ELEVEN

Democracy Is a Harsh Employer

There was no more telling symptom of the malaise that afflicted America in the months leading into the 1932 election than a soup kitchen in Chicago where unemployed men in threadbare suits and caps were photographed by news reporters as they lined up for sustenance. The kitchen was a gesture of philanthropy by America’s most notorious criminal, Al Capone. The perception that gangsters were filling the vacuum by assisting the public while the federal government did little would plague Hoover throughout 1932. With the booming economy of the previous decade in shambles, and radical voices on the left and right calling for a new social and economic order, many prognosticators believed that almost any Democrat could defeat Hoover. Yet the Republicans were without a viable alternative. Hoover had deliberately avoided entering most primaries in order to avert an embarrassing defeat in the West. Twelve delegates listed Coolidge as their first choice, yet the former president preferred retirement. Lacking the consensus to unite behind another candidate, the Republicans fell into inertia, gambled on the advantage inherent to incumbent officeholders, or hoped that voters would remember Hoover’s long-standing record of public service. There was little doubt that Charles Curtis would be Hoover’s running mate if he desired the nomination, though some of his friends wanted to elect him senator from Kansas, a position he was more likely to win.

The Republican National Convention gathered at the Chicago Stadium from June 14 through June 16. Polled on the issues, delegates to the convention overwhelmingly cited the economy, an issue boding ill for their nominee. Prohibition remained an important issue, second only to the economy, but the GOP was fiercely divided among itself. Rather than call for outright appeal or for continuing the policy, their platform called for each state to decide the question for itself. Although Vice President Curtis was a strong “dry,” Hoover considered drinking not a moral issue but ultimately an issue of personal choice. He felt that as long as Prohibition remained the law it should be enforced, and his efforts to step up enforcement led to the conviction of Capone for tax evasion. By contrast, Franklin D. Roosevelt had moved from a “damp,” or willing-to-compromise, position on Prohibition to a “wet” advocacy of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment. Among the GOP delegates in Chicago was a growing sense of defeatism, a sense that, given the wretched economy, any GOP candidate faced inevitable defeat. The widespread unpopularity of Prohibition presented yet another problem. An American presidential election is primarily a referendum on the state of the country, an axiom almost as certain as the law of gravity. In 1932, the resentment of the voters was palpable.¹

In late June, Franklin D. Roosevelt broke with tradition by accepting his party’s nomination at its national convention in Chicago. His nine-hour flight from Albany added urgency and a dash of modernity to his campaign for the White House. Hoover considered FDR’s descent upon Chicago as grandstanding. He had followed custom by not attending his party’s convention, and he delivered his acceptance speech later, on August 11, his birthday. The reception was much better than might have been expected, given the doubtfulness of victory. The audience of five thousand at Washington’s Constitution Hall cheered enthusiastically, inspired as they rarely were by a Hoover address. If he could have reached this level of animation more consistently, the reserved Quaker would have been a more popular president. Despite the widespread public perception that Hoover would be unable to vanquish the Depression, he might have campaigned more successfully if he had shared FDR’s ability to make people feel better about themselves. Of course, the crowd at Constitution Hall already supported him; he was not seeking converts, and yet the enthusiasm also extended to professional journalists covering the event. “There was sudden realization of his steadfastness, his patient courage, his quiet strength,” the New York Herald Tribune wrote. “He had given himself gallantly in what might prove to be a losing cause on both the political and the economic front, but there was no question that he had given himself.”² At least briefly, the address rallied the spirits of the GOP across the nation. “The speech will have a tremendous and permanent effect in stabilizing the thought of the people,” Henry Ford said. “I think all of our citizens are proud of our president today.” R. R. Moton, the black educator who served as president of Tuskegee Institute, added, “There has been no address or state paper since Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address that compares with it.”³ Some journalists observed that they saw empathy in the president they had not known existed. “It was straight from the heart,” another daily explained.⁴

Despite Hoover’s showing that he could make a rousing speech, his second term was anything but assured. The GOP remained the majority party, yet it was splintered and demoralized by the Great Depression. Many Americans, out of work and struggling to feed their families, felt that any change in the White House would be a change for the better. Unlike Hoover, Roosevelt grasped intuitively that the election would be determined by emotion, not intellectual persuasion; by the belly, not the brain. The man the voters liked best would win. The one they hated most would lose. The Depression gave the challenger a long head start. In desperate times people seek change; they are willing to take risks; on impulse the prevailing party can be tried and convicted simply for being there at the time a disaster occurred. Although Hoover addressed the nation by radio, he used it merely as a megaphone to reach a larger audience. Roosevelt had a keener understanding of the nascent medium’s potential to simulate a personal conversation with his listeners. Yet some analysts agreed with Hoover and considered FDR weak, ill informed, too eager to try to please everyone, and a mediocre intellect.⁵ Hoover quipped that the chief obstacles he had to overcome to win were “10,000,000 unemployed, 10,000 bonus marchers, and 10-cent corn.”⁶

Hoover underestimated Roosevelt and believed he would be the easiest Democrat to defeat. He assumed FDR would find it impossible to do the work of the presidency from a wheelchair. Also, he derided Roosevelt as long on style but short on substance, calling FDR’s promise to give a job to every unemployed American “cruel” for building false hope. Hoover and Roosevelt had been personal friends, or at least convivial acquaintances, until FDR turned on Hoover during the 1928 campaign. As a result, the president considered Roosevelt fickle and unprincipled, with a win-at-all-costs ethical code. Nonetheless, the Depression, not Roosevelt, was the real enemy. Under ordinary circumstances Hoover would have been a strong candidate, but these were unusual conditions. One supporter of Hoover summed up the dilemma of the GOP. “It was natural to claim for the Republican Party the great prosperity of 1928, but unfortunately it is equally natural to lay at its doors the misfortune of 1932.” He explained that FDR was a more formidable opponent than Al Smith, whose Roman Catholic faith Protestants viewed with suspicion and whose links to Tammany Hall lent him an unwanted aura of big-city corruption. “Although infinitely inferior in mentality to Smith, Roosevelt has a pleasing personality; a good voice; a good appeal as a speaker, without any of the disqualifications of his opponent since religion is not an issue. . . . All he really has to do is to capitalize on the present discontent, and let that current bear him in.” The writer’s advice was that Hoover should be bold and assertive, frame pithy, catchy slogans, and take the offensive. He should emphasize the challenger’s lack of qualifications and lack of viable alternatives to the Hoover program, placing the Democrat on the defensive.⁷

Republicans had not faced so grave a challenge for a long time. Money was an enormous problem for the GOP. The party eventually patched together about $2.5 million, more than the Democrats, but less than the $4 million they had spent in 1928, during booming times. Ironically, the Democrats spent less in winning in 1932 than they had in losing in 1928. The parties were fairly evenly matched in total spending, though the Republicans had a slender edge. Hoover and the best orator on his campaign team, Ogden L. Mills, paid for radio time out of their own pockets. The president was forced to spend a good deal of time raising money to keep the campaign solvent, finally obtaining a pledge of $500,000 from J. P. Morgan on the condition that Hoover raise matching funds. The president found the money, which lasted through the end of the GOP campaign.⁸

In mid-September, the returns in Maine, a rock-ribbed, reliably Republican state that voted in advance of most state elections in November, dumped a dose of cold reality on Republicans’ hopes of carrying New England. Maine residents elected only their fourth Democratic governor since the Civil War, and two of three Democratic representatives won. There were no local issues; the election was considered a referendum on the economy. “No Maine election in modern times has appeared so ominous to Republican Presidential prospects,” the New York Herald Tribune concluded. The results helped ignite the president’s campaign, although he still did not campaign on a nationwide scale as Roosevelt was doing.⁹

The contrast in strategy was clear. Throughout the summer and fall Roosevelt barnstormed the country. Although he used a wheelchair, he carefully concealed his disability from the general public and refused to be photographed on crutches. Hoover did not plan his first major speech until October 1, believing speeches before that date were forgotten. Rather than campaigning personally, he planned to rely on surrogates and to avoid campaigning west of Des Moines. Ogden L. Mills, not the president himself, would shadow Roosevelt and refute the challenger’s allegations. Hoover’s aides warned that though farmers were angry, heartland votes were crucial, but the president was slow to respond. He was reluctant to leave Washington, where he was working on a program to end the Depression. Campaigning had little interest for him. He conceded that the West and the South would be carried by Democrats, and he felt his best option would be to cobble together an electoral majority in the Northeast, New England, the Mid-Atlantic States, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois.

The Des Moines speech on October 4 was only Hoover’s second since his acceptance speech on August 11. The president’s press secretary, Theodore Joslin, had suggested Kansas City would be better, but Hoover insisted on speaking in the state of his birth. As his train traveled west from Washington, Hoover polished his address until the last minute. The parade from the train station to the coliseum, where the speech was delivered, was watched by 125,000 onlookers, who provided a rousing reception. Hoover, moved by speaking in his native state, rose to the occasion, delivering his remarks, which dealt specifically with agriculture, with vigor and emotion. Congratulatory telegrams poured in afterward. Joslin considered the effort at Des Moines the best speech of the campaign. “I have never experienced one like it before and I have traveled with Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, La Follette, among other Presidents and would-be Presidents,” Joslin remarked.¹⁰ Later that night the president informally discussed his Iowa boyhood with journalists, regaling them with off-the-record stories, showing a human side the public rarely witnessed. He was relaxed and among friends. Hoover reminded old friends, acquaintances, and reporters of his rural roots and his love of agriculture, but the election was now only five weeks away and much of the agrarian heartland was already lost. The defeat in Maine had galvanized the Republicans, but the Democrats had a head start and the mood of the country was sour. It was, Hoover sensed, too little, too late.¹¹

Hoover was confronted with an almost entirely negative campaign waged by his opponent and his surrogates, who accused him of feeling no sympathy for the suffering of Americans and denounced his economic policies for causing the Depression. Roosevelt, who had once expressed admiration for Hoover, now held him responsible not only for sinking the ship of state, but for sinking it in a sea of red ink. In a campaign speech, FDR called for reducing the federal budget “not less than by 25%.” Like Hoover, he believed in balanced budgets, although he never achieved one as president. Roosevelt made few promises with specific content. He vowed to help people but was vague on specifics. He pledged to preserve sound money but did not define “sound money.”

Roosevelt needed only to exploit already existing discontent that was steaming over. He tried to be all things to all people without alienating anyone. Lamentations about the “Hoover Breadlines” for the hungry and the “Hoovervilles” for the homeless that sprang up in big cities helped make political capital of human misery. They also covered up the fact that the Democrats had few plans of their own to improve conditions. Lies were told about Hoover. Drew Pearson, writer of the syndicated newspaper column “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” depicted the president as a man who was rude to his wife and habitually lost his temper, and who as a boy had peddled worthless land by duping settlers as a mere office boy for his uncle’s Salem land company. But that was the least of Hoover’s crimes, according to Pearson. He claimed that Hoover also swindled the unwary during his mining career. Moreover, he employed Chinese coolies as virtual slaves to mine for him and chained them to a stake in the hot sun for a full day to discourage strikes.¹²

For most of the campaign Hoover kept his peace. Only once, in his address at Fort Wayne, Indiana, on October 4, 1932, did he attempt to even partially respond. “During my public life, I have believed that sportsmanship and statesmanship called for the elimination of harsh personalities between opponents,” he said. “I shall now say the only harsh word that I have uttered in public office,” he explained. “When you are told that the President of the United States, who by the most sacred trust of our nation is the President of all the people, a man of your own blood and upbringing, has sat in the White House for the last three years of your misfortune without troubling to know your burdens,” he continued, “without heartaches over your miseries and casualties, without summoning every avenue of skillful assistance, irrespective of party or view, without using every ounce of his strength and straining his every nerve to protect and help,” he concluded, “without using every possible agency of democracy that would bring aid, without putting aside personal ambition and humbling his pride of opinion if that would serve—then I say to you that such statements are deliberate, intolerable falsehoods.”¹³

In his Fort Wayne speech, Hoover also refuted the imputation that the worldwide Depression had originated on his watch, due partly to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, and that he personally had perpetuated it. The chief executive discussed at length the Depression’s origins. He cited the destruction of the Great War, the harsh treaties imposed on the defeated nations, the expenses of large standing armies, which weighed down the European economies, revolutions in Russia and China, overproduction in agriculture in many parts of the world, and a general attitude of malaise. These developments had heaped calamity upon calamity. The downturn was more complex and deep-rooted than the American stock market crash or the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. In fact, the Depression had begun abroad before the American tariff was even passed. The highly respected Bureau of Economic Research stated that the Depression had begun in eleven nations with populations totaling 600 million prior to its origins in America. The president then paused and asked why no Democrat had predicted the Depression. “I did not notice any Democratic Jeremiahs.” The president slammed home that the insinuation that his administration had fomented the Depression was woefully ignorant or deliberately designed to sow political blame. He might have gone further and added that the Democrats had not proposed any solutions to the Depression, either. They wanted people to believe that if Hoover disappeared, the Depression would evaporate. Roosevelt might make complex problems appear simple, but that did not make the reality of the problems any simpler.¹⁴

Slander is endemic in American political campaigns, but in 1932 it reached epic proportions, destroying the image of one of the kindest men ever to occupy the White House. Some Americans were willing to believe even the most scurrilous whispers about Hoover, given the depth of the economic crisis and his image of cold detachment. During the campaign, a rumor spread implicating the president in the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. (Charles Lindbergh was actually a close friend of Hoover.) The fiercely loyal Lou exclaimed that after hearing the bombastic hyperbole that had smeared her husband she would have voted against him herself, had she been sufficiently gullible. Some of Roosevelt’s closest advisers found the lies difficult to stomach, and several prominent New Dealers later admitted so. Raymond Moley, who subsequently broke with Roosevelt, grew to like and appreciate Hoover’s skills and honesty. Rexford Tugwell, like Moley a Brain Truster and a Roosevelt speechwriter, admitted in 1974 that much of the substance of the New Deal’s programs had been borrowed from Hoover. FDR’s first vice president, John Nance Garner, also became a Hoover convert in later years and regretted the vindictiveness of his attacks.¹⁵

One of the first supporters Hoover recruited to speak on his behalf was ex-president Coolidge, who remained popular among many Republicans, although his reputation had lost some of its luster. Coolidge, resentful of the Democratic criticism, was anxious to speak, yet his health had declined and he could not travel extensively. In early September The Saturday Evening Post published an article by Coolidge strongly backing his former commerce secretary. Coolidge had additional incentive, because FDR had blamed Coolidge for countenancing the conditions that led to the Depression during his administration with his laissez-faire philosophy toward business interests. Coolidge wrote that Hoover had done a superb job as president, had the Depression almost under control when factors abroad pulled the world economy down in 1931, and had performed his duties better than any other world leader of his time. Coolidge reiterated that message in a speech to twenty thousand responsive Republicans at Madison Square Garden on October 11, carried nationwide via radio. He delivered a second national radio address directed at getting out the vote on election eve, the same evening Hoover delivered a related talk.

Initially, Hoover planned to deliver only three or four major speeches, yet during the final six weeks of the campaign he reached out to all sections of the nation. He believed in his policies and was persuaded that they were working. He felt he could help lift the nation out of the doldrums of the slumping economy, given a second term. To elect Roosevelt would delay recovery and might encourage the imposition of a leviathan government. If Hoover were defeated, he felt certain his policies would be abandoned. He feared the prospect of reckless experimentation and unwise concentration of power in a Democratic administration. He believed Roosevelt’s plans were poorly conceived—indeed, barely thought out—and would result in bureaucracy, not prosperity. Hoover would have preferred to remain in Washington and work on the nation’s problems, but now he forced himself to play a more active role in his own campaign. None of his loyal supporters had his national credibility. Some of his best orators, such as Senator Borah, had broken with him, and Curtis was no longer popular in the party because of his bone-dry position on Prohibition. Hoover knew he must still rely partly on surrogates, but he continued to write his own speeches. He felt it was necessary to travel more than he had intended to and utilize radio as much as his meager budget would permit.¹⁶

During October, Hoover’s team saturated the Midwest with speakers, including cabinet officials, congressmen, and other high-ranking GOP spokesmen. Treasury Secretary Ogden Mills, an eloquent upstate New Yorker who was a neighbor of FDR and the most effective orator in the Republican arsenal, made the most grueling tour, trekking all the way to California to shadow the Democratic candidate and rebut his speeches. Altogether, the GOP put some 260 speakers into the field during October to refute FDR’s charges, defend Hoover, and outline the Republican program. Mills and Indiana congressman Will R. Wood led the attack in the Midwest, where they compared the substance of Hoover’s agricultural program with the vague promises of the Democrats. The Republicans depicted Roosevelt as a candidate with a pleasing personality who lacked both a program and principles. Wood, in particular, attacked the Roosevelt claim that Hoover was an extravagant waster of federal dollars. Wood said the only increase in expenses was for construction work needed to provide the unemployed with jobs. FDR had claimed that the current administration had spent the most money in history without mentioning the jobs created by the federal construction. Wood pointed out that the Democratic House had denied the president the authority to thoroughly reorganize the government in the interest of economy. Roosevelt had condemned the president for pyramiding “bureau upon bureau,” yet the only additions made, such as the RFC and the home loan bank system, had enabled the government to combat the Depression and save homes, banks, and farms.¹⁷

Addressing the Republican State Convention at Detroit and reaching the nation via a national radio network, Mills defended Hoover’s record and assailed Roosevelt for lacking “any indication of having a program to lead the American people out of this valley,” contrasting Hoover’s integrated plan with Roosevelt’s “intellectual lassitude.” Mills resisted ad hominem attacks but criticized FDR’s skeleton program of vague platitudes point by point.¹⁸ On October 12, Senator Henry D. Hatfield of West Virginia accused FDR of taking a hypocritical stand on the tariff. Noting that the Democrats had accused the GOP of logrolling in enacting the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, he struck back. Hatfield insisted that “they propose a system of reciprocal tariffs wherein treaties will be entered with some forty-eight different foreign nations, and they ask the American people to believe that in the making of these treaties there will be no log-rolling or bartering.” The following day, at Chicago, Ogden Mills asserted that Roosevelt blamed Hoover for his actions yet had presented no package of his own. Mills cited Hoover’s massive programs of public works, job creation, relief, mortgage protection, and home and business loans and charged that the Democrats offered nothing specific. “Governor Roosevelt has no answer,” he declared. Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley charged that Roosevelt’s tracing of the Depression solely to American roots was a historical distortion. The calamity and its origins were worldwide and the Depression had taken effect in some countries before leaping the Atlantic to America. FDR himself had had the tools to prevent or mitigate the stock market crash and major bank failures and had not exerted them, he claimed. The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that banks and the New York Stock Exchange operated in intrastate, not interstate, commerce. Roosevelt, not Hoover, had the responsibility to regulate them, and he had not done so.¹⁹

At a speech in Cleveland, Hoover focused on economic problems, including unemployment and the tariff. He continued to defend his policies, yet he urged his countrymen to think beyond the material aspects of life and, even in their suffering, to view material possessions as a means to wholesomeness and a happy home rather than as an end in themselves. Hoover spoke to twenty-four thousand people at the city auditorium and to a nationwide radio audience. He was warmly received, yet the crowd was less enthusiastic than that at Des Moines, where he was on native turf. Along the way he made several short speeches from the rear platform of his train. Now in a fighting mood, the incumbent had decided he must be more assertive in defending his administration and not leave all the work to his surrogates. The president denied that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff had incited the Depression. It increased the general duty only 2.2 percent, and two-thirds of American products were nondutiable, he explained. Once more he emphasized that it was simplistic to attribute the Depression to a single event in a single nation. Shortly after his Cleveland address, Hoover spoke in Detroit, where he took the offensive, charging the Democrats with condemning his ideas because they lacked original ideas of their own. Virtually all of Hoover’s criticism of the Democrats was directed toward them as a party and their policies, however, and he rarely employed personal invective. He challenged Roosevelt, who was avoiding the issue, to take a clear stand on the veterans’ bonus and said he did not intend to make Prohibition a campaign issue.²⁰

After the Detroit speech, Hoover devoted several days to public matters in Washington and to writing his next major address, scheduled for Indianapolis. From a strategic perspective, the Indianapolis talk was the high point of the campaign.²¹ This wrap-up, whirlwind tour included brief speech stops in Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. The president exhibited Democratic propaganda that was being employed against him that mocked some of his most important accomplishments. He displayed flyers distributed by the Democratic National Committee with banner headlines reading “How President Hoover has failed children.” Another stated, “His real interest in the Nation’s children may be gained by his recorded effort to emasculate and disrupt the Children’s Bureau.” Another was entitled “The Bunk of the Home Loan Bank.”²² On his return the chief executive spoke for half an hour in Philadelphia. Then he headed to Baltimore and Wilmington, Delaware. The president whistle-stopped through several coal and industrial states, devoting special attention to the hard-hit mining districts, and conferred with United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis.²³

Although by early November Hoover accepted that his chances for a second term were remote, those final days before the election saw him revitalized. As he returned to the East, which he considered his base, he planned to make one final effort in New York City, his October 31 speech at Madison Square Garden. Hoover had said from the beginning that he must carry New York to win the election, and he vowed to make a supreme effort there. In each of his previous speeches, the president had emphasized a single theme. Now, in his New York speech, he attempted to weave the strands into a common theme, provide moral uplift, and explain how his philosophy differed from his opponent’s. En route, the chief executive delivered a speech to seventy-five thousand GOP partisans at Newark. He dwelled on business conditions, which he said had been improving since his debt moratorium and standstill agreement. He indicated that there had been an upswing in most economic indices since midsummer.²⁴

The crowds that lined the streets to Madison Square Garden were enthusiastic, and Hoover hoped the mood indicated a shift in his direction. The audience inside the Garden was massive. Some twenty-five thousand people had to be turned away for lack of seats. In his address, Hoover attacked Roosevelt’s philosophy of government, which, he complained, was built from the top down rather than from the grass roots. FDR would build layers of bureaucracy through which the average citizen must meander. Bureaucracies are self-perpetuating and wasteful, Hoover pointed out; they represent their own interests rather than those of the people. Above the bureaucracy stand the politicians, whose objective is to keep their own jobs by doling out favors, not to the neediest, but to those most likely to vote for them. Such a model for government is unwieldy and does not have the best interests of the common people at heart. This election, Hoover stated, represented a difference not merely between two candidates but between two philosophies of government. Hoover continued to hammer away at the contradictions in Roosevelt’s public pronouncements, seeking to contrast his policies with FDR’s. He attacked his opponent for pandering to the popular mood rather than delivering substance, and he defended his own economic program and personal character against the attacks that had been made on him. A few days before the election, in Springfield, Illinois, Hoover accused his rival of pledging one type of tariff policy in the East and the diametrically opposed position in the West. Roosevelt could not be trusted to keep his promises, Hoover warned.²⁵

Maintaining a vigorous pace through Election Day, Hoover spoke by radio to his home state of California, where polls showed him trailing, and announced that he would cross the country by rail to vote in Palo Alto. Along the way he made twenty-eight speeches from the rear of his coach and major addresses at Springfield, Illinois; St. Louis; St. Paul; Salt Lake City; and Elko, Nevada. The president conceded to his staff that only an unlikely rapid improvement in the economy could carry him to victory. Before departing the White House, he spent three arduous days writing his speeches in longhand, with minimal input from associates. He tried to be upbeat but realistic. Along the way, the president reached the point of near exhaustion, stumbling over words and almost collapsing on the platform at St. Paul. He spoke haltingly and his voice was weak. He repeatedly lost his place in the manuscript and struggled to complete the speech.²⁶ In Washington, a dismayed Theodore Joslin listened to Hoover’s address by radio. “The President was absolutely punch drunk tonight,” Joslin wrote in his diary after speaking with Hoover over the telephone. “The content of the speech was good,” explained Joslin. “But the delivery of his speech was terrible. Hoover’s speech didn’t help him any in the circumstances. It is too bad for we were hoping it would swing Minnesota and perhaps North Dakota.”²⁷

Not every address showed the wear and strain of campaigning. Speaking in St. Louis, Hoover was combative and assertive. The president blamed Roosevelt for the nasty tone of the campaign, saturated with distortion and innuendo. Hoover defended his record and said the Democrats could not escape a share of the blame for conditions that instigated the implosion of the economy. “I submit that some of the greatest leaders amongst the boom promoters of this period belonged to the Democratic Party, and the Democratic candidate himself assisted actively in promotions.” He added that “the Governor in his speeches conveys the impression that as President I should have stopped the boom. He does not prescribe the method by which I should have stopped it.” Finally, he said, “If the President had attempted to stop that boom, one of the persons he would have needed to warn is the present Democratic candidate.”²⁸ The president also rebutted the Democratic argument that charged him with sole responsibility for the Depression by pointing out that Democrats had offered few tangible alternatives of their own.²⁹ Logic was on Hoover’s side, but emotion was on FDR’s side. Hoover’s train continued westward to Salt Lake City, where he addressed ten thousand in his final major speech, then to the small town of Elko, Nevada, where he delivered his last radio address. Then it was off to Palo Alto. At Stanford University, where classes were dismissed for Election Day, Hoover addressed two thousand students who had gathered to support him. The Hoovers cast their votes at the Stanford Union. The president carried the precinct easily. He retired to his home nearby, where family and old friends waited by the radio and listened to the returns until early evening.

The homeward journey had been difficult. On his return to California to vote, Hoover’s train was halted because a vandal was spotted pulling up spikes, hoping to derail the engine. The man was arrested. In Nevada, Hoover was pelted with eggs, and the state’s governor refused to greet him. With morbid humor, a man cabled Hoover: “Vote for Roosevelt and make it unanimous.”³⁰ Once a beloved world-renowned figure, Hoover was no longer termed the Great Engineer or the Great Humanitarian except in mockery. The stereotype that replaced his heroic status was the personification of the Great Depression, which, ironically, he had labored tirelessly to alleviate. The modest Quaker has often been depicted by historians as glum, dejected, defeated, eager to depart the White House and release his burden. Just the opposite was true. He was eager to win a second term because he felt certain the Depression was almost over. On November 8, the American voters denied him that opportunity. Roosevelt carried 42 states, winning 472 electoral votes and 57.4 percent of the popular vote. Hoover took only 59 electoral votes and 39.7 percent of the popular vote. It was a resounding renunciation of his administration. At nine thirty p.m. Hoover conceded defeat as calmly as he had accepted victory four years earlier.

In the weeks that followed the election, major newspapers tried to explain Hoover’s presidency in perspective. Considering his decisive defeat, most major dailies demonstrated respect, even praise. One common sentiment was that anyone who had found himself in Hoover’s position would have been hard-pressed to do better. The Washington Post agreed with the president’s own assessment that the American economy was reviving from its slumber in 1931 when the European economic crisis plunged it into a coma. “Mr. Hoover,” the Post observed, “has earned the gratitude of the country for his services. He has battled with gigantic and unprecedented forces of destruction, without sparing himself.” The New York Herald Tribune wrote that in his “resolute self-sacrificing devotion to the ‘American System’ Mr. Hoover proved himself a great President.” On the other hand, the Chicago Tribune accused Hoover of incubating socialism in America.³¹ As for the judgment of history, it was then too early to ascertain whether he would be labeled with an epitaph suited for ruining the country, or apropos the first Jeffersonian Republican. He still had more than a quarter century to make a difference and to write much of his own legacy.

The long interregnum between the voting in November and Roosevelt’s inauguration on March 4, 1933, was one of the most contentious in history. During the interim between the election and the swearing in, the nation was in limbo. Hoover was the last president to experience the long transition as a lame duck. The Twentieth Amendment, which ended the period on January 3 for Congress and January 20 for the president, did not take effect during his term. Although he still had the legal mandate to govern, he was deprived of meaningful power. The interlude between the inauguration and the election had created a difficult transition during earlier administrations, but the tense nature of the Hoover-Roosevelt transfer of power occurred during a precarious time. While en route to Washington by train, two days after the election, Hoover addressed a long telegram to Roosevelt, outlining the intention of America’s Great War allies to cancel or reduce their war debts to the United States in light of the worldwide economic downturn. Hoover wanted to work with Roosevelt to craft a bipartisan response. Roosevelt agreed to meet with Hoover but refused to take action, declaring that the problem needed to be sorted out by the outgoing administration. Congress, rudderless, meandering, and lacking guidance, balked at even the most mundane request from the outgoing president and blocked confirmation of even low-level government appointees. Hoover was president in title only; the ship of state lay beached. Seldom was the transfer of power between an outgoing president and his successor as awkward or acrimonious. This was not because of any lack of vital executive business. Roosevelt said he would not act or comment until attired in the requisite authority of president. When Hoover talked, the public appeared deaf. A logjam of business piled up in Congress and in the executive branch. Roosevelt instructed Democrats not to vote without instructions from him, but he issued few specific guidelines except to kill Hoover bills and appointments. Almost the entire four years of Hoover’s administration had been frustrating, but the interregnum proved the most frustrating. At least during previous crises he had been in charge. Now no one was in charge. The stressful interregnum was characterized by a series of dilemmas that included a banking panic, acute unemployment, unsettled economic issues with Europe, a decline in world trade, and a fiscal crisis punctuated by uncertainty over the future of the gold standard. Hoover turned to Roosevelt, who rejected every overture. Some of FDR’s advisers believed the outgoing president wanted to trap the governor into pursuing his discredited script. By March 4, Inauguration Day, the men were bitter and remote.³²

Rumors gathered that the new president planned to devaluate gold-backed money or abandon the gold standard entirely, which provoked the greatest bank panic of the Depression, eclipsing 1929 and 1931. House Speaker Garner recklessly published the names of banks that had received RFC loans, which started a panicked run on those banks. Exchange rates became scrambled, destabilizing foreign trade. Roosevelt resolutely refused Hoover’s request to spell out what steps he would take about banks and the currency despite the tide of bank failures sweeping the nation. Hoover and some of Roosevelt’s most trusted advisers warned him that this would inspire turmoil in financial markets. The incoming president seemed content to let the economy drift for the remainder of Hoover’s tenure. Banks and repositories were drained of assets and toppled like children’s blocks during the disorderly interlude. Congress and the people would not follow Hoover, and FDR would not lead. The longer the power vacuum lasted, the worse conditions became. Some three-fourths of the withdrawals occurred during the week before FDR’s inauguration, more than half during the final three days. It constituted a far greater economic catastrophe than the crash of 1929. Roosevelt’s intentions remained inscrutable. The president-elect sneered at federal interventions, arguing that he “could see no reason why he should save these bankers,” ignoring the stark reality that when banks failed, depositors were left penniless.³³

The next installment of World War I debts would overlap the Hoover-Roosevelt administrations. Foreign debtors wanted to negotiate reductions during the Hoover administration for payments due during the Roosevelt administration, but the incoming and outgoing presidents could not agree on terms, or even conduct a serious discussion on the subject. Hoover, Roosevelt, and their aides met for two major discussions, but Roosevelt wanted to wait until he became president to deal with the issue. Hoover argued that by that time it would be too late because the deadline would have passed and the debtor nations would have defaulted. The outgoing and incoming administrations also discussed the rash of bank failures. Both sides believed some form of bank holiday might be necessary to avert a total collapse, but time ran out before they could agree on details. Roosevelt consistently refused to negotiate any tentative agreement until he was actually president, and every proposal foundered on that obstacle. Under the existing circumstances, almost any clarification of intended policy would have been stabilizing, yet there were none.³⁴

Hoover and Roosevelt took different approaches to their meetings, usually with one or two advisers present. Hoover wanted straightforward negotiations resulting in decisive commitments, while Roosevelt preferred pleasant chats during which not much business got done. The two men had common friends, one of whom confided that the New Dealers wanted economic conditions to decline to their lowest point before the new administration took office. Using that valley as their barometer, they could measure recovery against the period when the Depression bottomed out—Hoover’s interregnum—and use those gloomy statistics in future comparisons. Even with the election over, the politically minded FDR wanted to wring every political advantage out of the failing economy.³⁵

Roosevelt was an intuitively adept politician, while Hoover was no politician at all, simply a public servant with a set of objectives he wanted to achieve. While Hoover’s presidency was scrupulously planned, Roosevelt’s was made up off the cuff, characterized by a weak cabinet but strong advisers. Roosevelt did not initiate most of his own policy; he waited for business to be brought to him and let others flesh out the details. He procrastinated endlessly and changed his mind and his set of advisers often. He frequently borrowed from others (including Hoover), often without attribution. Raymond Moley, an early Brain Truster, commented that to conceive of the New Deal as “the result of a unified plan was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter’s tools, geometry books and chemistry sets in a boy’s bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator.” Moley made these observations in retrospect after breaking with Roosevelt and leaving the New Deal. Those who saw FDR up close were often not as impressed with his intellect as those who saw Hoover intimately.³⁶

Inauguration Day on March 4, 1933, was a chilly affair. Hoover and Roosevelt rode together in an open car to the Capitol for the swearing-in ceremony but barely exchanged words. Afterward, Hoover and his family departed Washington for New York. He planned to return to his beloved California for a quiet life in retirement, perhaps dabbling in engineering and farming, writing, continuing his work with charities such as the Belgian-American Educational Foundation and the Boys Clubs of America, and becoming more involved in Stanford affairs. However, although he was relieved of official responsibilities, his pace never slackened.

Hoover lost the 1932 election primarily because of the woeful state of the economy more than anything he did or did not do. Like all mortals, he had human foibles and made mistakes. His most fateful mistake was choosing politics as a profession. He was an introvert in a profession that rewards extroverts. He did not enjoy mixing with crowds, shaking hands, or making small talk and could not communicate emotionally to the masses. Hoover enjoyed solitude, unusual for a politician. He was honest to a fault, reluctant to pander or employ patronage in elections. An orphan, reared in modest circumstances in small frontier villages, he sympathized with the downtrodden but could not connect with them in speeches before large audiences. He did not enjoy the public relations aspect of politics and gave little grist to the media mills. He could not dramatize himself or his policies. Even in 1932, after he had spent the previous decade in politics, the political process remained alien and unnatural to Hoover. He expected private charity to do a job that even the entire state and federal governments could not do adequately. He viewed hunger in America as merely a larger version of that in Belgium. He held few lasting political grudges, but those few were intense and obvious. His sense of humor was too subtle for large crowds. Simply put, he lacked political skills. He wanted to win GOP nominations without campaigning for them. Yet if he had been nominated in 1920, when both parties wanted him, he would have presided over the prosperity of the 1920s and might have gone down in history as a great president.

Hoover made specific errors as well. He should have opposed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Mandatory crop controls would have been preferable to his system of cooperatives if they could have been enforced. He should have clamped down sanctions on Japan when the island nation invaded Manchuria, though the Japanese might have conquered additional territory to obtain raw materials. Idealistically, Hoover relied too heavily on world opinion to deter aggression. This approach had no teeth. He should have compromised with Senator George Norris to begin development of hydroelectric power in the Tennessee Valley. He should have lobbied Congress more aggressively, including distribution of patronage. Hoover was not pursuing a fool’s errand; his methods had worked in the past. He was too intellectually honest for the times, which were saturated with hypocritical intrigue. What might Hoover’s place in history have been if he had never run for president at all? He was virtually unsurpassed as a humanitarian and an administrator.

Hoover’s good deeds and sharp mind, his generosity and his sincerity outweigh these faults, and his mistakes constituted errors in judgment, not mortal sins. He was both human and humane, and if he does not deserve a spot on Mount Rushmore, he does not deserve to be pilloried as the scapegoat of the Great Depression either. History is more complicated than that.