EIGHT

Getting a Grip on the Presidency

As Herbert Hoover prepared to take the oath of office, the American public’s expectations for their new president rose. The New York Times noted that “the country is ready as it has seldom been for audacious leadership, [and] the chance for coincidence between the man and the hour seems almost too good an opportunity to waste. . . . Everyone agrees, critic and friend, that he is the best qualified President we have had for decades.”¹ The San Francisco Chronicle chimed in, “No other American has ever had the breadth of experience which Herbert Hoover brings to the task confronting him.”² Novelist Sherwood Anderson observed that the incoming president was possibly the most respected man in America and had “never known failure.”³ Only occasionally did anyone dampen the euphoria. Shortly after Hoover’s inauguration, The Outlook observed, “He is regarded as a miracle worker. That is his misfortune. He will be required by his masters, the people, to do the impossible.”⁴

Hoover seemed oblivious to the deluge of attention. As his inauguration approached, he spent much of his time at his home on S Street in Washington, DC, surrounded by family, including Herbert Jr., with his wife and two babies, and Allan, a Stanford senior. On his last day as a private citizen, Hoover ate a hearty breakfast and perused the newspapers, deterred from a relaxing drive into the countryside by a rainstorm. His most comforting thought was that the campaigning was over and he could soon get to work.⁵

On Inauguration Day, a morning drizzle gave way to a downpour that drenched his motorcade as it crept along Pennsylvania Avenue, cheered on by thousands of celebrants. Rain pelted Hoover’s face as he leaned forward to kiss the Bible, opened to the Sermon on the Mount, his favorite passage. His speech, delivered in his typical monotone, reached the largest radio audience on record at that time. For all the distractions, and the president’s low-key delivery, the content was meaty, with a positive tone, including tributes to Coolidge and passages of moral and spiritual uplift. The longest portion dealt with maintaining peace in a world still impacted by the Great War. Excessive armaments wasted federal dollars and escalated tensions while bringing no additional security, Hoover insisted. He would settle disputes with other nations amicably and work to resolve differences without meddling in their affairs. In addition, the new president announced that to protect American agriculture he would summon Congress into a special session limited to two items, farm relief and moderate tariff increases. He promised to appoint a commission to investigate law enforcement, including Prohibition, and announced plans for public works, waterways, government reorganization, and improvements in public health and education. Although bursting with progressive ideas, Hoover had sliced fat from the speech, making it one of the shorter addresses for a modern president. Following the ceremony, the First Family changed into dry clothes in their quarters at the White House before Lou presided over a large tea. Hoover, who did not dance, skipped the Inaugural Ball, sponsored by Vice President Charles Curtis, attending a small charity benefit instead.⁶

The White House, muddled under Harding, somnolent under Coolidge, now became the heartbeat of government activity, blazing with action. Commandeering the desk used by Woodrow Wilson, whom Hoover admired for his high ideals, the new president had a telephone installed, the office’s first. Whereas previous presidents had utilized one primary secretary, usually male, Hoover had three, who were assigned responsibilities according to function and met each morning to plan the day’s work. The president outlined objectives, giving his secretaries flexibility to take the initiative and accomplish their goals. Each man shared his leader’s traits of resolve and probity. Walter H. Newton had served in Congress, as a political liaison with Capitol Hill, on the Republican National Committee, and with government agencies as well as with committees and commissions. A shrewd politician, he gathered political intelligence about pending legislation and helped steer bills through Congress. Lawrence Richey, a former Secret Service agent, had worked for Hoover at Commerce and was close to the president personally, the only one of the men who fished with Hoover. Richey handled the president’s personal correspondence and managed the office, and also took on personal assignments, such as political intelligence. George Akerson, a former Washington correspondent for a Minnesota daily, became press secretary, a position he had held previously during the campaign and at the Commerce Department.

Although not among the group of secretaries, French Strother, a former associate editor at World’s Work, contributed research to Hoover’s speeches and fact-checked, though he left the president’s prose alone. One of Hoover’s closest friends, Edgar Rickard, returned to private business following the campaign and handled the president’s personal finances. Hoover’s fortune had dwindled from both investment losses and personal generosity, and during his years in office his outside income rarely exceeded $40,000 annually. He customarily declined a government salary as president and paid his own expenses, including those covering White House entertainment.⁷

In consolidating his cabinet, Hoover had assembled men of strong executive experience. Two were holdovers from the Coolidge administration, Labor Secretary James J. Davis and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Hoover appeased the business wing of the party with Mellon, yet he also installed men who would faithfully implement his own policies, such as Ray Lyman Wilbur as interior secretary. Henry L. Stimson, who held influence in the Republican Party and had previously served as governor-general of the Philippines, was chosen as secretary of state, though Hoover would often prefer the advice of Ogden Mills, an assistant secretary of the treasury, and William R. Castle Jr., the undersecretary of state. The secretary of war, James W. Good, had served as a congressman from Iowa and held a seat on the House Appropriations Committee. He served only eight months in the cabinet before his death and was replaced by Patrick J. Hurley. For navy secretary, Hoover named Charles Francis Adams, scion of a family that had produced two presidents, and later lamented not appointing him as secretary of state. Hoover deemed Attorney General William D. Mitchell, a Democrat who had been Coolidge’s solicitor general, quite able. Walter Folger Brown, who had worked for Hoover at Commerce and shared his boss’s interest in government reorganization, was selected for postmaster general, and Arthur M. Hyde, former governor of Missouri and an old friend of Hoover’s, was appointed as secretary of agriculture. Robert P. Lamont, an engineer and businessman, was appointed as secretary of commerce. Hoover later said he regretted the choice because Lamont lacked initiative and imagination.

While legislation originated with the president or Congress, the cabinet worked at a tactical level, fleshing out, refining, and implementing policy. At meetings, cabinet members usually reached a consensus on major questions and then closed ranks before announcing programs, which was usually left to Hoover. Assembling weekly, they vetted the most significant topics, and everyone was encouraged to contribute. No written minutes were taken. Hoover worked without notes, drawing upon his precise memory.

The Hoover administration’s first eight months were a whirlwind of reform that indicates what might have been accomplished had the Great Depression not intervened. There had been a paucity of meaningful domestic reform for nearly a generation. Wilson’s second term had been preoccupied with the war, while Harding was unfit to engineer reform and Coolidge opposed it by principle. Hoover, however, moved rapidly, implementing new policies and issuing executive orders that laid the foundation for legislation. He planned conferences to study child health care, conservation, and law enforcement, and he commissioned studies on recent social and economic trends to explore his ideas for social and economic improvements.⁸

Over Andrew Mellon’s objections, Hoover urged legislation graduating income taxes more steeply, placing a lower burden on the poor and middle classes. He expanded civil service throughout the government and worked to expand the acreage of federal parks and forests. To head the federal prison system, he recruited Sanford Bates, a veteran prison reformer, who made the system more humane, emphasizing rehabilitation and the potential for parole, treating women and minorities more fairly, and reducing overcrowding. Hoover canceled oil leases on federal lands, which had been perpetrated during the Harding scandals, and he instructed Walter Newton to compile a plan to reorganize the federal bureaucracy that could be translated into legislation.⁹

Three months later Hoover requested a law creating a strong Federal Power Commission to regulate interstate transmission and rates of electricity. He also sought to regulate railroad rates and to reorganize and stabilize the banking system. Hoover believed in firm and fair regulation of business and was a long-established opponent of monopoly, which he believed strangled competition and drained dry the incentives vital to productive free enterprise. He placed the interests of consumers above the profits of businessmen. During his tenure in the White House, the Justice Department instigated antitrust suits against such leading industrial giants as Radio Corporation of America, General Electric, and Westinghouse. In fact, more antitrust suits were filed under Hoover than under any previous president. During the 1932 presidential campaign, Franklin D. Roosevelt would even advocate relaxation of Hoover’s stringent regulation of big business.

Hoover used the moral leadership of the presidency to protect the nation’s most vulnerable citizens, including children, women, Native Americans, and African Americans. During the 1920s, he had been instrumental in founding the American Child Health Association, and he remained their most visible advocate in the White House. For many years he supported a constitutional amendment outlawing child labor, which was passed by Congress but never ratified by the states. He embraced causes important to women, including suffrage and women’s participation in politics. Hoover sought to improve the well-being of Native Americans, nearly doubling appropriations for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and appointing administrators sympathetic to their needs. Native American health and educational facilities were improved substantially, and Interior Secretary Wilbur became a leading proponent of the preservation of native traditions, religions, crafts, and lifestyles. In race relations, Hoover invited black educator Robert R. Moton to lunch in the White House and increased appropriations for Howard University, a federally funded black college in Washington, DC. In addition, the president gave more urgency to labor reform, defending the right of labor to organize and to strike if necessary.¹⁰

One of the most contentious issues throughout the 1920s was the enforcement of Prohibition. Hoover doubted the law’s enforceability and questioned its constitutionality.¹¹ Nonetheless, Hoover considered it his duty as president to implement all laws as a matter of principle, and he became the only chief executive of the Prohibition era who made a good-faith effort to stiffen enforcement. The most certain way to ensure the repeal of an unpopular law, he felt, was to enforce it strictly, motivating citizens to advocate for repeal.

Viewing Prohibition as a law enforcement issue, he moved responsibility from the Treasury to the Justice Department, placed agents under civil service, and discouraged the use of firearms so as to protect innocent bystanders. Eventually, his reforms led to the FBI’s arrest of the nation’s most notorious mobster, Al Capone, on charges of income tax evasion. Privately, the president believed that the dry era was doomed. The chief problem in federal enforcement was that federal officials could intercept and prosecute only interstate commerce. States were responsible for bootlegging committed within their own borders, but they possessed neither the will nor the resources to arrest and incarcerate offenders. An army of agents was needed to impose the amendment, the president felt. Despite his reluctance to discuss the problem openly, Hoover spoke with GOP leaders to persuade them that the law was impractical.¹²

Hoover’s concern with law enforcement extended beyond Prohibition to comprehensive legal, judicial, and prison reform. During his inaugural address he had pledged to form a commission to study these problems and recommend solutions. On May 29, 1929, he appointed a Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement chaired by President Taft’s former attorney general, George W. Wickersham. The commission thoroughly probed numerous aspects of the legal system and wrote a series of detailed reports, but its findings had little influence on public policy.¹³

Shortly after his inauguration, Hoover met with House and Senate leaders to discuss the agenda for the special session. His first priority was farm relief, he explained, followed by a slightly increased tariff to protect farmers against the low cost of foreign labor. American farmers, who made up 30 percent of the population, had not shared in 1920s prosperity, when supply outweighed demand. Hoover had sought to restore that balance as commerce secretary, yet now he intended to go further. He wanted to reduce transportation costs of farm products by reorganizing railroads for efficiency and creating a waterway system for bulk traffic. A system of farm cooperatives, operating via loans and technical advice from the government, would help individual farmers combine, akin to industrial enterprises. They could pool their resources to negotiate down the goods they bought and bargain up the produce they sold. Aided by loans, they could construct grain elevators to keep nonperishable crops off the market, releasing them incrementally rather than flooding the market and depressing prices at harvesttime. A Federal Farm Board of eight members, appointed by the president along commodity lines, plus the agriculture secretary as an ex officio member, would provide technical and organizational expertise, yet the individual commodity-oriented cooperatives, pyramided from the local to the national level, would be owned and run by farmers themselves, who would formulate policy. It was not ideal for farmers—the solution was incomplete—but it was an improvement. These attempts to nationalize farming without stepping beyond constitutional boundaries made common sense, especially when combined with Hoover’s schemes to diversify farming and phase marginal lands out of cultivation and plant them with cover crops.

Ironically, the chief opposition to the measure came from farm-state senators the tariff was intended to benefit, such as Smith Brookhart of Iowa and William E. Borah of Idaho. Fashioning themselves “Progressives”—conservative Republicans termed them “insurgents”—they often voted as a bloc against administration policies, focusing on legislation related to their farm constituents. Individuals such as Borah were spellbinding orators who attracted headlines out of proportion to the significance of their small electorates, some less populous than a single big-city ward. Insurgents countered Hoover’s plan for cooperative marketing conflicted with a plan to pay export debentures on farm products, which would increase exports and raise farm prices to a higher level than collectives. Hoover complained that most of the debenture payments would go to middlemen rather than to farmers, exacerbating overproduction, and also precipitate trade wars when Americans tried to undersell foreign nations on their own domestic agricultural markets. The debate grew more heated than Hoover had expected, an eruption of political gamesmanship directed at a new president who wanted to be a collegial leader, not a bully. In the end, Hoover got what he wanted in the farm bill, minus the proposals he opposed. The president signed the Agricultural Marketing Act on June 16, 1929. During ordinary times, it might have mitigated the toil of American farmers, but it was not destined to function during ordinary times.¹⁴

If the farm bill had been a struggle, the tariff sparked outright war. Hoover had conceived a moderate tariff on farm goods to help protect farmers from lower pay scales for farm labor abroad. Yet the chief problem in agriculture was not foreign competition, but oversupply. Mandatory crop limitations were the only certain solution but would have been difficult to enforce.¹⁵ In addition, tariffs, which involved many commodities and regional interests, were the richest source of pork in Congress. Congressmen demanded favors and horse-traded with other leaders in return for higher rates to satisfy their own constituents. Hoover attempted to remove politics from the equation with his intention to appoint a powerful Tariff Commission to raise or lower rates without congressional oversight, but for parochially oriented congressmen, the more politics in the tariff, the better.¹⁶

In this first session of his term, Hoover did not believe it would be necessary to summon individual congressmen to the White House to lobby them, much less offer them patronage plums for votes. Previous presidents had done this only rarely, with little success. Rather, Hoover focused his efforts on party leaders, certain committee chairmen, and the officers of the House and Senate, as well as small groups of congressmen. Aides and members of the Republican National Committee conveyed the president’s wishes further.

The final measure, known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, had become almost an afterthought by the time it passed in June 1930, long after the stock market crash of October 1929 had stolen its thunder.¹⁷ In the end, the bill did more harm than good. Hoover’s Tariff Commission did not prove a powerful tool in ameliorating high rates. What’s more, though the Senate had attached 1,253 amendments to the House measure, it had been stripped of the Farm Bloc’s debenture. Perhaps most important, the levy impacted only 4.2 percent of American trade. The diminution in foreign trade in later years stemmed largely from diminished purchasing power worldwide. Neither did it incite trade wars. Other nations had leapfrogged America in erecting tariff walls.¹⁸ Still, Hoover would have been wise to veto the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, and wiser yet not to have introduced the issue at all.

As the Smoot-Hawley debates raged, President Hoover again attempted to implement his agenda of bold social reforms. On September 28, 1929, Hoover invited a group of life insurance executives to the White House to discuss a new program to provide old-age pensions for American workers. Essentially an early draft of Social Security, Hoover’s reforms differed in several respects from the program enacted in 1935, and in some regards might have been superior. Premiums would be paid yearly in a lump sum of less than $500 beginning at birth, with parents or guardians assuming the responsibility until their child became a wage earner. At the age of sixty-five, a citizen would begin receiving $50 per month. Premiums paid by those who died prior to age sixty-five would be placed in a pool and used to supplement funds available to other retirees. Those in the system would receive a flat fee; there would be no graduated scale based on previous earnings. Only those who actually needed the stipend would receive money, excluding the wealthy.

Extensive research by government staffers and private social scientists had preceded the meeting. Some of Hoover’s associates traveled to Europe to investigate retirement programs there. A corpus of actuarial data was drawn from the information furnished by Hoover’s Research Committee on Social Trends. The conferees agreed to build in a system to adjust income to inflation. In this plan, unlike the plan enacted in 1935, the government would not have been permitted to borrow from the fund. Unfortunately, the president’s meeting with insurance executives was ill timed. Planned during the prosperous 1920s, Hoover’s program was impossible to implement during the difficulties of the 1930s. Hoover and the insurance companies soon postponed the program until the return of better times. He hoped to complete the project during a second term.¹⁹

Hoover had also devised a strategy for public and private cooperation to insure workers against unemployment, a complement to Social Security with many of the same features. Under his plan, the states would distribute the stipends, which would be derived from annuities sold to workers or en bloc to businesses by the major life insurance companies. While at the Commerce Department, Hoover made headway in stirring interest in the plan, and several studies were produced by social scientists employed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, demonstrating that such a program was feasible. The state legislature of New York, where the major life insurance companies were located, disapproved of the plan, as did the American Federation of Labor and the National Association of Manufacturers. After he became New York governor in 1928, Franklin D. Roosevelt also expressed reservations. The idea was eventually thwarted by the onset of the Great Depression. During the 1920s, when most people were employed, insurance companies had difficulty selling unemployment insurance. By the 1930s, the unemployment problem had swollen to such dimensions that no private company was willing to invest in marketing such securities. Nonetheless, this marks another example of the degree to which Hoover was more often ahead of his times than behind them.²⁰

Indeed, the Great Depression was to prove to be the greatest crisis Hoover would face as president. Wall Street, a narrow thoroughfare in lower Manhattan framed by towering buildings, had become the symbol, if not the sole substance, of American economic might. Thanks largely to America’s financial prowess, the United States had emerged from the Great War as the world’s largest creditor, the hub of technology and banking, and the leading industrial supplier. Wages rose steadily while unemployment fell, creating the world’s highest standard of living. In the lush years from 1922 to 1929, America’s economy had reached a height of prosperity unknown to previous generations. Pockets of poverty still existed in the South, the Appalachian uplands, and other rural areas, yet the nation’s economic future appeared bright. President Hoover appeared to have waded into a swiftly flowing economic stream. Neither he nor anyone else appreciated that it was filled with piranhas.²¹

The centerpiece of Wall Street was the New York Stock Exchange, a neoclassical temple where stocks and bonds were traded. On the trading floor, corporations, employing brokers as middlemen, sold stocks to investors, who in turn could resell their stock to third parties. As the nation’s economy strengthened after the war, stock trading flourished. Theoretically, a stock’s value was based on the issuing company’s present, or even its future, value. Yet throughout the decade, many investors engaged in speculation, the act of acquiring stock not for its value, but to take advantage of price fluctuations. Speculators were intent on profiting from a timely resale of stock rather than on making an investment in a business. Thus, speculation could often drive the price of a stock up out of proportion to its actual value. During the bull market of the 1920s, speculation became the norm on Wall Street, with some speculators amassing tremendous wealth. During this period, about 15 million Americans, many of whom had no experience in business, waded into the stock market. Some observers believed the nation had entered a new era that replaced the boom-and-bust cycles of the past with permanent prosperity. Yet many industry leaders watched the trading and speculation with growing concern. By July 1929, some of the nation’s most eminent businessmen—including Joseph P. Kennedy, Bernard Baruch, and Herbert Hoover—began to quietly divest themselves of stocks. What concerned the advance guard of the business community was that a psychology of anxiety had begun to grip the business world.²²

On September 3, 1929, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the yardstick of Wall Street’s performance, reached 386.10 and closed at 381.17. Although no one perceived it at the time, the Dow would not equal that peak for more than twenty-five years. The market gyrated wildly throughout September, falling only to recover. In October the trend plunged steadily and steeply downward. On October 23, some 16 million shares were dumped, and for some stocks no buyers could be found at any price. About $4 billion was lost that day as confusion reigned on the NYSE trading floor. Most believed this decline, like previous crashes, was temporary. President Hoover refused to comment directly on the market, saying only that the economy as a whole was sound. On October 25, a group of prominent bankers, attempting to slow the market’s death spiral, pooled their money and bought falling shares, providing a temporary respite. Yet they had little faith in their own hedge, and at the end of the day they secretly placed some shares back on the market. On Tuesday, October 29, there was a devastating sell-off of 23.5 million shares. Since September 1, the value of shares had declined by $18 billion. Some people, such as Secretary Mellon and British economist John Maynard Keynes, proclaimed the losses salutary because they would purge the economy of unsound businesses, leaving only the healthy ones. In the wake of past crashes, the federal government had not acted, and there were few calls for action now. Congressmen pondered the political implications of the sell-off, blind to the long-term effects on the nation. The hemorrhaging continued, and by mid-November the market had lost some $26 billion, about one-third of its September value.²³

Despite the staggering financial loss, no economist or historian has been able to establish a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the crash and the ten-year Depression that followed. Just as easy credit facilitated the crash but did not render it inevitable, Wall Street’s failure did not make a global, decade-long Depression inevitable. Initially, it seemed the panic would pass. By the end of 1929 the crash seemed like an aberration, or at least a normal adjustment to overvalued securities, the downswing of a pendulum that had swung too high. During the first half of 1930, planning for the London Naval Disarmament Conference was the major news story, not the deepening economic Depression. No major bank or company had failed. Even in hindsight, it is possible to interpret the stock market as simply a barometer that measures one index of business activity, rather than a cause that predetermines activity. Most expected the business decline to emulate the Harding recession of 1920–22, when the unemployment rate peaked at 5 million. Yet following the October 29 crash, jobless estimates show a downturn that initially moved at a slower rate, from 2.7 million in 1929 to about 4 million in mid-1930.

The catastrophe, however, was worldwide, not simply American made. The Great Depression was actually a series of segregated yet interconnected events in different parts of the world. The London market, which experienced stock speculation similar to that conducted in New York, had crashed a month prior to the Wall Street disaster. The National Bureau of Economic Research showed that eleven nations preceded the United States into the Depression, and eight others were destabilized approximately simultaneously.

James T. Shotwell, a social and economic historian, observed that the Great War had been the chief precipitating factor for the worldwide downturn. “Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that the world-wide economic depression is the last battle of the World War itself.”²⁴ The war had seen prices for natural resources such as metals and foodstuffs soar by 146 percent. When the conflict ended, prices fell, but the enormous debts incurred had to be repaid. Adding to the balance were trade restrictions, defaults on gold payments by struggling governments, and hoarding of precious metals by private citizens. During the first years after the war, trade was driven by a need for replenishment, and the world’s producers were slow to overtake demand. This inspired temporary prosperity at the cost of long-term stability and steady, even growth. In America, demand raced ahead of supply, but ultimately supply caught up.²⁵

In Washington, President Hoover quickly recognized the dangers of the crash on Wall Street. Fearing that it represented more than an ordinary slump, he “determined that the Federal government should use all of its powers.” In an attempt to arrest the deflationary spiral before it could fasten its grip on the economy, Hoover scheduled a series of private conferences with leaders from various sectors of the economy. In the first meeting, held at the White House on November 19, the president, along with cabinet members, convened with railroad executives, who agreed to maintain and even accelerate maintenance and the laying of tracks. They also agreed to avoid wage cuts in exchange for no-strike pledges from unions. On the morning of November 21, in a discussion with business leaders, the president exacted promises to avoid wage cuts and layoffs and, if necessary, to reduce the workweek in order to spread employment. This was crucial to preserve consumption, which powered the economy. Any reductions would have to come from profits, not jobs—Hoover did not consider labor a commodity to be liquidated. Some twenty-two executives agreed to implement Hoover’s requests to maintain wages at current levels. Before adjourning, Henry Ford guaranteed to grant wage increases to 150,000 employees of the Ford Motor Company. On November 22, the president summoned a meeting of leaders in the building and construction industries. They agreed to maintain their building schedule to save jobs. The following day he telegraphed all forty-eight governors and the mayors of major cities, urging them to expedite the pace of the public works to avert unemployment.²⁶ They agreed.

Soon after, Hoover met with labor leaders, who agreed to abstain from wage-increase demands and from striking. William Green, the president of the American Federation of Labor, concurred that wages should be stabilized at least until 1930. As a result, real wages, for those sufficiently fortunate to retain their jobs, would have more purchasing power due to deflated dollars. Next, Hoover met with the directors of the Farm Board, who attempted to stave off a collapse of the commodities market, and chairmen of the federal land banks, along with the leaders of national farm organizations. Hoover then conferred with leaders of the public utilities industry, who agreed, with the exception of the insolent Samuel Insull, to cooperate with the president’s program. Hoover asked his former assistant from the Food Administration and the Commerce Department, Julius Barnes, to create an executive committee of businessmen who could exert pressure to ensure that the agreements were implemented. On December 5, 1929, Barnes assembled the National Business Survey Conference in Washington, consisting of four hundred leading industrialists and financiers, to brainstorm about stabilizing business and enforcing the president’s guidelines. Meanwhile, Hoover opened the spigots of credit. The Federal Reserve System combated deflation by reducing its rediscount rate to member banks and by undertaking open-market operations. It also began to reject rediscounts to banks that used loans to finance speculation.²⁷

Such actions as persuading employers to preempt unemployment and stabilize labor relations had never before been attempted during a decline. Hoover was largely successful in eliminating strikes; his administration presided over a time of unusual labor peace. The prodding had tangible as well as psychological effects. Power companies increased their construction by $110 million over the previous year, while rail companies boosted theirs by $345 million and gas companies by $428 million above 1928. Moreover, the telephone and telegraph companies spent substantially more on repair and expansion. Altogether, the conclaves resulted in more than $1 billion in additional capital expenditures. Stocks also regained some of their lost ground. From mid-November through the final conference in early December, industrial stocks regained nearly three-fourths of their diminished value.²⁸

While encouraging private efforts, Hoover also launched large-scale public works at the federal level. In January 1930 he authorized the initiation of work on the Boulder Dam costing $60 million, and asked Congress for $500 million for the construction of public buildings. In addition, $75 million was authorized for work on highways. Hoover stated that it was the responsibility of the federal government to partially take up the slack in construction during hard times. Since his tenure as secretary of commerce he had advocated such a rainy-day fund. Congress agreed, sometimes grudgingly. The chief criticism on Capitol Hill was not that Hoover was doing too little, too late, but that he was overreaching, attempting too much, too soon. Historian Robert Sobel noted that in 1929 Hoover “proved a more activist president than any since the wartime activities of Wilson and Lincoln.” Sobel added, “Indeed, no peacetime president since Jefferson had done more to expand the power of the presidency in that one year.”²⁹ “No one in his place could have done more,” the New York Times wrote that spring. “Very few of his predecessors could have done as much.” The New York Herald Tribune described the president’s leadership as “cool and superlative.”³⁰

Some historians argue that both Hoover and, to a greater degree, Franklin D. Roosevelt prolonged the Depression by meddling in the economic cycle. Hoover himself was fiscally conservative in comparison with Roosevelt, but temperamentally he was an activist and was disposed to alleviate human suffering. Well-read in history and having lived and worked abroad, he also knew that economic desperation inspires political instability that often culminates in totalitarianism. Hoover did not believe that government alone could legislate or spend its way out of a depression. Yet his first priorities following the crash were to preserve social order and alleviate suffering. Still, Hoover considered it ill-advised to create a government bureaucracy that would prove perpetual after the emergency ended. He preferred decisive policy implemented by decentralized means that tapped voluntary goodwill at the grass roots.³¹

His presidency still young, coping with the shock of the stock market crash and the nation’s downward spiral into depression, Hoover now faced a contentious appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. On February 9, 1930, Chief Justice William Howard Taft resigned his seat due to ill health. The same day, Hoover announced the nomination of Charles Evans Hughes, one of the most distinguished Republicans. Hughes, a former governor of New York, had served on the Supreme Court for nearly six years before resigning to become the GOP candidate for president in 1916. Defeated by Woodrow Wilson, he later served as secretary of state under Harding and Coolidge. There were no blemishes on his record, nor any scandals in his closet. Yet opposition to Hughes hardened among the insurgent Republican clique along personal and ideological grounds. Some of the criticism of Hughes, impassioned if not unbiased, was indirectly aimed at Hoover. The insurgents, in alliance with some Democrats, claimed that Hughes was an opulent, conservative elitist, a crony of the aristocracy, and an attorney for big corporations who would orient the Court to the right. Hughes, they asserted, was an effete intellectual who did not understand dirt farmers, had never soiled his hands, and flitted among the corporate boardrooms of the Northeast. Aligned against Hughes were such GOP mavericks as Robert La Follette Jr. of Wisconsin, who had not voted for GOP legislation a single time during Hoover’s term; George Norris, who had supported Al Smith in 1928 and had cast only one vote for a Hoover measure in the Senate; Hiram Johnson, the president’s old archenemy still smarting from Hoover’s sidetracking of his bid for the GOP nomination in 1920; and Hoover’s new archenemy, William E. Borah, a silver-tongued though bellicose orator. Nonetheless, the insurgents and their Democratic allies could generate more noise than votes due to Hughes’s impeccable character and distinguished record. Ideologically, Hughes could not be pigeonholed. He was not actually a conservative but a moderate liberal who had cleaned up New York City, defended Socialists expelled from the New York legislature for their beliefs, and refused to permit party bosses to map out his 1916 campaign against Wilson. Ultimately, Hughes’s nomination prevailed 56–26 in the Senate. Eleven of the dissenters were Republicans.³²

Hoover’s next battle over a Supreme Court appointment occurred not long afterward and proved even more contentious than the polemics over Hughes. On March 8, 1930, Edward Terry Sanford, the only Southerner on the bench, died. The president wanted to replace him with another Southerner, particularly one from a circuit court district that had gone unrepresented for numerous years. Attorney General Mitchell perused possible nominees and recommended forty-four-year-old John J. Parker of North Carolina, a state Hoover had narrowly carried in 1928. Despite his youth, Parker was considered fair and highly intelligent and received endorsements from six former presidents, as well as the sitting president, of the American Bar Association. Although a Republican, Parker received the backing of ten Southern Democratic senators and seven Democratic governors. The jurist, who had never held elective office, had served as a special assistant to the U.S. attorney general under Coolidge from 1923 to 1925 before being elevated to the Federal Fourth Circuit Court. Opposition arose from two powerful interest groups, the AFL and the NAACP, both of which believed Parker might prove inimical to their interests. The AFL pointed to a case in which Parker had voted with the majority to uphold the legitimacy of a “yellow dog” contract requiring job applicants to pledge not to join a labor union as a condition of employment. Parker argued that he was not antilabor; he had merely followed judicial precedent. The Supreme Court had upheld a similar contract and any contrary lower court ruling would be summarily overturned. Nevertheless, the AFL mobilized its membership to exert pressure on industrial state senators to oppose Parker. The NAACP launched a campaign against Parker as well, arguing that no white Southerner could be a fair judge. Moreover, in 1920, while running for a state office, Parker had reputedly denied being an integrationist when baited, though any white Southerner with hope of winning would have been forced to respond as such in a state in which the voting public was exclusively white. Moreover, some senators, and their constituents, did not want a truly independent thinker on the bench who examined the evidence case by case and voted on its individual merits. While Hughes’s stature had enabled him to overcome the opposition, Parker had neither the stature nor the experience.³³

The GOP insurgents alone could not block Parker’s nomination; they could only make it ugly. Yet many Republican regulars who normally backed the administration joined the objectors. Senators representing states where the AFL or the NAACP wielded considerable clout resorted to self-preservation over loyalty to the president. Concerned with their own reelection prospects if they defied these potent interest groups, they weighed the odds and calculated that they had nothing to gain by voting for Parker. Meanwhile, Parker remained silent, considering it improper to lobby for a Supreme Court appointment, though he issued a letter defending his record. A more aggressive effort by Hoover might have tipped the scales in his favor. He did persuade several wavering senators, but on May 7 Parker’s nomination was defeated 41–39. If the president had persuaded one more senator to vote for his nominee, a tie would have resulted, permitting Vice President Curtis to cast the deciding vote and ensuring the confirmation. It was a major setback for Hoover; such a defeat had not been inflicted on a president since the second administration of Grover Cleveland thirty-six years earlier.³⁴

Though humiliated, Hoover maintained a dignified silence. The New York Times pointed out the hypocrisy of Southern Democrats, themselves white supremacists who voted against Parker to embarrass the president, even if it made a fellow Southerner the sacrificial lamb.³⁵ The Minneapolis Journal took aim at Senator Borah. “The Borahs of the Senate want no Supreme Court appointee whose opinion on a controversial subject will be formed after he has examined the subject,” the daily wrote. “They want a man whose opinion in a given controversy they can pretty well guess in advance.”³⁶ An editorial in the New York Herald Tribune punctured the Senate’s cynical rhetoric: “An argument might have been made that the president should have appointed a more experienced jurist. A counterargument could have commended Parker as one of the ablest members in the circuit court system. Yet neither argument was made.” Instead, the paper continued, the Senate “seemed chiefly intent on demonstrating once more its ability to rank among the pettiest deliberative bodies in the world.”³⁷

Following the Parker setback, the president nominated a safe successor, Owen J. Roberts, a Philadelphia attorney who had spent most of his career in private practice and had won every case he argued before the Supreme Court. He was one of two attorneys, along with Atlee Pomerene of Ohio, who had been appointed counsel for the government by President Coolidge to prosecute the oil scandals that had occurred during Harding’s administration. After the bitter fight over Parker’s nomination, Roberts, a moderately conservative Republican, was confirmed by the Senate within one minute after his name was presented to the upper chamber, without even a roll call.³⁸ Nearly two years later, Hoover again faced a Supreme Court nomination battle, yet fortunately this one fared as easily as Roberts’s had. On February 15, 1932, Benjamin Cardozo, a liberal Jewish Democrat from New York, reached the bench with negligible opposition. Cardozo had not been Hoover’s first choice—he had intended to appoint Attorney General Mitchell to the slot and move Patrick Hurley to Justice, but Mitchell was lukewarm about the idea. Hoover had been impressed by Cardozo’s intellect and impressive service on the Wickersham Committee and felt he could be easily confirmed. Roberts and Cardozo both had noncontroversial stints on the Supreme Court and joined the ranks of distinguished jurists.³⁹