If Hoover had needed any additional spur to resume his public life, Roosevelt provided it with his bold attempt to pack the Supreme Court in the first weeks of 1937. The court and the executive branch had been at loggerheads throughout Roosevelt’s first term. Almost every major component of the New Deal had been threatened with judicial nullification. Important parts of the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act had been eviscerated by the justices, while Social Security and other acts awaited their day in court, their prospects dim.1
Primary among the Supreme Court’s concerns with Roosevelt’s legislation were what it considered unwarranted intrusions of the federal government into state affairs, and an unlawful delegation of congressional powers to New Deal agencies under the administration’s control. Roosevelt, enraged by unelected judges frustrating the will of the legislature, advanced a proposal that would have empowered him to appoint additional justices to the Supreme Court, to a maximum of six, for every member of the court over the age of seventy. At that moment, six of nine members were overripe by the proposed standard. Roosevelt’s public rationale for the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill was that workloads were heavier than “aged or infirm” members of the court could manage. Over time, he came to rely on the more forthright argument that the court had mistaken itself for a legislature and that he was attempting to “restore” it to “its rightful and historic place in our system of Constitutional government.”2
Hoover, on balance, took a conservative view of the court, as had been evident in his appointment of Charles Evans Hughes to serve as chief justice in 1930.*1 He had also anticipated Roosevelt’s move against the judiciary, warning in his convention speech the previous summer that FDR, already possessed of enhanced executive powers and overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress, might subvert the last major barrier to absolute control of the national government. In Hoover’s opinion, the justices of the Supreme Court, ancient or not, were learned, duly appointed, and as constitutionally legitimate as the president himself. The proposed bill was an outrage. “The sword of the people,” he thundered, was being reduced to “a tool of the executive.”3
Disgusted once more at the feeble response of his fellow Republicans to Roosevelt’s chicanery, Hoover assigned himself the role of Jeremiah. He crossed the country again making fiery speeches that were reprinted in hundreds of dailies: “If Mr. Roosevelt can change the Constitution to suit his purposes by adding to the members of the Court, any succeeding President can do it to suit his purposes. If a troop of ‘President’s judges’ can be sent into the halls of justice to capture political power, then his successor with the same device can also send a troop of new ‘President’s judges’ to capture some other power. That is not judicial process. That is force.”4
Hoover was finally on to a popular issue. The mails to Congress ran eight to one against the court bill. Roosevelt, said Walter Lippmann, was “drunk with power.” By May, the White House was trying to salvage its initiative with a compromise. It did not fly, leading to a bitter political defeat for the administration. Hoover claimed credit, although the justices themselves, and the Democrats in Congress who stood up to the president after four years of rubber-stamping his agenda, were the critical players.5
The repercussions of the court-packing escapade were several and profound. The political momentum Roosevelt had gained in the recent elections was wasted, and he slipped significantly in public esteem. Progressive Republicans and conservative Democrats abandoned the New Deal coalition, hobbling progress on the president’s domestic agenda. On the other hand, Roosevelt had housebroken the Supreme Court: it almost immediately reversed its opposition to New Deal labor legislation and never again posed a serious threat to the president’s will.
The administration might have rebounded from the court setback had its burdens not been aggravated later in the year by yet another economic slump, known to posterity as the Roosevelt Recession. In a twelve-month period beginning in September 1937, industrial production and payrolls dropped by a third, national income by 13 percent, and profits by 78 percent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gave up most of the gains it had made since the bank holiday of 1933. Despite Roosevelt’s having put an additional 3.5 million people on the federal payroll, unemployment, never to decline beneath 11 percent on his watch, soared back up to 20 percent.6
Chief among the several causes of the Roosevelt Recession was the decision by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, who worried about inflation with foreign gold still pouring into America, to take a volume of gold out of circulation, tightening the money supply and discouraging bank lending. The rising costs of labor, a consequence of administration policy, and FDR’s hostility to the financial sector also hurt the economy. Nor did it help that Roosevelt, believing a balanced budget essential to a healthy economy and worried that his temporary relief programs, if extended, would have the “narcotic” effect of a permanent dole, rushed to cut spending. Hoover had also moved to eliminate his deficits, although he had been fighting a run on gold while Roosevelt enjoyed an abundance of it.7
America was perplexed to find itself back on the breadlines after Roosevelt’s volleys of legislation and new spending. The New Deal was exposed as having prioritized the president’s political agenda over the nation’s economic recovery. “Incredible as it sounds,” wrote Walter Lippmann, “the New Deal does not have any program, good, bad, or indifferent, which even pretends to have any relation to the economic crisis.” Hoover’s new line was that the planned economy had resulted in “two families in every garage.”8
Americans were also disturbed by a new wave of labor unrest. Workers introduced the novel tactic of the sit-down strike at a General Motors factory in Flint, Michigan, in February 1937. They occupied the premises and barred the doors, demanding higher wages and shorter work weeks, and crashed GM’s production from a rate of 12,500 cars a week to as few as twenty-five. Management and the State of Michigan had no answers. After forty-four days, the strikers won recognition for the United Auto Workers as representative of employees in GM factories, a great victory for industrial unionism in America.9
The sit-down strike and the new labor militancy quickly spread to factories and steelyards across the country, sometimes with savage results. On Memorial Day, a crowd of UAW pickets and their sympathizers squared off against a police cordon along a hundred-yard line at the gates of Republic Steel Corporation’s South Chicago Mill. The melee left ten dead, and thirty others seriously wounded. Similar tensions led to the imposition of martial law in Pennsylvania and Ohio.10
Roosevelt, having traded toleration of sit-down strikes for organized labor’s support, did his best to stay above the fray. To many who recalled his anti-business rhetoric, he appeared indulgent of the new militancy. The public increasingly took the side of order, and the gulf between Roosevelt and conservative members of Congress widened.11
The president’s troubles were good for Hoover’s bookings. The public appetite for screeds against the New Deal was sharpening, especially in the business community, long intimidated by Roosevelt’s popularity and apparent moral authority, and slow to raise its voice against him. It was angry and loud by December 16, 1937, when Hoover appeared before the elite of midwestern commerce at the Economic Club of Chicago.
His speech was written as they all were now: lead pencil on paper, sitting at a desk with his feet clenched around his chair, his free hand twirling his forelock. It gave his audience what it wanted in the way of condemnations of government meddling, wasteful spending, inflation, regimentation, democratic decay, and other New Deal scourges. He was just short of gleeful in his descriptions of the court-packing debacle, the depths of the Roosevelt Recession, and the failure of the New Deal to build a New Jerusalem. It was nevertheless a different style of address than Hoover had become accustomed to deliver.12
Over the previous three months, he had been attempting to move beyond abstract essays on liberty and takedowns of New Deal initiatives toward a positive statement of an alternative approach to governance. The Chicago crowd was treated to the fruits of this labor. His speech, prosaically entitled “Economic Security and the Present Situation,” asserted that the primary objective of any economic system should be “to eliminate poverty and the fear of it.” Government must also address business abuses, remedy social ills, look after the homeless and the aged. It should strive for an equitable distribution of wealth and require “the economically successful [to] carry the burdens of social improvement for the less fortunate by taxes or otherwise.” These objectives were not markedly different from those articulated by Hoover while in Commerce and the White House. Nor were they incompatible with the New Deal. Hoover and Roosevelt were both attempting to enhance the economic security of the American people. It was the means to this end that fundamentally distinguished Hoover’s option.13
Hoover doubted that “transient political officials” could plan and secure the economic prosperity of a nation of 120 million. The only real security available to Americans, he said, was through job creation, wage growth, and rising standards of living, and those were generated not by government but by individual initiative and private enterprise:
We cannot increase standards of living by restricting production. We cannot spend ourselves into prosperity. We cannot hate ourselves into it either. We cannot constantly increase costs of production without increasing prices and therefore decreasing consumption and employment. We cannot place punitive taxes on industry without stifling new enterprise and jobs.14
Despite eight years of depression, Hoover had not given up on the ability of his countrymen to govern themselves. Whereas Roosevelt believed that the nation’s entrepreneurial fires were dying and that the age of American growth was over, Hoover held that free men could repair their losses, repay their debts, bury their mistakes, and resume the march of progress. The “competence, the self-discipline, and the moral stamina” of the American people, he insisted, were undamaged:
What they want of government is to keep the channels of opportunity open and equal, not to block them and then send them a tax bill for doing it. They want rewards to the winners in the race….To red-blooded men and women there is a joy of work and there is joy in the battle of competition. There is the daily joy of doing something worth while, of proving one’s own worth, of telling every evil person where he can go. There is the joy of championing justice to the weak and downtrodden. These are the battles which create the national fiber of self-reliance and self-respect. That is what made America.15
Hoover disliked political labels. Terms like liberal, conservative, radical, Tory, and reactionary, he said, were mostly used by one group to disparage another.*2 In the past, when pressed, he had described himself as a liberal, in the classical sense of someone who “seeks all legitimate freedom first, in the confident belief that without such freedom the pursuit of other blessings is in vain.” Over time, however, liberal had been distorted in common parlance to describe people favoring the use of government to achieve social and economic outcomes. The New Dealers were liberals; he needed something else. “If the connotation of ‘liberalism’ is to continue to be coercion,” he decided, “then that alternative party may be dubbed ‘conservative’ without disturbing my sleep.”16
So it came to be that the man who had arrived in Washington two decades earlier as a darling of the progressives was now, after an arduous slog to power, a turbulent presidency, and five years of the New Deal, self-identifying as a conservative. On this icy winter evening in Chicago he laid down the core values of his new creed. Economic security on Roosevelt’s terms, he said, was not worth having. Security was worthless unless joined to the higher good of American liberty, “the greatest possession any nation has ever had.” He was again echoing Lincoln on the essential democratic character of the Union, on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the nation advanced by unleashing the talents and genius of free individuals:
The main anchor of our civilization must be intellectual and spiritual liberty. Ideals, invention, initiative, enterprise, and leadership spring best from free men and women. The only economic system which will not limit or destroy these forces of progress is private enterprise.17
Rickard, listening on the radio, thought Hoover’s delivery poor and believed that he must have lost his place at certain points. Press reports were kinder, saying only that he was frequently applauded and that he had received loud cheers.18
As it happened, the very day that Hoover made his address, a bipartisan group of conservative senators, including Hoover’s associate Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan and North Carolina Democrat Josiah Bailey, a dissenter from the New Deal, published their own manifesto in the New York Times. Citing the need for quick action to reverse the Roosevelt Recession, the senators presented a ten-point program entirely consistent with Hoover’s new creed. It sought, among other measures, to encourage private investment, lower capital gains taxes, reduce friction between capital and labor, maintain states’ rights, end government competition in the economy, and above all to preserve and rely upon “the American system of private enterprise and initiative.” These, said the senators, were the constituent elements of the “American form of government,” which was “far superior to and infinitely to be preferred to any other so far devised. They carry the priceless content of liberty and the dignity of man.”19
The emergence of the manifesto on the day of Hoover’s speech may have been a coincidence, but their similarities were not. Hoover had been a leading critic of the New Deal since 1934, and much of the substance of his creed had already been published piecemeal in magazines and newspapers over the autumn. Senator Vandenberg, moreover, had been one of Hoover’s partners in a high-profile and ultimately abortive campaign to unite Republicans around a general statement of anti–New Deal principles. The ex-president’s influence on the manifesto is obvious, right down to the assertion that “the heart of the American people is sound.”20
Conservatism was by no means new to America in 1937. It had a long and manifold history dating at least to Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists. Its character had been mostly oppositional: conservative Whigs had fought to protect a burgeoning industrial economy from the agrarian-populist ravages of Jacksonian democracy; conservative Democrats had beaten back radical Republicans seeking to punish Confederates and protect freedmen during Reconstruction. In Hoover’s lifetime, the likes of Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Harding, and Coolidge, although differing markedly on such issues as industrial trusts and the tariff, had consistently upheld an orthodoxy of small government, low taxes, and the rule of law, the essence of conservatism through most of Hoover’s lifetime.
Modern American conservatism, conceived as an antidote to the New Deal, was born on December 16, 1937, with Hoover as its prophet and philosopher, and the signatories to the Senate manifesto, whose spirit would dominate Congress until the Kennedy era, as its first generals.
Leaving his divided party to mull his words and its future direction, Hoover and a small entourage boarded the ocean liner Washington on February 9, 1938, for his first visit to Europe in nineteen years. He had been planning a return to Belgium, and the sites of his relief and reconstruction triumphs, since 1935. He was curious about the state of the Continent and eager to remind Americans of the prestige he had once held on the international stage. Various roadblocks, including a reported reluctance by Brussels to grant a hero’s welcome to one of Roosevelt’s chief critics, had delayed what he called his “sentimental journey.”21
The Belgians were not wrong to be cautious about their invitation. Another motive behind Hoover’s trip was a desire to open a foreign-policy front in his ongoing war against Roosevelt. When he arrived in Le Havre, Belgium embraced him regardless. He was paraded from town to town, meeting old colleagues and soaking up the gratitude of the beneficiaries of his humanitarianism through dozens of receptions, speeches, toasts, and dinners. He visited the universities that had been revitalized by the $25 million surplus of the Committee for the Relief of Belgium. He left flowers on the tombs of his old friends, King Albert and Queen Astrid.22
After eight days of round-the-clock adulation, loaded down with scrolls and medals, Hoover moved on to France, Switzerland, Austria, and ten other stops in what became a fourteen-nation grand tour. All along the way he received the friendly press coverage he had anticipated, including a multipage spread in Life magazine that showed him standing awkwardly and somewhat endearingly in a tall ceremonial hat as he received a PhD in Helsinki.23
The more substantial benefit of the journey was the access he gained to heads of state, senior officials, and eminent personages in and out of the governments of every country he visited, including Nazi Germany. He traveled to Berlin by automobile purposely to experience at first hand the Third Reich’s celebrated housing projects and autobahns. He was astounded, as were so many others, by how quickly Germany had rebounded from the depths of depression in 1933 when, said Hoover, it was as near “to a complete state of chaos as any modern nation has ever reached.”24
Before noon on his first morning in the capital, Hoover presented himself, along with Hugh Wilson, American ambassador to Germany, at the Reich Chancellery. He was escorted through a large door, over which the initials AH were carved on the marble transom. He came face to unmistakable face with the Führer and Reich Chancellor of the German people. Hoover took a seat in the middle of a large sofa behind a tall round coffee table, Hitler to his left in a matching upholstered chair. The Führer wore black slacks, a quasi-military doubled-breasted tan jacket, and a swastika band on his left arm. Their conversation, conducted through interpreters, centered on the German economy and agriculture. Hitler did most of the talking, punctuating his discourse with red-faced tirades about Jews and Communists. Revolted by these displays of temper, Hoover nevertheless admired the Führer’s intelligence and his “ability for logical arrangement of facts.” He decided that pundits who dismissed him as the puppet of a Nazi Party hierarchy had underestimated him.25
Their interview lasted just over an hour, after which Hoover traveled by motorcade thirty-five miles out of Berlin to Carinhall, the massive lakeside hunting lodge of Germany’s number two, Minister President General Field Marshal Hermann Göring. Greetings were conferred at the entrance to the estate by sixteen huntsmen in medieval costume blowing the hunting song from Wagner’s Siegfried on French horns. Göring shared none of the asceticism that Hoover had sniffed on Hitler. The Americans estimated Carinhall must have cost several million dollars to build. Its great room, two hundred feet long, was packed with a museum’s worth of Old Masters, rare tapestries, and statuary, and on the table at which they lunched was a full-sized solid-gold bust of Göring’s first wife on a revolving stand.26
Through such entertainments, as well as individual meetings with Germans of varying degrees of loyalty to the Reich, Hoover sharpened his views on the meaning and implications of Nazi rule. There was no question that Hitler had in a short time restored economic virility and political order to the nation, and dignity to its people. “I don’t wonder,” he said, “they idolize the man who brought it about.” Yet this transformation had come at an awful price. Individualism and community were suppressed in the name of a “new Sparta.” The universities and the intellectual life of Germany had been crushed, along with any and all political dissent. Discipline and devotion to the state were enforced through intimidation and concentration camps, and there was a serious menace in the Reich’s racial intolerance and feverish rearmament.27
As for Hitler’s ideology, Hoover deemed it built on the rudiments of Italian fascism, fortified by German skill and thoroughness, and enveloped in an “atmosphere of mysticism,” an ecstatic vision of Germany’s collective destiny that spoke to “the tribal instincts” of its people. Hitler was “an extraordinarily emotional character” whose mind “gets to mysticism at a jump.” His speeches were unremarkable to read, yet they had “a very persuasive effect on a crowd.” Hoover listened to one on the radio and could feel its power, “even though I understood only about twenty per cent of what he said. And then the Germans are the only people in the world who can stand a three or four-hour speech and like it.”28
Nazism, decided Hoover, was a phenomenon “of the most terrible order for the rest of the world.” It represented, in economic and military terms, something “more focused and potent” than anything before it. Hitler would inevitably bust out of his Versailles cage and unite the German people in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and wherever else they might be. Hoover considered it a blessing that this appeared to be the extent of his territorial ambitions. He was convinced the Nazis were not a mortal threat to England, Belgium, or France. If the Nazis were to expand, they would seek agricultural land in the east, bringing them ultimately into the path of the Soviet Union. Hitler despised the Soviets and was obsessive about the threat of Communism. He had consolidated conservative power in Germany through an anti-Communist stance. It was far likelier that he would challenge the Soviets than the West, said Hoover, who, sharing the Führer’s hatred of Communism, was sanguine about that prospect.29
Surprising as it may seem in retrospect, Hoover was correct, at this point in time, about the Führer’s strategic direction, notwithstanding Germany’s remilitarization of the Rhineland along its borders with France and Belgium, and its heavy contributions to the war in Spain. Hitler’s attention was riveted on Czechoslovakia and the east, he had not articulated any designs on Western Europe, and neither he nor his generals had confidence, given their state of preparedness, that they could fight in both directions at once.30
After seven weeks of travel and a final stop in England, Hoover returned to America eager to inform his countrymen of Europe’s “terrible and disheartening” condition, to warn them of what lay ahead, and to fire the first salvo in his new battle with Roosevelt.31
Nineteen years after Wilson’s crusade to make the world safe for democracy, said Hoover, liberal institutions were in retreat across the Continent. The League of Nations was in a “coma,” and the notion that peace could be imposed by collective action was, for the moment, “dead.” More than a dozen European nations were in the iron grip of authoritarian dictatorships, some of them nationalist, some imperialist, some militarist, and all of them with a brutal disregard for life and justice. Political trials, concentration camps, the aerial bombing of civilian populations in Guernica, and the “heartbreaking persecution of helpless Jews,” said Hoover, “are but the physical expressions of an underlying failure of morals terrible to contemplate.” Civilization was once again on the brink of disaster. He did not believe another general war was “an immediate prospect”—military preparations were as yet incomplete—but it would not be long given the terrifying pace of rearmament.32
As disturbing to Hoover as the probable fate of the Continent was the casual assumption of so many Europeans he had met that the United States would be drawn into the coming conflict as a defender of democratic ideals. Roosevelt, they believed, had assured them of this eventuality.
Foreign policy had not been central to Roosevelt’s first term. He had followed Hoover’s Good Neighbor Policy in the Western Hemisphere and was thwarted in his efforts to bring the United States into the World Court (Hoover, with the Senate against him, had not tried). Roosevelt’s boldest move had been to recognize the Soviet Union, largely to enhance American commercial prospects, and also in a bid to limit Japanese expansionism in Asia. Hoover had objected to this decision. America’s policy of nonrecognition, he said, had been inaugurated by Wilson after the Soviet Union had refused to honor czarist Russia’s debts to the United States and seized American property without compensation. What’s more, a nation that had snuffed liberalism within its borders and ruled by terror did not belong among “respectable members of the family of nations.”33
The Roosevelt administration had been at least as isolationist as the 1920s Republican regimes of which Hoover had been a part, until late in 1937 when the president had announced that it was time to “give thought to the rest of the world.” He did not thoroughly explain his change of heart. He cited a deplorable “reign of terror and international lawlessness” that, while certainly exacerbated in 1935 by Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia and by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, had been evident since his first inaugural. Unlike Hoover, who did not believe totalitarian governments posed a major security threat to the United States, Roosevelt was now seized with the menace of Germany, Japan, and the march of despotism:
Let no one imagine that America will escape, that America may expect mercy, that this Western Hemisphere will not be attacked and that it will continue tranquilly and peacefully to carry on the ethics and the arts of civilization….
The storm will rage till every flower of culture is trampled and all human beings are leveled in a vast chaos.34
Roosevelt’s answer to the new challenge was a proposal for peace-loving nations to “quarantine” the forces of international anarchy and barbarism. This required an ill-defined form of active engagement between the United States and European democracies for the purposes of upholding international “morality” and protecting the right of nations “to be free and live in peace.” It was this indistinct project that had convinced so many Europeans that Roosevelt would come to the rescue of Continental democracies if they were threatened by fascism. They were less cognizant of FDR’s promise to domestic voters that he would take every “practicable measure” to avoid a resort to arms.35
Unable to credit the president with a principled stand on the issues, Hoover decided that Roosevelt was duping the American people. He believed the president wanted a piece of Europe’s action either to distract from his stalled domestic agenda or to generate the state of crisis that would perpetuate his administration and facilitate his state-building ambitions, or both. Terms such as “actively engage” and “quarantine,” said Hoover, could only be read as promises of military or economic support to England and France, and this was the last message the United States should be sending. It implicated the United States in the security of Great Britain and its global empire. It committed America’s might not only to France but to its ally, the Soviet Union. What good was a war for democracy, he asked, when “we would be supporting Stalin?”36
Worse, in Hoover’s reading of the situation, was that Roosevelt’s statements sent a provocative message to Europe that America would join Great Britain and France in league against Hitler. This was making Great Britain and France incautious, while drawing the Führer’s attention from the east, raising, rather than reducing, the chances of continent-wide conflict.
Neither an isolationist or a pacifist, Hoover, having grappled for two decades with the horrid legacies of the last war, simply wanted no direct role in another. He knew it would be more encompassing, more expensive, and more technologically advanced; that it would spill more blood and destroy more homes, towns, cities, and nations; that it would be, in all likelihood, “the most barbarous war that we have ever known.” The victors would suffer “almost equally” with the vanquished, the world would be changed beyond recognition, and the United States, if it participated, would change along with it. Another massive mobilization would leave America heavily indebted and with a permanently centralized, swollen, and increasingly authoritarian national government. “Those who would have us go to war to save liberty might give a little thought to the preponderant chance that we should come out of such a struggle with personal liberty restricted for generations,” he said. “We should have none of it.”37
Hoover believed the sane thing was to “harden our resolves [to] keep out of other people’s wars” and resist the temptation to pose as a global guardian of liberal democracy. Wilson had tried and reaped a continent seething with dictatorship. “We cannot herd the world into the paths of righteousness with the dogs of war,” said Hoover. “We cannot become the world’s policeman unless we are prepared to sacrifice millions of American lives—and probably some day see all the world against us. In time they would envisage us as the world’s greatest bully, not as the world’s greatest idealist.”38
If Hitler was determined to expand, Hoover continued, let him head east, not west. Let America protect the home front, which, contrary to Roosevelt, he believed was safe from serious military attack by Germany. Better for the United States to “keep the lamp of liberty alight” until such day as Europe realized its error, as he was sure it would: “The spirits of Luther, of Goethe, of Schiller, of Mazzini and Garibaldi, are not dead.”39
Events marched on. Germany had annexed Austria by the time Hoover returned to America. Hitler next menaced Czechoslovakia until, in October 1939, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and French prime minister Edouard Daladier permitted his occupation of the country’s ethnic German Sudeten region in exchange for his pledge to cease his territorial demands. Five months later, Hitler helped himself to most of the rest of Czechoslovakia, snuffing out the last bastion of democracy in the neighborhood to his east. Fearing that Poland was next, Britain and France made a hasty guarantee of Polish independence. On the pretext that Britain, France, and Poland were trying to encircle Germany, Hitler renounced his nonaggression pact with the Poles in favor of a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union. He and Stalin secretly divided Poland and other nations between them. German bombers flew over Warsaw on September 1, 1939, and the Second World War was under way.
Hoover and the American people watched with mounting horror this grim spectacle, which, unlike the abrupt start to the earlier war, seemed to move in slow motion. Even after Poland, there was no popular appetite in the United States for intervention. “If the world is to become a wilderness of waste, hatred, and bitterness,” said Pennsylvania governor George Earle, a liberal Democrat, sounding a lot like Hoover, “let us all the more earnestly protect and preserve our own oasis of liberty.”40
Between 1935 and 1939, Congress passed five pieces of neutrality legislation designed to insulate the nation from the storms in Europe. The acts forbade Roosevelt to sell arms and war materials to belligerent nations or to lend them money. U.S. ships were prohibited from carrying goods or passengers to warring nations. Peace marches and pacifist oratory were commonplace in Washington and around the country. Fear of contamination by the bacillus of war was so extreme that a mere 5 percent of Americans supported the relaxation of immigration quotas to accept European refugees.41
It stood to reason in 1939 that the popularity of peace would be of some political benefit to an arch-peacemaker like Hoover, or so he believed. He also noticed that neither of the leading candidates for the Republican nomination in 1940, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio and Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, had anything like his experience and knowledge of global affairs. Still more enticing, the Democrats seemed to be at the end of their rope. Roosevelt was likely to retire, as per tradition, after his second term, and he would leave a party divided by his meddling in Europe, by the court-packing episode, and by the New Deal. Although Democrats clung to both houses, Republicans had made gains in the 1938 election. The result, wrote Joseph Alsop, was a “repudiation of precisely the intellectual liberalism for which the New Dealers stand.” The economy, while improving, remained weak by historical standards. This illusion of opportunity was encouraged by the fact that Hoover had been feted in Europe and heard on his return. Journalists were speaking of the “renaissance,” the “comeback” of America’s only living ex-president.42
Another hint that he had escaped the political desert came in the form of overtures from the White House. Through Norman Davis, chair of the American Red Cross, Roosevelt inquired as to Hoover’s availability to coordinate relief for the millions of Europeans who had been displaced by the outbreak of war. Hoover was suspicious of this proposal. He had been hounded from office and pilloried by FDR. “Few administrations in American history,” wrote Newsweek, “ever went to greater lengths to smear a predecessor than the present one, and the former president had every right to question the sincerity of a sudden peace gesture.” He declined to pursue the opportunity.43
FDR next had his wife, Eleanor, call publicly for Hoover to head an agency that would manage relief work. He refused again, convinced that the Democrats were attempting to derail his unannounced campaign for the Republican nomination or to buy his silence on domestic and foreign policy. In fact, Roosevelt, to the extent that he was interested in Hoover, saw him as a pawn in a larger scheme to build an aura of bipartisan legitimacy around his administration in wartime.
Candidate Hoover continued with his noncampaign, working maniacally to keep himself visible while refusing to admit his intentions. He revived his arguments against the New Deal and wrapped himself in the mantle of traditional American foreign policy, defined as the avoidance of foreign entanglements, an emphasis on self-defense of the territorial United States, and the promotion of peace, liberty, and economic prosperity. He dared Roosevelt to come out with a “vigorous, definite statement” that the United States would not go to war with “anybody in Europe unless they attack the Western Hemisphere.” He assailed the president’s coalition cabinet, which placed Hoover’s former secretary of state, Henry Stimson, in the War Department, as another attempt to stifle political opposition and establish one-man rule.44
The nomination proved as elusive to Hoover in 1940 as it had four years earlier. He was damaged beyond political repair by the failure of his presidency and the anti-Hoover mythology artfully perpetuated by Roosevelt. The best part of every FDR campaign speech in the thirties was his description of the state of America when he first took office, bequeathed a country “afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing government”:
The nation looked to government but the government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! And, my friends, powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that government is best which is most indifferent to mankind.45
Roosevelt did not need to mention Hoover’s name in these speeches. His listeners knew where the finger was pointed. This was one of FDR’s more sublime political achievements: he had by now overseen six years of the Great Depression to Hoover’s three. While the nadir of the downturn was in 1932–33, much of its trauma was inflicted by its duration, by the endless anxiety, the fruitless searches for work, the persistent hunger, the long erosion of confidence, and the gradual turn to disillusion, bitterness, and radical solutions. All of this made of the Great Depression a national trauma, opening the door to sweeping political reforms and searing its imagery into the American psyche.
The Depression had begun to take shape as a cultural phenomenon in the last months of Hoover’s administration, with a Fortune magazine article lambasting his employment record and Bing Crosby’s version of the jobless anthem “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” both landing in the midst of the 1932 campaign. Otherwise, the rich trove of critical and artistic expression inspired by the Depression accumulated in the Roosevelt years. Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey both date from 1936. The most searching books, You Have Seen Their Faces, by Erskine Caldwell and the photographer Margaret Bourke-White, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a collaboration between James Agee and photographer Walker Evans, were released in 1937 and 1941 respectively. Dorothea Lange’s iconic Migrant Mother, a family portrait of Dust Bowl victims, was taken in 1936. Indeed, the black clouds of the Dust Bowl, fueled by drought and wind erosion, and used to magnificent metaphorical effect in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), provide the most poignant imagery of the Depression. The Dust Bowl (a phenomenon distinct from the droughts of 1930–31) came in three waves between 1934 and 1940.46
Roosevelt not only shepherded the economy through six desperate years while attracting little of the blame, but his administration sponsored an enormous volume of artistic endeavor during the Depression, confident that it would hold to the narrative of Republican failure and sustain rather than undermine Roosevelt’s authority. As his advisers anticipated, every new tent city that sprang up in the Roosevelt Recession of 1937–38 was called a Hooverville.47
William Allen White, who had bled for Hoover in 1936, bled for him once more in 1940. He esteemed the former president as an “honest, intelligent, and courageous” leader and believed that the nation could not afford to ignore the advice of so valuable a man, yet there was no doubt “Hoover is poison…he is a sort of political typhoid carrier.”48
The Republican Party chose a dark horse as its nominee: Wendell Willkie was an inebriate, apostate Democrat and anti–New Dealer seeking to leap directly from the utilities industry to the White House. His timing was excellent. The Nazi boot crushed France on the second day of the Republican convention in Philadelphia. The eyes of the world immediately shifted across the channel for the much-anticipated Battle of Britain, which would run concurrently with the national campaign. Willkie was the leading Republican proponent of giving Churchill every support short of a military action, an increasingly popular position now that Great Britain, America’s friend and erstwhile ally, had its back to the wall.
To the delight of Democratic organizers who could feel their prospects brighten every time the Republican Party acknowledged its last president, Hoover was permitted to speak to the convention in a prime-time spot in Philadelphia. The moment was broadcast nationally on radio as well as television for the first time.
It is sometimes said that a great leader can ask more of people, admit the hard truth of a situation and call on his followers to make the necessary sacrifices rather than settle for promises of easy solutions. Hoover tried a great leader speech in Philadelphia:
The New Deal has contributed to sapping of our stamina and making us soft….The road to regeneration is burdensome and hard. It is straight and simple. It is a road paved with work and with sacrifice and consecration to the indefinable spirit that is America.49
This message was consistent with Hoover’s vision of America, and it contained some home truths. It was nothing, however, that Americans were prepared to take from a man they saw as the cause of their economic miseries. On the first ballot, a thousand votes were cast for ten candidates, with Hoover receiving seventeen and finishing ninth. Willkie was nominated on the sixth ballot, and he had no more use for Hoover than had Landon in 1936. The ex-president was permitted to make two speeches on behalf of the campaign, which would not pay to have them broadcast.
Roosevelt, at the last minute, decided that America needed his skills and experience for a third term and to meet the Nazi threat. He dumped his running mate, John Nance Garner, in favor of his agriculture secretary, Henry Wallace, and swept the country with 449 electoral college votes, leaving the Republicans and Willkie with 82, in double figures (or less) for the third consecutive election.50
The New Deal never did deliver full recovery, or resolve the interminable farm crisis, or produce a coherent social or economic philosophy to replace what had stood before it. At the same time, neither did it massively redistribute national income, or compete with business in a major way, or bring America to the doorstep of totalitarianism. Roosevelt, whatever his methods, did manage to shepherd the country through the greatest domestic crisis since the Civil War with its institutions intact, with domestic extremists at bay, without widespread social unrest, and with his own popularity largely undisturbed. Hoover, for obvious reasons, would only see the New Deal’s faults and never admit its accomplishments.51
His third mandate assured, Roosevelt adeptly led or, as Hoover would have said, backed the American people into war. He had already been operating secretly to assist China in fending off the Japanese, and he had begun a quiet correspondence with Churchill to discuss means of supporting Great Britain. He steadily pushed against neutrality laws and the U.S. arms embargo and overcame congressional reluctance to extend credit and deliver weapons to belligerents through his cash-and-carry policy. He convinced his countrymen that the United States should serve as “the arsenal of democracy.” In practical terms, this meant adoption of the Lend-Lease program under which America sent food, oil, and weapons, including planes and warships, to Britain, France, and China in exchange for leases to strategic military bases around the globe. He denied, through it all, any intention of sending American soldiers to fight.52
Hoover continued to dog Roosevelt’s every step through 1941, making principled arguments and thoughtful policy suggestions, and above all warning Americans that the president’s maneuvering would trap them into war. The United States, he insisted, had nothing to fear from Hitler. If Germany had failed to negotiate the English Channel and invade the United Kingdom, there was no threat of it crossing the Atlantic.
Hoover was enraged when Roosevelt extended the Lend-Lease program to the Soviet Union—“one of the bloodiest tyrannies and terrors ever erected in history,” “an enemy of human rights and human liberty,” a “militant destroyer of the worship of God”—after it was invaded by Germany in June 1941. It left America in the position of underwriting the Red Army’s charge westward into Europe on a front extending from Finland to Romania. The proper course of action for Roosevelt would have been to stand back and let “those two bastards [Hitler and Stalin] annihilate themselves.” Western civilization, said Hoover, had instead “consecrated itself to making the world safe for Stalin.”53
Close behind Soviet appeasement on Hoover’s list of Roosevelt’s diplomatic blunders was his inflammatory rhetoric and economic sanctions against Japan. He compared the administration’s policy to poking a rattlesnake with a pin. “I am afraid,” he wrote an associate on November 16, 1941, “that [FDR’s officials] are so anxious to get into the war somewhere that they will project it. They know there will be less public resistance to this than to expeditionary forces to Europe.” He was already on record expressing “a foreboding that we have taken on a situation [in the Pacific] from which sooner or later we will see outrages upon American citizens and other incidents which will inflame the country and draw us into war in the east.”54
He had the good sense to hold his tongue when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, and Germany and Italy, allied with Tokyo, declared war on the United States. He immediately pledged his support to Roosevelt and recommended America “fight with everything we have.”55
It was a long, dreary war for Hoover. His position that totalitarian governments did not threaten the security of the United States was untenable after Pearl Harbor. For his counsels of restraint, he was flayed by Democrats and even some Republicans as an isolationist and an appeaser. Especially in retrospect, it would appear that he had failed to recognize potentially devastating threats upon looking them in the eye. Roosevelt, whose motives, while mixed, were nobler than Hoover would admit, received credit for anticipating and preparing America for the inevitable conflagration. None of that is quite as simple as it appears.
Hoover did recognize Hitler as a madman and a menace to the peace. His hope, again, was that the West would avoid a direct conflict. Whether or not Hitler could have been placated (or depleted) by eastern expansion is one of history’s unknowables. It seems unlikely that continental war could have been prevented given the legacies of the Great War, Hitler’s mad ambitions, and the pace of rearmament among Europe’s powers, but the fact is that Germany only reluctantly turned its attention to the west when it was clear that Great Britain and France, with presumed material support from the United States, were obstacles to its designs on Czechoslovakia and other eastern points. This occurred well after Hoover and Roosevelt had staked their positions, while the situation in Europe was still fluid. War was not preordained. Nor was direct American military involvement.*3 As always, war was a consequence of a series of choices made by leaders in evolving situations. More than one principled stand was available and alternative outcomes, of more or less desirability, were possible. None of which changes the position of Hoover in 1941: “We are the lepers,” he told a friend as America mobilized. “At least our consciences are clear.”56
He did his best to rekindle some of the humanitarian magic he had possessed in the previous conflict, but without a mandate from Roosevelt and with the belligerents reaching new heights of savagery he could not find a footing to deliver substantial food or aid to any part of Europe. He continued to speak and write with what one journalist called “his habitual air of grumpy wisdom.” His anti-interventionist book entitled America’s First Crusade, treating the failed aims of Wilson’s war, had the misfortune to be released on the eve of Pearl Harbor. Its own publisher, Scribner’s, did its best to ensure no one bought it.57
A 1942 volume, coauthored with Ambassador Hugh Gibson and entitled The Problems of Lasting Peace, examined the failures of peacemaking in 1919 and argued against putting the vanquished on a “treadmill of punishment.” It outlined a constructive, staged approach to restoring order and resolving such issues as borders, debts, and reconstruction. The staging was crucial to wringing emotion from the process. The book would help to move Republicans to accept the necessity of a new League of Nations in the postwar world.58
In his expanding spare time, Hoover fished, smoked cigars by the drawerful, and invested in mining opportunities in Nevada and Utah. He traced in the press ideas he had floated in speeches that had been adopted by others without attribution. He grimly chronicled every perceived error in strategy and judgment made by the Roosevelt administration in the management of both the war and the American home front. “HH continues to be most despondent,” wrote Rickard, who was trying to break his friend of his feeling “that all the world is working against him.” Hoover also suffered “periods of acute depression over the affairs of government.”59
He ruled himself out of contention well in advance of the 1944 election and made no attempt to organize, covertly or otherwise. The Republican nominee was New York governor Thomas Dewey, former star of the University of Michigan glee club, with slick dark hair and a push-broom mustache. Dewey had shot to prominence by hanging a thirty-year jail sentence on Mafia kingpin Charles “Lucky” Luciano. He would have the honor of becoming the fourth consecutive Republican to fail to win one hundred electoral college votes against FDR. Hoover did not participate in the race, submitting rather meekly to Dewey’s request that he publicly disassociate himself from the Republican side.
“It having been plainly indicated that I was a liability,” Hoover wrote his old friend Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms, “I naturally took to the mountains. I…have given great attention to the fish. Of course, every new candidate has to make his own campaign and the problems, of course, are new and the experience of other campaigns never seems very real.” In other moments, he was less sanguine. “A man couldn’t wear a mustache like that,” he said of Dewey, “without having it affect his mind.”60
He met his seventieth birthday in 1944 defeated in his efforts to rehabilitate himself, marginalized as a humanitarian, a politician, and a public servant. He met it as a man in exile, both from Washington, where 2300 S Street had been put up for sale, and from California, which he had officially abandoned for the Waldorf after the state’s Republicans had failed to support his unofficial candidacy in 1940. He also met it alone.
The postpresidential years had been easier for Lou Hoover than for her husband. She continued her work with the Girl Scouts and indulged her love of music, organizing and underwriting classical concerts in Palo Alto. She founded an organization called the Friends of Music at Stanford in 1937, dedicated to the encouragement of performance and education. She supported Republican women’s organizations and her husband’s attempts at stewardship of the party without entirely appreciating how badly he wanted another shot at the White House.61
Her health, always robust, weakened in 1943. Limiting her activities on medical advice, she also spoke with her lawyer about preparing a will. She wrote her sons to tell them “you have been lucky boys to have had such a father, and I a lucky woman to have my life’s trails alongside the paths of three such men and boys.” She spent a last summer at her home at 623 Mirada in Palo Alto and picnicked at her favorite spot in Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. That autumn the Hoovers rented 623 Mirada to the university and for the first time since the earliest years of their marriage occupied just one residence, suite 31-A at the Waldorf in New York.62
At half past six on the evening of Friday, January 7, 1944, Lou attended an afternoon concert given by the harpist Mildred Dilling in New York. She returned to the apartment. Edgar Rickard and Hugh Gibson were there, waiting to take her husband to dinner. He was tuned in to Lowell Thomas’s nightly broadcast on NBC. When he was finally ready to go, he went to say good night to Lou and found her unresponsive on her dressing room floor. Rickard called for the Waldorf doctor, who arrived at 7:05 p.m. A few minutes later, Hoover emerged from the bedroom to report to his friends that his wife of forty-four years “was gone,” dead of a heart attack at age sixty-nine.63
An undertaker was contacted, and Lou’s body was moved that evening across the street to St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church. Flight arrangements were made for Herbert Jr. and Allan. Hoover, said Rickard, went to bed at 11 p.m., having kept his head all evening.
Fifteen hundred mourners, including two hundred Girl Scouts, attended a service at St. Bartholomew. Afterward, the three remaining Hoovers flew with the casket to Palo Alto, where Lou was buried. Her obituaries emphasized her role as a political wife and said relatively little of her independent interests and accomplishments.
Among Hoover’s neighbors at the Waldorf was the Duke of Windsor, who had given up his throne in the United Kingdom to marry the American Wallis Simpson in 1936. After Lou’s funeral, he invited Hoover to join him for a few days of recuperation in the Bahamas, where the duke served as governor. The two men were photographed together at Government House in Nassau, standing stiffly side by side under a hot sun in double-breasted suits.
In typical fashion, Hoover said almost nothing to anyone about his loss. Lou’s papers, including two wills, were scattered across the country and required considerable effort to arrange. On February 7, Rickard and Hoover dissolved the Seeing Cairo Fund they had assembled from their windfalls thirty-five years earlier and sent $250 to the Hoover War Library as a memorial in Lou’s name.64
*1 Hoover, during his term, placed two other justices on the Supreme Court. Owen Roberts was appointed in 1930 after Hoover’s initial nominee, John J. Parker, was rejected by a single vote in the Senate after protests from the NAACP and organized labor. The appointment of the liberal Benjamin Cordozo in 1932 was universally commended.
*2 He did not like to use labels, but he understood them: “Taking a compound of definitions coming out of Washington, the impression would be that the Tories do the money changing. The Reactionaries are members of well-warmed and well-stocked clubs. The Conservatives are greedily trying to keep their jobs and their savings. The Liberals have the exclusive right to define the opinions of others. The Radicals do not know what to do but do it in every direction.”
*3 Winston Churchill believed war avoidable through a strategy diametrically opposed to Hoover’s. “No event,” Churchill would write, “could have been more likely to stave off, or even prevent, war than the arrival of the United States in the circle of European hates and fears.” Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War (London: Bloomsbury Revelations, 2013), p. 110.