“He is certainly a wonder, and I wish we could make him President of the United States.
There could not be a better one.”
—Franklin Delano Roosevelt on Herbert Hoover, 1920
“No one better illustrated Tacitus’s verdict on Galba, omnium consensus capax imperii nisi imperasset (by general consent fit to rule, had he not ruled).”
—Paul Johnson on Hoover, Modern Times
Hoover was orphaned at age ten and worked his way through the brand new Stanford University, where he was in the first graduating class
Hoover, a strong anti-Communist, may have inadvertently assured the success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia
Hoover was the first president to have a telephone installed on his desk in the Oval Office
Herbert Hoover is the great tragic figure among modern American presidents. Universally acknowledged for his ability, and acclaimed for his great humanitarian accomplishment in organizing food relief for a Europe in desperate conditions after World War I (ironically, the anti-Communist Hoover may have saved Soviet Communism by ameliorating the Communist-caused famine in Russia), Hoover had the misfortune to preside over the worst economic calamity of the twentieth century. On paper he seemed to be the ideal president to respond to the crisis. In addition to his humanitarian record, Hoover had been secretary of commerce under the previous two presidents, and he was well known and respected in the business community. He seemed to blend the best of Progressivism with a belief in enterprise and individual initiative—having made his own personal fortune as a mining engineer in his youth. Yet because of how he actually handled the crisis when he was called into action, Hoover is not loved by anyone.
Hoover was sworn in at noon on March 4, 1929, and delivered his inaugural address in a heavy downpour of rain, a gloomy portent, perhaps, of his unhappy single term. “By the time we arrived at the White House,” Hoover recorded in his memoirs, “both Mrs. Hoover and I were thoroughly soaked.”
It was his double misfortune that the crisis of the Great Depression coincided with the arrival of the media presidency. No one knew it at the time, but as FDR showed upon succeeding Hoover in 1932, Americans were now ready for presidents who “emoted.” Hoover, in sharp contrast to his successors, was seemingly incapable of conveying empathy. He did not, like Bill Clinton, “feel your pain,” or, like FDR, say to Americans, “Tell me your troubles.” While he intervened extensively in the economy—in all the wrong ways—in a vain effort to ameliorate the Depression, his inability to “connect” with the American people was his political undoing. Later he would become a strong critic of FDR and the New Deal, implicitly repudiating many of his own policies. Partisan liberal historians have unfairly attacked Hoover along with Harding and Coolidge for decades—enabling Democrats to blame the Republican Party generally and conservative economics in particular for the legacy of his failure.
Hoover’s most authoritative biographer, conservative historian George H. Nash, calls Hoover “the Rodney Dangerfield of American politics—he gets no respect.” And for good reason. It was understandable that liberals would criticize the Republican Hoover. But conservatives eventually came to abandon him too, even though he was a vehement anti-Communist, a friend of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, and a financial supporter of some important initiatives of the modern conservative movement. In the 1950s Hoover was a favorite, if not a hero, of many leading libertarians such as Rose Wilder Lane and John Chamberlain.
And ironically, at one time—shortly after the end of World War I—both parties wanted Hoover and hoped he might become their presidential candidate. Today, however, Hoover has become a complete political orphan, embraced by neither political party. (In a way Hoover has come full circle, since he was literally orphaned at the age of ten.) Nowadays Hoover is just as likely to be attacked by conservatives and libertarians as by liberals. And while Calvin Coolidge, Dwight Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon have received belated revisionist praise from some liberals, Hoover continues to languish in the reputational basement. Pretty much his only recent champion was Oregon’s late Senator Mark Hatfield, a liberal Republican with a limited following.
Hoover was a backer of Human Events, The Freeman, and National Review. Before he entered politics in the 1920s, he founded one of the most important conservative intellectual institutions, the Hoover Institution for the Study of War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University—decades before such independent research organizations became commonplace. Hoover’s early initiative to gather records of the Russian revolution at the close of World War I provided the main repository of evidence for scholars and investigators of the Soviet Union for several decades.
The problem with Hoover is that the closer you look, the more elusive and contradictory he becomes. If you read Hoover’s spoken and written words (and he wrote a lot—a bibliography of his published writings and speeches contains over 1,200 entries), you can find many examples of fervently expressed conservative principles. He published a book in 1922 entitled American Individualism that embraced free enterprise and attacked collectivism. This phrase from one of his 1928 campaign speeches is typical of Hoover’s rhetoric: “You cannot extend the mastery of the government over the daily working life of a people without at the same time making it the master of the people’s souls and thoughts.”
But despite many statements in favor of free enterprise, Hoover was no devotee of free markets, and he failed to perceive that free enterprise depends upon them. At times he could be a vocal critic of “laissez faire,” and he supported lots of government regulations. Back in 1912 Hoover considered himself an “independent progressive,” supported Theodore Roosevelt and his Progressive “Bull Moose” Party—and then he went on to serve in the Wilson administration. In fact he boasted in his memoirs, “Those who contended that during the period of my administration our economic system was one of laissez faire have little knowledge of the extent of government regulation.” As secretary of commerce under both Harding and Coolidge, Hoover distinguished himself as a busybody, causing Coolidge at one point to refer to Hoover as a “meddlesome liberal.” As Paul Johnson described him, “Hoover showed himself a corporatist, an activist and an interventionist, running counter to the general thrust, or rather non-thrust, of the Harding-Coolidge administrations. . . . There was no aspect of public policy in which Hoover was not intensely active, usually personally: child health, Indian policy, oil, conservation, public education, housing, social waste, agriculture—as President, he was his own Agriculture Secretary, and the 1929 Agricultural Marketing Act was entirely his work.” Indeed, Hoover’s memoirs are quite unlike any other president’s; they are organized more topically than chronologically, with sequential chapters on “water,” “conservation,” and “public buildings.” The book reads more like a policy manual than an autobiography.
The Life of Herbert Hoover by George H. Nash, 3 vols. (W. W. Norton, 1983, 1988, and 1996).
As George Nash put it, Hoover was “too progressive for the conservatives, and too conservative for the radicals.” But this does not mean he was either a moderate or an unprincipled compromiser. A closer look at Hoover yields some important lessons about modern politics and the requirements for success in the presidency.
The source of Hoover’s difficulties may have been mostly intellectual, and only partly temperamental. Trained as an engineer, he brought an engineer’s mentality to politics, a domain that resists the orderly, mechanistic approach of engineers. (The Philadelphia Record newspaper hailed Hoover as the model of “engineering statesmanship.”) It is not a coincidence that the president to whom Hoover bears the closest resemblance in terms of being aloof from the nitty-gritty of politics was also an engineer—Jimmy Carter. It was precisely Hoover’s reputation as a supreme administrator, along with his humanitarian record, that raised expectations for the thirty-first president. Americans expected that they were electing a “miracle worker,” a fact which worried Hoover himself. As he wrote to a friend, “They have a conviction that I am a sort of superman, that no problem is beyond my capacity.”
One passage in Hoover’s memoirs reveals precisely what Hoover didn’t understand about the changing nature of presidential politics in the twentieth century: “I was convinced that efficient, honest administration of the vast machine of the Federal government would appeal to all citizens. I have since learned that efficient government does not interest the people so much as dramatics” [emphasis added]. While Hoover was busy with the machinery of government—as he conceived it—his opportunistic and partisan critics were able to create a morality play that gripped the public, capitalizing on the president’s seeming indifference to the plight of the “bonus army” of World War I veterans who marched on Washington in 1932 hoping to pressure Washington to release their war pensions early as a relief measure. This was unfair, as no one was more aggressive in using government to try to ameliorate the nation’s suffering economy. But that was a large part of Hoover’s problem.
The great British historian Paul Johnson ably summarizes the standard liberal narrative of Hoover that stood for more than two generations:
The received view is that Hoover, because of his ideological attachment to laissez-faire, refused to use government money to reflate the economy and so prolonged and deepened the Depression until the election of Roosevelt, who then promptly reversed official policy, introducing the New Deal, a form of Keynesianism, and pulled America out of the trough. Hoover is presented as the symbol of the dead, discredited past, Roosevelt as the harbinger of the future, and 1932–3 the watershed between old-style free market economics and the benevolent new managed economics and social welfare of Keynes.
Over the last couple decades the true picture has come into focus: far from being a contrast to FDR, Hoover paved the way for the New Deal by setting in motion most of its central elements. Moreover, had he followed the example of President Harding—and the advice of his treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon—and let the economy take its natural self-correcting course, the sharp recession set off by the stock market crash of 1929 might not have turned into a deep depression that lasted for a decade.
George Mason University historian Steven Horwitz reflects the recent scholarship, writing, “Herbert Hoover deserves a good deal of the blame for turning what would have most likely been a steep but short recession into a much deeper and eventually much longer Great Depression.” First, far from being a frugal fiscal manager like Harding and Coolidge, Hoover increased federal spending by 48 percent, from $3.1 billion in 1929 to $4.7 billion in his last budget for 1933. (Under Coolidge federal spending had been nearly flat.) Under Hoover government spending was skyrocketing during a time of deflation—meaning that the real, inflation-adjusted increase in spending was much higher than 48 percent. Hoover’s budget deficits were actually larger as a proportion of total spending than any of FDR’s New Deal budget deficits, and even larger than President Obama’s huge deficit is today. That he was reluctant to spend money is one charge against Hoover that is simply false.
But huge deficit spending was only the beginning of Hoover’s mistakes.
1. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which lent tax dollars to banks and other firms?
2. The Home Loan Board, to give money to the construction sector?
3. The Public Works Administration, to coordinate and expand federal construction projects?
Answers: 1. Hoover. 2. Hoover. 3. Hoover.
Instead of letting markets adjust to new conditions, Hoover intervened across the board in an attempt to manipulate prices and wages. He established agricultural cartels to prop up farm prices, in a precursor to the policies FDR adopted. He “jawboned” business into not cutting wages (even though prices were falling), thinking high wages would preserve consumer spending and aggregate demand. Many industries complied, but compensated by laying off more workers, making the problem of unemployment worse. Hoover stepped up anti-trust lawsuits against “destructive competition.” He promoted public works projects, just like President Obama’s 2009 “stimulus,” but with an added twist: Hoover signed into law the Davis-Bacon Act, a pro-union law that requires that all government-funded construction projects pay the “prevailing wage,” which means a union wage. Davis-Bacon, which is still in force today, not only raised the price of public works to taxpayers, but for decades had the effect of excluding immigrants and minorities from public works projects (which was part of the intention of the sponsors of Davis-Bacon in the first place).
“It was Mr. Hoover who abandoned the principles of laissez-faire in relation to the business cycle, established the conviction that prosperity and depression can be publicly controlled by political action, and drove out of the public consciousness the old idea that depressions must be overcome by private adjustment.”
___________________________
Walter Lippmann, 1935
Perhaps the most disastrous move Hoover made was agreeing to the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill in 1930. Smoot-Hawley was old-fashioned trade protectionism; it raised tariffs on a wide range of imports. It had the desired effect: imports to the U.S. fell by 40 percent over the next two years. But Smoot-Hawley set off a wave of retaliatory tariffs enacted by our trading partners—devastating U.S. exports and worsening the already severe depression; unemployment, which had eased a bit before Smoot-Hawley, began rising again. The stock market fell sharply the day Hoover signed the bill.
The final insult to the American economy was a massive tax increase passed in 1932, which raised personal income taxes and revived a number of World War I-era excise taxes, on top of which Hoover supported a higher inheritance tax. Hoover favored higher taxes out of concern for the budget deficit, but the middle of a depression is the worst time to raise taxes. This is the main reason why decades later, after the Republican Party embraced supply-side economics under Ronald Reagan, Hoover’s reputation among conservatives collapsed on account of what Jack Kemp called “Hoover’s root-canal school of economics.” Steven Horwitz’s judgment is harsh but dead-on: “Hoover preferred the visible fist of government to the invisible hand of the market.” Hoover himself would later boast that the Republican Party had “created seven out of the ten great Federal regulating agencies of today.”
In the 1932 campaign Franklin Roosevelt actually attacked Hoover from the right for his free-spending ways. FDR charged Hoover with “reckless and extravagant” spending, calling Hoover’s “the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history.” FDR also charged that Hoover thought “that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible.” Roosevelt’s running mate, John Nance Garner, went so far as to say Hoover was “leading the country down the path of socialism.”
Many of FDR’s top advisers later came to admit that Hoover paved the way for the New Deal. Raymond Moley, one of FDR’s political aides and speechwriters, wrote years later, “When we all burst into Washington, we found every essential idea enacted in the 100-day Congress in the Hoover administration itself.”
“I once made a list of New Deal ventures begun during Hoover’s years as Secretary of Commerce and then as President. . . . Practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.”
___________________________
Rexford Tugwell, one of FDR’s more radical advisers
Hoover and Roosevelt have always been understood as great political rivals—which is obviously true from one point of view, since they ran against each other in 1932. But as political scientist Gordon Lloyd points out, it is more accurate to understand them not as ideological rivals, but as “the two faces of liberalism.”
One reason Hoover is a lasting enigma is that after his defeat at the hands of FDR in 1932, he moved sharply to the right and became a strong critic of the very policies he had embraced as president. If you didn’t know about Hoover’s record and went only by his post-presidential speeches and writings, you would acclaim him a great conservative figure. As of Richard Nixon decades later, it can be said of Hoover that he was much better out of office than in it. This is one reason why Hoover’s reputation in the public mind is at odds with his record. The final irony, therefore, is that Hoover was himself responsible for the misperception—which has been so useful in the liberal mythology about the Depression and the New Deal—that Hoover was a conservative, even a reactionary, president.
“Self-government never dies from direct attack. No matter what his real intentions may be, no man will arise and say that he intends to suspend one atom of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Liberty dies from the encroachments and disregard of the safeguards of those rights. And unfortunately it is those whose purposes have often been good who have broken the levees of liberty to find a short cut to their ends.”
___________________________
Hoover in 1937, by which time he was a critic of the New Deal
Throughout the 1930s Hoover attacked what he called the New Deal’s “assaults on the spirit of American liberty” and “the gigantic shift of government from the function of umpire to the function of directing, dictating, and competing in our economic life.” In particular, in 1937 Hoover attacked FDR’s “court packing” plan to take over the Supreme Court. In a speech entitled “Hands Off the Supreme Court,” Hoover blasted FDR for seeking “a quick and revolutionary change in the Constitution” that would hand FDR’s administration “a blank check upon which they can write future undisclosed purposes.”
Herein lies the clue to unraveling the enigma of Hoover. It is usually said that Hoover’s technocratic and almost machine like persona was ill-suited to the political shock of the Depression, especially in contrast to Franklin Roosevelt’s large personality. Hoover might have been more politically successful if he had had a warmer personality and had foreseen, as FDR did, how retail politics was changing fast with the rise of modern mass media such as radio (and later television). This is true as far as it goes, but it glosses over how Hoover’s engineering mentality led him to embrace the very kind of social engineering that is anathema to a free economy and to the founding principles of a self-governing people. Hoover’s attack on FDR’s “court packing” scheme was one of Hoover’s very few expressions of concern for the Constitution. His memoirs barely mention the Constitution; and unlike other inaugural addresses up to that time that dwelt at length on the Constitution and the nation’s Founding principles, Hoover’s barely mentioned either. For all of Hoover’s decency and ability, his lack of appreciation for, and understanding of, limited government explain many of his inconsistencies and failures in office, and his lack of a coherent view of the limits of state power or the limits of his own reach. Indeed, it is not too harsh to suggest that one reason for his criticisms of the New Deal after he left office was simply personal pique that he was not the person in charge of shaping the interventions.
Hoover’s relative indifference to the principles of the Constitution explains his mixed record of appointments to the Supreme Court. Hoover appointed three justices. The first was Charles Evans Hughes, to replace Chief Justice William Howard Taft. Hughes had been on the Court before (ironically appointed by President Taft), but had stepped down to run for president in 1916. Hughes was a moderate on the Court in both of his stints as a justice.
Hoover’s second appointment was Owen Roberts, and in the early years of FDR’s New Deal, Roberts was generally aligned with the Court’s conservatives in striking down New Deal legislation for exceeding the Constitution’s grant of powers to the federal government. However, Roberts was the key justice who changed sides in the “revolution of 1937,” when the Supreme Court buckled under pressure from Franklin Roosevelt and ceased protecting economic liberty from assaults by the federal government.
Hoover’s third appointment was the most disappointing: Benjamin Cardozo. Cardozo, a Democrat, was an open proponent of Brandeis-style “sociological jurisprudence” and the Progressive idea of “ordered liberty” that presumes more government supervision of individuals and permits massively expanded federal power. Cardozo wrote the majority opinion in the case that upheld the constitutionality of Social Security, for example.
Between Hoover’s weak grasp of constitutional principles and his mixed record of Supreme Court appointments, his constitutional grade is a C-.