Defeat
In October 1931, Hoover returned to Philadelphia for another World Series contest at Shibe Park—where two years earlier he had received such a heartwarming welcome—only to be greeted by deafening boos. The City of Brotherly Love had turned nasty for more than one reason. As raucous chants of “We want beer!” indicated, the president was out of step with the rising resentment toward Prohibition. More important, a Philadelphia authority soon reported, “We have unemployment in every third house. It is almost like the visitation of death to the households of the Egyptians at the time of the escape of the Jews from Egypt.” And on the very day of the game, one of the city’s largest banks, the Franklin Trust Company, collapsed—the consequence, a state official said, of “the hysteria and unfavorable psychological reaction which are gripping the public.”
The affliction that brought down Franklin Trust felled scores of other financial institutions. Within a month after Britain jettisoned the gold standard, 522 U.S. banks failed, and that autumn, in the greatest outflow of bullion in American history, $1 billion were removed from bank vaults and squirreled away in coffeepots, mattresses, and other hiding places. No longer was anyone saying “as safe as a bank.”
The night before Hoover went to Shibe Park to watch Connie Mack’s A’s take on the Cards, he had made his way to Andrew Mellon’s palatial mansion on Massachusetts Avenue for a secret session with the country’s foremost financiers. The president beseeched the bankers to create a credit pool to assist weaker institutions and was shocked when, instead of manifesting determination to preserve private authority, they asked for government intervention. Only after he promised federal action if voluntary efforts failed would they agree to set up a National Credit Corporation with a fund of $500 million.
The National Credit Corporation did next to nothing. Focused understandably on maintaining the liquidity of their own institutions, the House of Morgan and other mammoths considered it imprudent to throw good money after bad. They demanded collateral that only a bank with little or no need for assistance could provide. By December the NCC had parted with a paltry $10 million. When 1931 came to an end, a reckoning found that over the course of the year nearly 2,300 banks had closed their doors, a historic milestone—almost twice as many as in 1930. Hoover concluded from the misadventure not that his faith in voluntarism required rethinking, but that bankers were a shabby lot.
While the NCC was self-destructing, Hoover’s program launched in the fall of 1929 to rely on big business to sustain labor was further disintegrating. U.S. Steel announced it was cutting wage rates 10 percent, and major firms such as General Motors and U.S. Rubber quickly followed its lead. Henry Ford, acclaimed as the apostle of high wages, slashed rates, and the Ford Motor Company had already fired three out of every four workers. At a time when Hoover was trumpeting the superiority of free enterprise over foreign systems, the Soviet Union publicized six thousand job openings; a hundred thousand Americans applied.
In August 1931, Hoover had replaced the defunct Woods outfit with a President’s Organization on Unemployment Relief chaired by the head of American Telephone and Telegraph, Walter S. Gifford.
Though POUR had a different name and acronym than PECE, it was essentially the same organization and just as feckless. According to Will Rogers’s facetious account, Hoover approached Gifford by telling him he had a remarkable task for him to take on. “Why is it remarkable?” Gifford inquired. “Because we are giving you no resources to do it with,” the president replied. The creation of another committee—a shopworn Hoover palliative—was intended, he made clear, to silence the cries for “a socialistic dole.”
Hoover took POUR no more seriously than its predecessor. Gifford had hardly accepted the assignment, which he did not want, when the president again pontificated that reports of unemployment were exaggerated. Demoralized, several members of POUR’s staff resigned. A still lower point for the operation came when Gifford was compelled to admit at a Senate committee hearing that he had no idea how many people needed relief or how many were getting it. He did not believe, he told his interrogators, that “the data would be of any particular value.” He added, “My sober and considered judgment is that … Federal aid would be a disservice to the unemployed.”
Gifford’s statements dovetailed with those of the president. In his State of the Union address in December 1931, Hoover insisted, “Our people are providing against distress from unemployment in true American fashion by magnificent response to public appeal and by action of the local governments.” He opposed “any … dole” because, thanks to “the sense of social responsibility in the Nation, our people have been protected from hunger and cold,” and voluntary effort gave “assurance against suffering during the coming winter.” When Hoover wrote these words, more than two hundred thousand men and women were walking the streets of Detroit seeking work. Throughout the country, tar-paper Hoovervilles were multiplying; one ragtag community of the dispossessed squatted in Manhattan’s Central Park. Although Hoover claimed “nobody actually
starved,” the commissioner of charity in Salt Lake City reported that, after county and private relief funds gave out, families were slowly starving. The historian Irving Bernstein later noted the death from starvation of a four-year-old boy in Oakland, California, and of a man in a barn near Troy, New York. In 1931 New York City hospitals recorded scores of such deaths: Gouverneur, one; Harlem, two; Kings County, thirty-three; Bellevue, fifty-nine. Outside the White House, Communist demonstrators sang, “We’ll hang Herbie Hoover to a sour apple tree.”
Alarmed that the government was running a historic deficit—nearly a billion dollars—Hoover believed it essential to balance the budget in order to forestall a run on gold reserves and to instill faith in the integrity of the government. “Nothing will contribute more to the return of prosperity than to maintain the sound fiscal position of the Federal Government,” he declared in the address. Consequently, he advocated substantial tax increases along with cuts in government spending—precisely the wrong medicine for the ailing economy.
Yet in this same message preaching austerity and minimalist government, Hoover asked Congress for speedy action to resuscitate the War Finance Corporation, though doing so involved unprecedented federal intervention in peacetime and vast expenditures. New York’s fiery representative Fiorello La Guardia denounced the legislation as “a millionaire’s dole,” and Senator Norris said, “I have been called a socialist, a Bolshevik, a communist, and a lot of other terms of similar nature, but in the wildest flights of my imagination I never thought of such a thing as putting the Government into business as far as this bill would put it in.” So frightening, though, were bulletins on the imperiled financial system that in January 1932 Congress chartered the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (the wartime agency under a new name) to lend money to banks, railroads, insurance firms, building and loan associations, and other institutions. Started with $500 million in capital, the RFC was authorized to make available, through issue of securities, four
times that sum for a total of $2 billion—a staggering amount. Bankers, remarked Will Rogers, had “the honor of being the first group to go on the ‘dole’ in America.”
Progressives found it impossible to square Hoover’s RFC venture with his adamant refusal to sanction federal relief or with his earlier record abroad as a humanitarian. “We shall help the railroad; we shall help the financial institutions; and I agree that we should,” Senator Robert Wagner stated. “But is there any reason why we should not likewise extend a helping hand to that forlorn American, in every village and every city of the United States, who has been without wages since 1929? Must he alone carry the cross of individual responsibility?” Remarking on the eagerness of the government to bail out bankers, he added: “We did not preach to them rugged individualism. We did not sanctimoniously roll out sentences rich with synonyms of self-reliance. We were not carried away with apprehension over what would happen to their independence if we extended them a helping hand.” The columnist Heywood Broun underscored another anomaly. “The only mistake starving unemployed of this country have made,” he wrote, “is that they did not march on Washington and under the windows of Mr. Hoover in the White House display … banners reading ‘We are Belgians.’”
Hoover accompanied his request for an RFC with a number of other initiatives. He asked Congress to augment the capital of Federal Land banks and to establish a system of Home Loan Discount banks that would undergird mortgages. More important was the Glass-Steagall bill to ease credit by liberalizing requirements for the issue of Federal Reserve notes. Business Week regarded it as “perhaps the most powerful dose of monetary medicine that has ever been applied to the strengthening of the banking system in a similar period of time,” and Hoover promoted it as a “national defense measure” to save the gold standard. With Republicans and hardshell Democrats allied, the House took only ten minutes, the Senate a mere three, to approve the bill in late February. “This isn’t a session of Congress,” complained La Guardia. “This is a kissing bee!”
Commentators marveled at Hoover’s change of heart toward
mobilizing the national government, but he had undergone no fundamental transformation. He made these recommendations only because he had lost faith in public-spirited bankers and had run out of other options for thawing sources of credit. Gratified that the agency was only temporary, Hoover took the RFC legislation as a bad-tasting pill. Historians who later portrayed Hoover as a proto–New Dealer misconceived his point of view. Only unwittingly—by revealing the inadequacy of his voluntaristic approach—was Hoover the progenitor of FDR’s enlargement of federal authority.
The RFC got off to a good start, but the hope that it would bring about recovery soon withered. By lending hundreds of millions of dollars to financial institutions, it reduced bank closings from 346 in January to 46 in April; however, before the year was out, 140 banks that had received RFC loans shut their doors. The agency also failed to jump-start the economy. Instead of seizing upon the RFC as a way to stimulate business by expanding credit, many bankers saw an opportunity to shore up their holdings. Furthermore, manufacturers were not eager to go further into debt by producing goods for which there was a shrinking market.
Without any effective galvanizer, the slump dramatically worsened—erasing all the gains of the golden era of Hoover’s public career. Factories in 1932 turned out less than they had in 1913. For every four cars that rolled off the assembly line in 1929, only one emerged in 1932. Steel plants operated at a pitiful 11 percent of capacity. And with few jobs to be had, breadlines grew longer. The business magazine Fortune estimated that 34 million men, women, and children were “without any income whatever,” and this figure “omitted America’s 11 million farm families, who were suffering in a rural Gethsemane of their own.”
Hoover and his circle cocooned themselves from the magnitude of the deprivation. The president marshaled statements from the surgeon general claiming that the health of the nation was better in the Great Depression than it had been in prosperous years—proving, Hoover said, that “our people have been protected
from hunger and cold.” He circulated comforting hearsay: “The hoboes … are better fed than they have ever been. One hobo in New York got ten meals in one day.” Social workers sat seething while Secretary of the Interior Wilbur told their national convention that “our children are apt to profit, rather than suffer, from what is going on,” since in hard times parents were more attentive and the young got “better and more suitable food than in past good times.” Private charity and local governments, Hoover continued to insist, were performing splendidly in seeing that no one was in want—a contention he maintained even when, in the spring of 1932, Business Week was writing of “complete breakdown.”
Community chests could deal with a few hundred out of work, perhaps a few thousand, but they could not conceivably meet the needs of a city such as Cleveland, where 50 percent of the workforce was jobless. In Akron and East St. Louis, unemployment reached 60 percent; in Toledo it mounted to 80 percent. Even cities not so hard hit fell far short. In North Carolina’s capital, the Raleigh Community Chest allowed a destitute family a nickel a day for food.
Investigators found that Hoover’s reliance on municipalities was also ill founded. One hundred cities in 1932 appropriated no money at all for the indigent. New York City had twenty-five thousand emergency cases on its waiting list, and no way to help them. The city of Houston announced shamelessly: “Applications are not taken from unemployed Mexican or colored families. They are being asked to shift for themselves.” Chicago separated families, sending husbands and wives to different shelters. When Detroit, where unemployment was nearing a quarter of a million, exhausted its funds, bankers told the city that, to qualify for loans, it must drop more than one-third of its families from the relief rolls. The vice chairman of the Mayor’s Unemployment Commission of Detroit saw “no possibility of preventing widespread hunger and slow starvation.” A Philadelphia storekeeper reported: “Eleven children in that house. They’ve got no shoes, no pants. In the house, no chairs. My God, you go in there, you cry, that’s all.”
Single-mindedly, Hoover concentrated not on aid to the bereft
but on balancing the budget. Whatever members of Congress proposed—not only federal relief, but modest efforts such as gathering statistics on job loss or modernizing employment exchanges—he set himself sternly against. “We cannot … squander ourselves into prosperity,” he admonished. On May 31, 1932, he took the unusual step of appearing in the U.S. Senate chamber to scold legislators for considering costly relief and public works measures. “The course of unbalanced budgets is the road to ruin,” he declared. Instead, to pare the deficit, he urged Congress to raise taxes. That plea resulted in the Revenue Act of 1932—a law that, ever since, has been condemned by economists for draining purchasing power.
So great was the pressure from progressives in both parties for aid to the jobless, though, that Hoover capitulated and in July signed the Emergency Relief and Construction Act. The law provided $300 million in loans to states for succoring “needy and distressed people” and empowered the RFC to finance $1.5 billion for income-producing public works such as toll roads. In addition, it authorized over $300 million for emergencies. Never before had Congress enacted a statute of this nature or of these dimensions.
At Hoover’s behest, however, RFC officials administered the law so stingily that the tens of thousands of jobs the country had been promised were never created. “These loans are to be based upon absolute need and evidence of financial exhaustion,” the president said. “I do not expect any state to resort to it except as a last extremity.” When the governor of Pennsylvania asked for enough money to give those who were down-and-out thirteen cents a day, the RFC granted a sum that permitted just three cents a day. By mid-October, the RFC had approved only three of the 243 applications it had received for public works projects. That was not the kind of record likely to be helpful to Hoover as he appealed to a beleaguered nation for another term in office.
No episode in his presidency, though, so fixed in the mind of America the conviction that Hoover was cold and heartless as his
treatment of “the bonus army.” In the spring of 1932, veterans of the Great War congregated in Washington in hope of persuading Congress to approve immediate payment of bonuses for their service—funds they were scheduled to receive years later but desperately needed in grim times. After the Senate rejected their request in June, most of the demonstrators left town. Several thousand, though, remained—in a settlement outside of the city at Anacostia Flats and in unoccupied government buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue. On July 28, following a melee downtown, Hoover—insensitive to how his action might appear—ordered the U.S. Army to rout the squatters and to confine the rest of the bonus marchers in the Flats.
The drama moved on in unforeseen ways. Mounted cavalrymen—sabers drawn—led six tanks and a detachment of infantrymen with fixed bayonets down Pennsylvania Avenue to a site not far from the Capitol, where they met no resistance. In flagrant violation of the president’s orders, the overbearing chief of staff, General Douglas MacArthur, then moved to drive the veterans and their families out of their squalid encampment in Anacostia Flats in the middle of the night. Cavalry harried the former doughboys; tanks rolled through their tent village; and infantry prodded them with bayonets, fired tear-gas canisters, and torched their shelters.
For days and weeks thereafter, newspapers and magazines raged against the president; movie audiences, shocked by newsreel footage of the mayhem, hissed when Hoover’s face appeared on the screen. “I swear I could not believe it,” wrote the popular syndicated columnist Floyd Gibbons. “The victims are American citizens, veteran soldiers, some of them disabled men who fought to sustain this Government.” In like manner, the Washington News told its readers, “What a pitiful spectacle is that of the great American Government, mightiest in the world, chasing unarmed men, women and children with army tanks.” Even more irate was the Hearst press. “For sheer stupidity,” concluded the San Francisco Examiner, “President Hoover’s spectacular employment of the military
in evicting a mere handful of the derelicts of the World War from their wretched billets in Washington is without parallel in American annals.”
Journalists offered vivid details, which, for decades, unwary historians have repeated. Hoover was portrayed as a murderer, though the army never fired a shot. The two veterans who died that day were killed not by soldiers but in self-defense by District police. The Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Paul Y. Anderson gave an “eyewitness” account of an “eleven-weeks-old baby in a grave condition from gas, shock and exposure; one eight-year-old boy partly blinded by gas; … one bystander shot through the shoulder, one veteran’s ear severed with a cavalry saber.” Every allegation false. Hoover was blamed especially for the death in Anacostia of an infant, who, it was said, had succumbed to tear gas. The bonus marchers’ News proposed an epitaph: “Here lies Bernard Myers, aged three months, gassed to death by order of President Hoover.” In fact, the baby had died of pneumonia after his parents refused medical treatment. Nor was there a word of truth in the story that “a boy received a bayonet thrust in the thigh while rushing back to get his rabbit.” Even MacArthur’s vainglory was exaggerated—hard though that was to do. These atrocity tales, the historian Roger Daniels has observed, “fit quite well into the old Christian tradition of the massacre of the innocents with poor Herbert Hoover badly miscast as Herod.”
The reality, however, was bad enough. Instead of rebuking MacArthur for his insubordination, Hoover joined him in claiming, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that there was an “extraordinary proportion of criminal, communist and non-veteran elements amongst the marchers.” Moreover, though stories of army behavior were embroidered, cavalrymen did flail with both flat and point of their sabers, and infantrymen fired some 1,500 rounds of tear gas. The highly regarded journalist Thomas L. Stokes reflected on the burning of Anacostia: “My mood was one of despair. It was an experience that stands apart from all others in my life. So all the
misery and suffering had finally come to this—soldiers marching with their guns against American citizens. I had nothing but bitter feelings toward Herbert Hoover that night.” One American appalled by the violence was the man the Democratic Party had just chosen to oppose Hoover in November. “Well,” Franklin Roosevelt told an adviser, “this elects me.”
As the 1932 campaign got under way, few observers saw even a glimmer of possibility that the president would win a second term. The election, stated a Richmond editor, was going to be “an inquest” at which “the American people will sit as a coroner’s jury, and … bring in their verdict against Herbert Hoover.” The Republican convention hall in Chicago displayed no picture of the president. “If the election was held tomorrow,” a former Oregon governor said, “any Democratic candidate who had not been convicted of anything more than rape or murder would defeat Mr. Hoover.”
Unhappily for Hoover, the Democrats had picked a formidable nominee, though it took some time for the president to acknowledge that. Hoover initially rejoiced in the Democrats’ choice, for he thought Franklin D. Roosevelt was the weakest candidate in the field. When FDR lost the Massachusetts primary, Hoover was downcast because he feared it meant that Roosevelt would not be his opponent. Even when Hoover did recognize that the ebullient governor of the country’s most populous state was no pushover, he failed to comprehend that his rival’s attitude toward help for the impoverished would give FDR the advantage. Roosevelt had told the New York legislature that relief “must be extended by Government, not as a matter of charity, but as a matter of social duty; the State accepts the task cheerfully because it believes that it will help restore that close relationship with its people which is necessary to preserve our democratic form of government.”
In contrast, Hoover ran as a right-winger of deepest dye. Not a
trace of his earlier progressivism could be discerned. In his final months in office, he sealed the impression of himself as a dogmatic reactionary. Some of his comments were hysterical. At a time when liberals were disappointed by Roosevelt’s moderation, Hoover charged that FDR’s approach incarnated “the same philosophy of government which has poisoned all Europe … the fumes of the witch’s cauldron which boiled in Russia.”
Hoover conducted a lackluster campaign. No one applauded at the end of his acceptance address, because, reported a British journalist, of “the dispiriting influence of Mr. Hoover’s personality, his unprepossessing exterior, his sour, puckered face of a bilious baby, his dreary, nasal monotone reading interminably, and, for the most part inaudibly, from a typescript without a single inflection of a voice or gesture to relieve the tedium.” Only once did he leaven his stupefying recitals of statistics with a ray of wit—in Cleveland when, remarking on how frequently his opponent shifted positions, he likened Roosevelt to a “chameleon on … plaid.”
The president had planned to give only three addresses, but when on September 12, 1932, reliably Republican Maine, which voted early in local races, lurched Democratic, he realized that FDR could no longer be taken lightly. “It is a catastrophe for us,” he said. “The thing for us to do is to carry the fight right to Roosevelt … . We have got to crack him every time he opens his mouth.” Later that month, bewailing the “hatred” for him that pervaded the West, he declared that “the only possibility of winning the election, which is lost now, would be exciting a fear of what Roosevelt would do.”
No longer did the nation hail Hoover as the Great Engineer. “No other man could, possibly, have done more; but no other man could conceivably have done less,” stated a New Haven paper. “The country is pretty tired of the Hoover myth.” The New Republic editor Robert Morss Lovett wrote: “Never before in this country has government fallen to so low a place in popular estimation, or been so universally an object of cynical contempt. Never before has the
chief magistrate given his name so liberally to latrines and offal dumps, or had his face banished from the screen to avoid the hoots and jeers of children.” War veterans circulated a parody:
Hoover is our shepherd
We are in want
He maketh us to lie
Down on the park benches
He leadeth us beside the still factories
He disturbeth our soul.
Stories circulated that he had accumulated a fortune from the distress of the Belgians, that dogs took an instinctive dislike to him, even that he had conspired in kidnapping and murdering the Lindbergh baby. Drawing upon the conviction that Hoover was an agent of the Crown, signs urged the destitute to “Eat ’erbs with ’Erbie,” and a radical farm leader denounced him as “the foreigner in the White House.” One vicious diatribe, John Hamill’s The Strange Career of Mr. Hoover Under Two Flags, reached number six on Macy’s list of nonfiction best sellers, though it was a tissue of lies.
When the Republican campaign train rolled into Detroit, where many thousands of autoworkers had been discharged, angry crowds shook their fists at the president and chanted, “Hang Hoover! Hang Hoover! Hang Hoover!” Placards read “Down with Hoover, Slayer of Veterans.” To protect him from the furor, mounted police had to be summoned. “I’ve been travelling with presidents since Theodore Roosevelt’s time, and never before have I seen one actually booed, with men running out into the streets to thumb their noses at him,” a Secret Service agent said. “It’s not a pretty sight.”
His face ashen, his eyes bloodshot, his hands trembling, Hoover soldiered on, convinced that he carried the fate of the republic with him. But when, on the final day of October, he approached Madison Square Garden, cries of “We want bread!” rang in his ears. “This campaign is more than a contest between two men,” he declared in his opening sentence. “It is a contest between two
philosophies.” Paraphrasing, curiously, William Jennings Bryan, he warned that if the country jettisoned the protective tariff, “the grass will grow in the streets of a hundred cities, a thousand towns; the weeds will overrun the fields of millions of farms … . Their churches, their hospitals, and schoolhouses will decay.” He concluded: “This election is not a mere shift from the ins to the outs. It means deciding the direction our Nation will take over a century to come.”
As the campaign ground toward a close, Hoover—his prematurely white hair unkempt, his clothes disheveled, his voice all but gone—found it increasingly hard to go through the motions. His press secretary later wrote of his appearance in St. Paul: “He spoke haltingly and without emphasis … . He lost his place in the manuscript again and again … . A man sat directly behind him gripping an empty chair throughout the time he was speaking, so that, if he should collapse, the chair could be pushed under him and he would not fall to the platform.” Hoover also misjudged the temper of the country, even at a friendly party rally in Minnesota. In what was taken to be an allusion to his handling of the bonus marchers, he ad-libbed, “Thank God, we still have some officials in Washington that can hold out against a mob.” The audience gasped.
His final campaign leg—west to California—painfully exposed the country’s animus toward him. In Wisconsin his train was halted after a man was detected extracting spikes, and, near a critical Nevada rail crossing, watchmen came upon two men toting sticks of dynamite. After tomatoes spattered his train in Kansas, he told his wife, “I can’t go on with it anymore.” When he crossed the California border, Hoover took comfort in knowing he was in his home state—but in Oakland, the terminus of the line, crowds jeered him, and on Market Street, the main artery of San Francisco, stink bombs fouled the air. By the time Hoover got to Palo Alto, he seemed to be a “walking corpse.” A telegram he opened there recommended: “Vote for Roosevelt and make it unanimous.”
On election night, November 8, 1932, at his home on the Stanford campus, Hoover awaited the results of the contest. One wire
after another revealed that rock-ribbed Republican strongholds had turned against him. Hoover was stunned—visibly aging before his neighbors’ eyes. A Palo Alto girl asked, “Mommy, what do they do to a president to make a man look like Mr. Hoover does?” Disbelieving, he clung to hope as long as he could, but when the first returns of his adopted state of California showed him trailing by half a million votes, he knew it was all over. After authorizing a concession statement, he came out from his living room to acknowledge the still-loyal Stanford students. A young women’s choir sang “Taps.”
No president had ever suffered so great a turnaround from his first campaign to his second. In 1928 Hoover had carried forty states; in 1932, with less than 40 percent of the popular vote, only six. Not for eighty years had there been such an avalanche of Democratic ballots. Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first Democrat to enter the White House with a popular majority since Franklin Pierce in 1853. Save for 1912, when the party divided, 1932 marked the worst defeat in the history of the GOP. The Hoover years wrenched many lifelong Republican voters from their moorings. In 1928 one couple had christened their newborn son “Herbert Hoover Jones”; four years later, they petitioned a court, “desiring to relieve the young man from the chagrin and mortification which he is suffering and will suffer,” to permit his name be changed to Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones. For Hoover, election night was desolating, all the more so because it was clear that the outcome was less an affirmation of faith in FDR than a repudiation of himself. A few days later, the editor of the Kansas City Star found a crushed man. Hoover greeted him with a single word: “Why?”
In any other land, defeat would at least have brought surcease, but under the U.S. Constitution Hoover’s ordeal in office continued for another four months—until Roosevelt’s inauguration on March 4, 1933. Though the ratification in February 1933 of the Twentieth Amendment foreshortened the interregnum to January
20, it did not take effect until 1937—leaving Hoover America’s last lame-duck president of the old dispensation. During his final months in office, convulsions shook the financial world; unemployment reached an awful 25 percent; and an attempt to murder the president-elect nearly succeeded. After 2,500 hunger marchers congregated on the Hill, police cordoned off the steps of the Capitol, and for the rest of the session Congress met behind a double line of rifle-bearing cops. A Pennsylvania congressman filed a twenty-four-count bill of impeachment against Hoover, and Time ridiculed him as “President-Reject.”
In these unpropitious circumstances, Hoover moved boldly—indeed, impudently—not just to put his presidency in the most favorable light, but to undo the results of the election. The returns had hardly been counted when he invited Governor Roosevelt to collaborate on framing international economic policy. The overture appeared to indicate an extraordinarily magnanimous willingness to share authority with his successor. In fact, it was the first of a series of steps to induce Roosevelt to surrender the fruits of victory. Hoover behaved, the historian Frank Freidel later noted, “as though he felt it was his duty to save the nation, indeed the world, from the folly of the American voters.”
On November 22, 1932, the president and the president-elect met in the Red Room of the White House. “The air,” David Kennedy has written, “hung heavy with sullen tension.” Hoover sought to put Roosevelt on record as favoring the gold standard and the president’s fantasy that, by offering concessions, he could persuade Great Britain to return to the gold standard—a notion the Foreign Office called “Hoover’s hare-brained scheme.” Having muffed an opportunity to make progress on war debts at Lausanne earlier in the year, he also tried to rope FDR into taking a stand on that extremely unpopular issue. Throughout the discussion, Hoover adopted a condescending air toward the man the country had inexplicably chosen to replace him. Roosevelt refused to be needled. Alert as a fox who hears the baying of hounds, he smiled
and smiled and smiled again, but committed himself to nothing. After the encounter was over, Hoover commented that his rival “was amiable, pleasant, anxious to be of service, very badly informed and of comparatively little vision.”
For weeks, negotiations between the two men—one in Washington, the other at his ancestral home in the Hudson Valley—went nowhere, until Roosevelt asked an adviser, “Why doesn’t Harry Stimson come up here and talk with me and settle this damn thing that nobody else seems able to do?” Stimson was eager to go, but Hoover, who had come to regard FDR as “a gibbering idiot,” only reluctantly consented. On January 9, 1933, lines of communication were reopened when the secretary of state journeyed to Hyde Park, where he concluded that his fellow patrician was not as dim-witted as he seemed. Hoover, though, was implacable. “I will never be photographed with him,” he told his press secretary. “I have too much respect for myself,” adding, “I’ll have my way with Roosevelt yet.”
On February 17 Hoover wrote out in longhand a ten-page letter to the president-elect (whose name he misspelled “Roosvelt”) catechizing him on the mounting emergency. Gold and capital were fleeing abroad, and money was being withdrawn from banks and hoarded; unemployment was rising. “The major difficulty,” he asserted, “is the state of the public mind, for there is a steadily degenerating confidence in the future which has reached the height of general alarm.” His policies, Hoover maintained, had pulled the country out of the depths the previous summer, but the situation had worsened since then because the country was unsettled by FDR’s election, which, Hoover said, many worried might bring on radical experimentation or even “dictatorship.” In short, he wanted Roosevelt to acknowledge that the country’s anxiety resulted not from the failure of Hoover’s policies but from apprehension about his successor. The brassy document concluded by asking Roosevelt to restore confidence through a series of statements: that “there will be no tampering or inflation of the currency; that the budget will be unquestionably balanced, even if further taxation is necessary;
that the government credit will be maintained by refusal to exhaust it in the issue of securities.”
Hoover knew full well what he was requesting. Three days later he confided to a conservative Pennsylvania senator that “if these declarations be made by the president-elect, he will have ratified the whole major program of the Republican Administration; that is, it means the abandonment of 90% of the so-called new deal.” In a letter to another Republican senator, Hoover specified some of the proposals he expected his successor to abandon: “bills to assume Federal responsibility for billions of mortgages, loans to municipalities for public works, the Tennessee improvements and Muscle Shoals.” In addition, Roosevelt must boost tariff rates and institute a national sales tax.
The letter ended whatever slim chance of cooperation remained. For days, Roosevelt—who regarded it as “cheeky”—left it unanswered. The president-elect’s refusal to comply, Hoover told Stimson, was the behavior of a “madman.” On March 3 Hoover, denying his successor the customary invitation to a preinaugural dinner at the White House, asked the Roosevelts for tea instead. He then marred this social occasion by again pressing his economic views and by treating the future president so cavalierly that, FDR later said, “I was sure [my son] Jimmy wanted to punch him in the eye.” Roosevelt recognized, however, which man really held the upper hand. “No cosmic dramatist could possibly devise a better entrance … than that accorded to Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” the playwright Robert Sherwood later commented. “Herbert Hoover was, in the parlance of vaudeville, ‘a good act to follow.’”
Hoover could seek consolation only in knowing that his agony was nearly over. The recent session of Congress had been a nightmare. Early in 1933 both houses had overridden his veto of a bill by huge margins, forcing him to concede, “We are in a pitiful position.” On his last day in office, the Washington correspondent of the New York Times found him “standing at the window looking out at the Washington Monument. His eyes were red; it was clear he had been weeping. We sat down and he said slowly that the country
was in terrible condition, … that the whole economy was in jeopardy.” His presidency was ending to the din of crashing banks, to the hush of silenced factory whistles. At midnight he faced up to the inevitable. “We are at the end of our string,” he said. “There is nothing more we can do.”