cooperation by the time Roosevelt made his fatal decision. Hoover held that one was possible, and he had been a party to several going back to the Dawes plan. He certainly believed that the United States owed it to the world to try again.29
One of the ironies of Roosevelt’s decision to devalue the dollar is that it compounded the negative impact of the high tariffs he had so effectively denounced during the campaign. Devaluation, more than Smoot-Hawley, made European goods less competitive, exports to the United States less attractive, and loans from the United States more burdensome. For Germany, heavily indebted to Wall Street, the pain was acute. Nevertheless, the new president maintained high tariffs through his first term, making no serious effort to reduce them until the opening of the 1936 campaign.
Thoughts on Roosevelt’s performance and the state of the world rattled in Hoover’s head as he steered a long, tall Buick down thousands of miles of new California highway built during his time in Washington. He tried to make sense of the New Deal. There were parts of it for which he wanted credit, and parts he abhorred. At times the whole program seemed preposterous: the New Deal was an empty phrase sanctifying “a muddle of uncoordinated and reckless adventures in government.” He would never be entirely sure that it deserved to be taken seriously. But as his thoughts distilled with each tank of gas burned, ominous elements of the program absorbed his attention, and he eventually arrived at a new and life-altering perspective on Roosevelt’s advance.30
David Lawrence’s original assessment that Hoover would be “as radical as the times demand” had held true at least until the last year of his presidency. He had adhered to an expansive vision of what government could do. While he had not moved as fast as other progressives wanted, he had moved steadily. Roosevelt brought him face-to-face with the limits of his radicalism.31
In Hoover’s judgment, the New Deal’s scale, reach, and coercive nature were so far beyond anything America had known as to represent a new and dangerous doctrine in national political life. Roosevelt was clearly bent on a massive expansion of the federal bureaucracy, having launched forty new agencies in his first year. There was a pattern in his initiatives of requiring Congress to delegate authority to the executive branch, resulting in a vast expansion of presidential powers that Roosevelt was not shy about wielding with partisan purpose. Government, in this new world, was no longer an umpire in the marketplace: it was directing and dictating wages and prices, and competing against private enterprise. This, thought Hoover, was not “change that comes from the normal development of national life.” This was an attempt to “alter the whole foundation of our national life.” It was “a radical departure from the foundations of 150 years which have made this the greatest nation in the world.”32
His hatred of the new president and his sensitivity to the administration’s withdrawal from the world convinced Hoover that Roosevelt was launching a mass nationalistic movement “dipped from the cauldrons” of Russian Communism, German National Socialism, and Italian fascism. As he later wrote:
All those movements sprang from the soil of postwar misery, the strivings for power, greed for the possessions of others, boredom with the routines of life, yearnings for adventure, or just frustration. These mass movements had many common characteristics. They exaggerated the miseries of the times. They condemned the existing economic and social systems as bankrupt. They cried, “Emergency! Emergency!” They promised Utopia. They envisaged a national devil. They stifled criticism with smearing and misrepresentation through the powerful agencies of government propaganda. They subjugated the legislative and judicial arms and purged their own party oppositions. They spent public moneys in subsidies to pressure groups. They distributed patronage to their adherents. They sought ceaselessly for more power.33
Hoover saw Roosevelt’s popularity as proof that he was corrupting the American people. They had been hypnotized into believing a new millennium had dawned. They were being made dependent on government by Roosevelt’s “habit of carefree scattering of public money.” While many Americans would have quarreled with Hoover’s suggestion that their economic miseries were being exaggerated, he continued to describe the Depression as a temporary setback and argued that the U.S. economy remained the strongest in the world. The rate of home ownership had never been higher, and there were 23 million cars on the road. He was correct, if somewhat beside the point.34
Here was Hoover’s Rubicon. Exactly where he crossed it is unknown, whether in the morning coastal fogs of Pescadero or under the unforgiving sun of Modesto. Somewhere along the road, his experiences, the nation’s postwar gyrations, the Depression, and Roosevelt’s radical New Deal had brought him to believe that the United States now had more to fear than to gain from further expansion of the federal government.
He had been planning, since his election loss, to renew his literary production. His former researcher, French Strother, a journalist by training, had agreed to help him mount a multivolume defense of his administration, only to die of pneumonia ten days after the inauguration. Hoover now proceeded on his own.
Published in 1934, The Challenge to Liberty is an abstract critique of the New Deal that never mentions its programs or its leader. The book discusses American freedom in historical and international perspective. It describes the individual rights guaranteed Americans by the Constitution and reminds readers that the nation had been built upon a strong distrust of concentrated authority. The Founding Fathers had believed that the best guarantee of liberty and justice was in the constraint of power. They had put severe limits on the national government’s capacity to intrude in everyday life and in the organization of the economy. Their foresight had left Americans with a legitimate claim to being the freest society on earth.35
The Challenge to Liberty sees threats to individual rights in heavy regulation and bureaucratic expansion. It perceives a forced regimentation in government efforts to plan industry and agriculture, to set wages and prices, to manipulate the currency, and to compete with private business. It charts a deterioration of public morals in the repudiation of debt through inflation, the creation of class division, and the exploitation of a temporary crisis to break with fundamental American values. Reviewing the checks and balances of power devised by the nation’s founders, it abhors the denigration of Congress in favor of one-man rule.
In its conclusion, it steers America back to the foundation of the individual, responsible to himself and serving his neighbors, building local institutions and governments—what we would now describe as social capital—and turning to the national government only when all else fails. The book does not deal with Prohibition, an enormous federal intrusion that Hoover had supported, and it betrays a suspicion of “temporary” expansions of federal authority to fight emergencies that had been lacking during his own administration. It is nonetheless one of the more trenchant critiques of New Deal liberalism to emerge in Roosevelt’s first term.
Hoover’s closest friends wished that he would not publish the book, knowing that it would be received as the bitter musings of a defeated man rather than as a thoughtful treatise on big government. Rickard also sensed, accurately, an unspoken, “unrelenting animus” toward Roosevelt in its pages. Hoover would not be dissuaded. The book sold over 100,000 copies thanks to a friendly deal with the Book of the Month Club.36
“The gospel according to Palo Alto,” as Hoover nicknamed The Challenge to Liberty, did little, if anything, to improve his public persona. Republicans were unresponsive. The Washington Post supposed the work might have enjoyed a better reception if written by a different author. The left was contemptuous. The Challenge to Liberty, wrote Harold Laski, the British Marxist, epitomized “the terrified anger of a high priest of the Ptolemaic astronomy watching the growth of the Copernican hypothesis.”37
The author’s hope that the book might influence the midterms of 1934 was dashed when Roosevelt and the Democrats increased their dominance over Congress. Hoover was dumbfounded: “Daily the world goes back toward the regimentation of the Middle Ages, whether it be Bolshevism, Hitlerism, Fascism, or the New Deal.” He stepped up his opposition, visiting newspapermen and making speeches across the country, defending his record as president and intensifying his attacks on the New Deal. He had plenty of ammunition. Indeed, it accumulated as he traveled, for, as a practical matter, the Depression survived Roosevelt’s remedies. In the summer of 1935, industrial production, wholesale prices, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, while improved over Hoover’s worst year, remained exceptionally weak by postwar standards. Unemployment ranged from 17 percent to 22 percent in the two years after the Hundred Days, hardly a recovery.38
Nevertheless, Roosevelt was spectacularly popular. He unleashed another barrage of legislation in 1935, known as the Second New Deal. The Social Security Act brought the United States up to date with other industrial countries through the introduction of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance. The Wagner Act guaranteed employees the right to collective bargaining through unions of their own choice. The Works Progress Administration put millions to work in low-wage jobs building public infrastructure including, famously, LaGuardia Airport in New York, the River Walk in San Antonio, and Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. Roosevelt’s optimism and constructive works kept the spirits of the country high and foiled all opposition.
The nation’s idolization of Roosevelt left Hoover aghast. He could not understand how people were missing what he saw, and he would not hear a word in favor of the president. When his old friend Mark Sullivan advised not speaking against the New Deal until FDR’s popularity had abated, Hoover suspected Sullivan of sordid motives. He told Edgar Rickard that the journalist was being easy on the new administration to gain access to the New Dealers, maintain the relevance of his syndicated newspaper column, and protect his income.39
Sullivan, in fact, was trying to protect his friend. With his wide acquaintance in Republican circles, he understood that the party was eager to turn the page and forget about its Depression president. It wished Hoover would pipe down. Three credible journalists—Frank Kent, David Lawrence, and W. M. Kiplinger—transmitted similar messages to the Firm: Hoover, never a true member of the Republican guild, now represented its greatest disaster, and it was time he step aside for new leadership. Another argument against Hoover was that many congressional Republicans believed the party needed to adopt elements of Roosevelt’s plan rather than to fight it. They thwarted his efforts to rally the party around a general statement of anti–New Deal principles.40
Hoover, aware of the hostility toward him, was “very much hurt,” said Rickard. It troubled him that his fellow Republicans sat mute as Democrats belittled the accomplishments of his administration: “He cannot see why it is not generally publicized that he broke the Depression in June and July of 1932.”41
With a courage bordering on delusional, Hoover ignored his advisers and set his sights on the Republican nomination in 1936. As usual, he would not overtly campaign for it. He told his friends that if they felt “sufficiently keen and confident, they should get out and ‘spread the gospel,’ and create a background in his favor, and only with a strongly manifest support could he be induced to accept any overtures.” He meanwhile advertised his availability through innumerable speeches, copies of which were circulated to vast mailing lists. Grossly overestimating both the receptivity of his party to his message, and FDR’s vulnerability, he thought he had a chance to win.42
In late February of the election year, Hoover, Larry Richey, Edgar Rickard, and others were guests of Lewis Strauss at the offices of Kuhn, Loeb and Company in New York. They shared their bad news: Hoover did not have a chance at the nomination. A poll of 1,600 Republicans in the bellwether state of Ohio showed a pathetic 4 percent support for him as leader. Moreover, money was scarce, and the practice of printing and distributing his speeches would have to stop. The consensus of the meeting was that Hoover should abandon his shadow campaign. Unconvinced, he fought on, dedicating every waking hour to his candidacy and running up “a terrific telephone bill,” said Rickard, through the primaries season. He failed to gain traction.43
William Allen White joined the circle of friendly journalists wishing that Hoover would keep his head down. The man was hated, wrote White, who was personally upset by this “mob rage at an honest, earnest, courageous man. Yet it is here. It still hangs on. And everything he says, as well as everything his friends say, is discounted. It is unbelievable.”44
Hoover finally folded his hand in the last days before the Republican convention. “It should be evident by this time that I am not a candidate,” he said. “I have stated many times that I have no interest but to get these critical issues before the country.” He was devastated. “Edgar,” said Hoover to his friend Rickard, “I am out of public life.”45
Of course, he was not really out. Hoover elbowed his way to a prime-time address before the convention in Cleveland on June 10, hoping for a last-minute miracle. Eight thousand people greeted him at the train station that afternoon, summoned by a truck circling the city with a megaphone. He arrived in his old blue serge uniform, looking cheerful and healthy, notwithstanding the pounds he had gained in the absence of Hooverball.
At 9 p.m., he walked through the throngs in the jam-packed auditorium and mounted a rostrum that rose like a pulpit in the middle of the convention floor. It was rigged with an unobtrusive metal stand on which he could place his speech and read its pages at eye level. This was one clue that Republicans were about to see a different Hoover.
Before he could utter a word, delegates from California broke into a wild demonstration, unfurling an enormous blue silk banner and parading it through the aisles. They pulled in delegations from seventeen other states behind them. Republicans stood on their chairs, waved their hats, and howled their approval. Hoover kept his poise. His eyes looked out over the throng, not down at his feet. He smiled and occasionally motioned for calm as the procession marched on. It was fifteen minutes before he could speak.46
When, finally, the delegates were quelled, he launched into the most bracing attack on Roosevelt’s policy yet heard from a senior Republican. He first described what he called his “charitable” view of the New Deal: “that it has no philosophy, that it is sheer opportunism, that it is a muddle of a spoils system, of emotional economics, of reckless adventure, of unctuous claims to a monopoly of human sympathy, of greed for power, of a desire for popular acclaim and an aspiration to make the front pages of the newspapers.” If the New Deal was indeed quackery, he said, it would lead to chaos. What worried him, however, was that it had a true purpose, that it represented “a cold-blooded attempt to Europeanize the country.”47
Hoover did not have to explain, with Mussolini and Hitler triumphant in Italy and Germany, and with fascists warring against republicans in Spain, that “Europeanizing” America meant the extermination of liberal democracy. He identified class hatred, centralization, utopian planning, collectivism, regimentation, unsound money, spoilsmanship, and a monarchical presidency as harbingers of despotism, and he traced their presence in New Deal thought and action. He railed at Roosevelt for spending $15 billion more than his own administration had spent, and he condemned Congress for abandoning its responsibility to control the public purse. He protested a reckless orgy of experimentation that had put “a few hundred thousand earnest party workers” on the federal payroll but returned unemployment to the same level it had notched on election day in 1932.48
His delivery, by Hoover standards, was superb. The stand for his notes kept his chin from his chest. It gave him the impression of being aware of his audience, although he was obviously reading his text. His tone, formal and crisp, was mildly modulated. He was repeatedly interrupted by vigorous applause. The New York Times, perhaps reflecting its low expectations, said he performed with “the aplomb of a man who is not naturally an actor but who, with the determination of Demosthenes, has mastered the platform technique.”49
In closing, Hoover demanded that the party fight the “poisoning of Americanism” and stop cowering in the face of the New Deal:
Republicans and fellow Americans! This is your call. Stop the retreat. In the chaos of doubt, confusion, and fear, yours is the task to command. Stop the retreat, and turning the eyes of your fellow Americans to the sunlight of freedom, lead the attack to retake, recapture, and re-man the citadels of liberty. Thus can America be preserved. Thus can the peace, plenty and security be re-established and expanded. Thus can the opportunity, the inheritance, and the spiritual future of your children be guaranteed. And thus you will win the gratitude of posterity, and the blessing of Almighty God.50
The Republican throng exploded again, chanting “We want Hoover!” State delegations jumped up to resume their marches. The band played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The auditorium was a circus of color and motion. Everyone seemed to be singing or yelling. Women were seen weeping. The shrieking and cheering continued for a half hour after the convention chair announced that Hoover had left the building to catch his train.51
After his speech, there was the briefest discussion among California delegates that their man might have a chance at renomination. Cooler heads prevailed. The ecstatic reception had been more a tribute to the ex-president than a wish to see him returned to office. Alfred M. Landon of Kansas, one of only two Republican governors to be reelected in 1934, took the convention. Roosevelt, who had money on Hoover, thought the Republicans had made a mistake.52
Hoover, according to Rickard, returned to New York in “great good humor,” buoyed by his reception and eager to take to the hustings and resume on Landon’s behalf his attacks on Roosevelt. His high did not last, as Landon, who found much to admire in the New Deal, refused the proffered assistance. Hoover was permitted to make just two speeches in the campaign.53
Roosevelt’s reelection was never at serious risk. The economy had improved steadily in the second half of his term, due largely to an expansion of the monetary base fueled by the flight of gold to the United States from an increasingly dangerous Europe. The New Deal, so far as most Americans were concerned, had stabilized the economy and the financial system, brought a new sense of fairness to the workplace, made home ownership more achievable, and made old age and unemployment less unsettling. Millions of families had received employment or checks from Washington. The rapacious denizens of Wall Street had been put in their place.
Republicans could grumble all they wanted about how voters had been bought with their own money, how Roosevelt was paying the young, the elderly, and the farmer not to work and paying healthy young men to do make-work, and still producing double-digit unemployment figures—it did not matter. FDR was wildly popular. To the extent that he had opposition, it had been from the likes of Louisiana governor Huey Long and California gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair, who believed the New Deal not radical enough. Landon won only 8 of 531 electoral college votes, a worse showing than Hoover in 1932. Only Maine and Vermont stood between Roosevelt and unanimity.54
Hoover might at this point have kept his vow to Edgar Rickard to retire after the election. He had other work to do, having signed on as a director of New York Life Insurance Company and expanded his farms in the Imperial Valley. He was bombarding Rickard with investment instructions. He became honorary national chair of the Boys Clubs of America Inc., a cause dear to his heart due to his own struggles as a youth, and also because he believed boys required outlets for their energies denied them by the rampant urbanization of American life. He set a lofty fund-raising goal of $15 million, sufficient to build a hundred new clubs in fifty cities in three years, and easily surpassed it. He also remained active at Stanford and his War Library. All of this would have sufficed for many an American male of sixty-two years. Not Hoover, and definitely not Hoover after he had been so warmly received by his own party in Cleveland and after Landon had run such an abysmal campaign. It was plain to him that no other Republican had the stature, intellect, and vigor to lead a crusade against the New Deal. He was correct insofar as no one else was clamoring for the job. Rickard soon found him determined to regain leadership of the GOP, wiping the slate clean of “pinhead politicians” of the Landon ilk.55
*1 Theodore Joslin records in his diary on July 30, 1932, that he showed Hoover an advance proof of an article in Fortune magazine claiming his fortune had dwindled to $700,000 from $4,000,000. “[Hoover] read it through carefully, looked up with a smile and said, ‘Well, Ted, for your information there is not an accurate sentence in that entire article.’ ”
*2 Herbert Jr. would later make a significant contribution to California’s emergence as a technology leader by founding Consolidated Engineering Corporation (CEC) and winning a patent for a mass spectrometer. “A marker in a Tommy’s Burger parking lot in Pasadena, California, commemorates his company and his patent,” says Thomas Schwartz, director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library (letter to the author, January 30, 2017). CEC was acquired by Bell and Howell Corp. in 1960.
*3 Hoover believed this turnaround happened because investors wrongly interpreted Roosevelt’s moves as a commitment to sound currency. Economist Barry Eichengreen argues that gold and deposits returned because the banking sector had been suffering from a run-of-the-mill panic rather than fear of the New Deal, as Hoover wanted to believe.
*4 After months of personally managing monetary policy and dictating the price of gold, Roosevelt in early 1934 repegged the currency at $35 per ounce of gold, representing a devaluation of 40 percent from the previous level of just under $20.67.