TWELVE

Challenging the New Deal

“I knew from the experience of all public men from George Washington down that democracies are fickle and heartless,” Hoover reflected on his thrashing in the 1932 presidential election. “When the ultimate bump came, I was well-fortified to accept it philosophically . . . for democracy is a harsh employer.” America had welcomed him home as a conquering hero following World War I, elected him president by a landslide in 1928, and defeated him overwhelmingly only four years later. Tad would later recall that his brother’s ascension to the presidency was the worst event in the lives of their family, causing a great deal of discomfort without compensating gratification. Herbert Jr. suggested that his father and his family would have been better off had he simply returned to America after the war and rested on his laurels. “If the might and dignity of a lion may be judged by the crowd of jackals yelping in his train,” Herbert Jr. reflected, “Herbert Hoover may look with complaisance on his following.” Despite his disappointment, Hoover held a hopeful, perhaps naïve belief that he might eventually persuade the public that the election of Roosevelt had been a mistake.¹

Immediately following the inauguration, Lou traveled to California with Herbert Jr. to finally spend time in her dream house. Meanwhile, her husband embarked with Allan for New York, where he had numerous loose ends to tie up. Exhausted, Hoover slept twelve hours undisturbed at his Waldorf suite the first night, then drove to Connecticut the following day to visit his devoted friend Edgar Rickard, who had handled Hoover’s financial affairs during his presidency. On March 6, the ex-president issued a terse statement urging the nation to cooperate with the new president’s bank holiday, though privately he had doubts about the total closing, which he considered overkill. He believed in closing only troubled banks and permitting sound banks to continue operation. His view was confirmed when most banks reopened almost immediately. The legislation enacted to rectify abuses might do harm to sound banks, he feared.²

On March 7, his energy refreshed, Hoover rose early and reviewed his personal financial situation, finding sufficient assets for him and Lou to continue comfortably at a reduced standard of living. He transferred some investments from bonds to stocks, which stood to appreciate along with Roosevelt’s currency inflation, and deeded his Rapidan fishing camp to the federal government for the use of future presidents. Falling into a routine of activities and appointments, which delayed his return to Palo Alto, he met with admirers, investment counselors, and charitable trusts he represented, such as the American Child Health Association, the Boys Clubs of America, the Belgian-American Educational Foundation and the American Children’s Relief Association. Finally, after several busy weeks, he boarded a train for California. Several hundred well-wishers gathered at the station to say good-bye.³

Lou had their home ready by the time her husband arrived in Palo Alto, and they spent several months relaxing. “It was a release not only from political pressures but from the routines of twelve to fourteen hours of work seven days a week,” he explained. For the first time in memory, he slept without an alarm clock. He and Lou read newspapers and listened to the radio while dining on a leisurely breakfast. They hired a team of secretaries to answer the twenty thousand friendly letters that poured in, signing the responses personally. Hoover puttered with engineering projects with old colleagues. His friends secured for him a seat on the board of the New York Life Insurance Company, which brought extra income. When he was greeted at home by the governor, the mayor, Stanford students, and old friends, his subdued wit emerged. In his last address before going into temporary political retirement, Hoover quipped, “You will expect me to discuss the late election. Well, as nearly as I can learn we did not have enough votes on our side.” This was the Hoover his friends knew.⁴

Initially, unchained from telephones and no longer tied to secretaries, he enjoyed a sense of liberation. For the most part he was his own boss, setting his own pace. The typical day began with a stroll along Fraternity Row accompanied by two pets, a police dog and a Norwegian elkhound, before he returned to his study, where he passed the hours surrounded by his books, journals, and projects. With Lou he traveled thousands of miles, visiting wilderness regions, cities, factories, and slums. He combined fishing expeditions with exploration, heading down rural roads at breakneck speeds. He roared into Reno and Grass Valley, where he and Lou visited the old Comstock mine, and sped down to his son Allan’s home in Los Angeles. In his first major excursion, the ex-president covered eight thousand miles in ten weeks. Most people he encountered were friendly. Yet Hoover’s nature demanded satisfying, productive work. He wanted to remain active, useful, and immersed in public affairs. He would never again be a completely contented man. Quakers are a determined people, and Hoover was not simply purposeful; he was driven. His interest in Stanford, and specifically the War Library, consumed him. He opened avenues to influential friends, and to Stanford streamed a steady traffic of endowments, funds for special projects, and rare books. He resumed a more active role in the affairs of Stanford, the Huntington Library, Mills College, the Carnegie Institute, the Boys Clubs of America, the American Children’s Fund, the Belgian-American Educational Foundation, and other committees. “I am engaged part-time in making a living in farming and mining on such moderate scale that keeps me out of the haunts of capital and enables me to reject offers of corporations and of radio and press or platforms for cash,” he wrote Henry L. Stimson, his former secretary of state.⁵

Palo Alto might have seemed idyllic, yet it was also tame for a man of Hoover’s drive and ambition. Finding the local newspapers insufficiently meaty with political news, he was soon devouring thirty national papers daily, receiving them via airmail. Not content to leave their old life behind, the Hoovers traveled extensively on the East Coast and rented a part-time apartment in the elite Waldorf Towers to be near the intellectual, political, and philanthropic action. For more than a year after his involuntary retirement, the elder statesman refrained publicly from partisan political statements, but privately he formulated plans to redesign the GOP as a clear, definitively conservative alternative to the New Deal, which was moving leftward at warp speed.⁶

By early 1934, the ex-president was hard at work on a book that critiqued the “statist” and collectivist ideologies sweeping the globe, such as Communism and Fascism, and he included the New Deal. Hoover rejected a $25,000 offer to publish a serialized version in American Magazine in lieu of a $10,000 offer from The Saturday Evening Post, in which it would reach more readers. The manuscript was boosted when adopted by the Book-of-the-Month Club. However, the publisher decided to pair its publication with a book defending the New Deal written by Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace. The Challenge to Liberty was published on August 10, 1934, Hoover’s sixtieth birthday. He felt a sense of release; he had gotten his views off his chest. However one might disagree with his viewpoint, the book’s intellectual honesty is transparent. Hoover did not mention the New Deal by name, simply by implication. It was also an indirect attempt to answer the critics of his own policies by demonstrating that he had maintained a nation free of coercion.⁷

In The Challenge to Liberty, the Chief dealt with the causes and consequences of the Great Depression. Hoover believed that even if regimentation could resolve the Depression—which it could not—it would be purchased at the cost of liberty. He called his slender volume “the gospel according to Palo Alto.” He believed the American System had been designed for peace and the Depression had been caused by the Great War and its aftermath. It was a worldwide phenomenon, not solely an American invention, and its solution must be found in international remedies. Regimentation would only curtail production and consumption, and bureaucracy would weigh down the economy with ponderous regulations and deter creative innovation. Hoover did not consider the feeding and shelter of the needy inherently collectivist. Americans had always taken care of those in need. The New Deal was dangerous because it usurped local responsibility and concentrated power in the federal government. People receiving direct relief from the government feared losing it if they did not vote for the party in power. There was further danger that the government could distribute relief as a form of patronage.⁸

In some respects, The Challenge to Liberty was an elaboration of Hoover’s 1922 philosophical treatise, American Individualism. By early October the volume had become a bestseller. To spread his creed, the ex-president purchased and gave away thousands of copies. Hoover’s friend William Allen White, a fellow product of the Progressive movement, explained that the former president opposed the New Deal’s methods, not its goals. In a review of the book, Professor Wesley C. Mitchell of Columbia cautioned that it would be improper to label Hoover either a reactionary or a radical; he occupied a middle ground. Still, there was no doubt that he stood to the right of the New Deal. Hoover believed that the New Dealers had kidnapped the word “liberal.” The ex-president himself might best be described as a nineteenth-century classical liberal or a progressive similar to Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson.⁹

Hoover realized that no nation could have both absolute liberty and absolute security. Although firm on bedrock principles, he compromised on implementation and over specific solutions to practical problems. The engineer planned carefully, but the artist in him could improvise and he accommodated and anticipated human error. The man who was at home roaming the fields and forests never underestimated the power of imagination. Without it, pure logic faltered. Emotion fueled him; he was no robot. A practical man, he considered drive more important than intelligence, common sense more important than a gilt-edged education.

The administrator’s belief in waste reduction was not a technical fetish. His work with the Boys Clubs of America demonstrated that he detested human waste as even more obnoxious than industrial waste or despoliation of natural resources. Although he was a careful analyst who believed in order, the idea of a planned society was anathema to him. Order did not mean regimentation. He disliked all forms of totalitarianism and authoritarianism and revered individualism. Rather than view Hoover as an archetypical conservative or liberal, it is more realistic to appreciate the changes in his philosophy as he aged and the circumstances changed. It is more accurate to describe him as an individualist than to pigeonhole him as the apostle of any doctrine.

Hoover spent the Roosevelt years as an outsider looking in, working as a critic, writer, and speaker. He was, nonetheless, the single most influential Republican strategist, writer, and speaker, as well as a formidable fund-raiser. Hoover was profoundly embittered by his treatment by FDR during the 1932 campaign, and by what he considered Roosevelt’s economic naïveté and political ruthlessness, and his criticism ranged from the satirical to the sardonic. Hoover condemned as unrealistic FDR’s narrowly nationalistic approach to the world and the Depression. The ex-president believed the worldwide Depression could be resolved only by cooperative, international recovery, not by an every-nation-for-itself mentality. Later, Hoover condemned Roosevelt for going too far in the opposite direction, for letting the needs and priorities of other nations guide American foreign policy at the expense of domestic interests. He saw Roosevelt moving the nation toward war. When the Nazis attacked the Soviets, Hoover proposed to hedge diplomatic bets rather than immediately siding with the Soviets, because he viewed both ideologies as equally odious.¹⁰

During this period, Hoover honed his writing and speaking skills. His style grew increasingly erudite, and his speeches, books, and articles are sprinkled with epigrams. Speaking before small audiences, he let his natural, nuanced humor show. Though he employed secretaries and research assistants to check facts and perform clerical duties, Hoover’s style remained inimitably his own, and it improved. He worked at it doggedly and daily. In 1940, Professor Elmer E. Nyberg of the New York University School of Commerce, who had made a study of the speaking ability of prominent public speakers, wrote in the New York Times that “Herbert Hoover has improved as a speaker more than any man in public life and at the present time leads all possible Presidential candidates in the content of his speeches.” He rated Hoover an A-plus in oratory, while President Roosevelt, whom he graded an A-minus, had lost ground, wrote the professor.¹¹

Hoover was a man on a mission, determined to right the listing ship of state and prevent it from sinking into a quagmire of unconstitutional laws and procedures. He viewed the New Deal jobs programs as naïve in an economic sense and a vote factory in a political sense. It was FDR’s largesse with government money to targeted interest groups, not his success in conquering the Depression, which was borderline, that explained the New Deal’s electoral victories. The people were duped into following a primrose path because the jobs were only temporary. They would end when the appropriations expired or the projects were completed. At the end of it all, the country would be worse off than before, mired in a sinkhole of debt left to future generations and future presidents to pay. Moreover, while Roosevelt spent billion upon billion on public works to generate temporary jobs, it never occurred to him to cut taxes, stimulate the private sector, and restore old, permanent jobs. Hoover wrote with passionate eloquence and improved in the process. This period brought out the hidden writer in him. Perhaps all he had ever needed was the time, the practice, and the cause. As an ex-president, he commanded a forum.¹²

Hoover was relentless and determined. He pointed out that Roosevelt’s sympathy for the poor was feigned. His humor and his ideas were borrowed, like some of his programs. Roosevelt even plagiarized some ideas from Hoover while simultaneously claiming that Hoover had done nothing. The nation was on a treadmill of deficit spending, appropriating more and more to remain in essentially the same place. At the rate recovery was progressing, everyone on the planet would be dead by the time it occurred.

Hoover regarded Roosevelt as animated by a mixture of unmitigated ambition and political savvy, yet considered the president jumbled in his witches’ brew of economic theories, which he barely comprehended: a short-run politician with an eye on the next election, offering the nation slogans and platitudes, fiddling while the nation was consumed in an economic wildfire. Roosevelt was an all-or-nothing leader. Like many charismatic leaders, the New Yorker was better at inflaming emotions than he was at solving real-world problems. Grasping at straws of ideas from all directions, he would pile them up until they broke the nation’s fiscal back. He pretended to care about the common man, but what he cared about was their votes. Yet because the New Deal morphed into a much larger bureaucracy with the coming of the war, a time when no one questioned the need for big government, and FDR’s death virtually coincided with the end of the war, the bureaucracy built for back-to-back emergencies was never completely dismantled and many equated the bureaucracy itself with prosperity and expected the government to guarantee prosperous times permanently. The circumstances created a system of dependency. The crutch would not be discarded after the leg had healed.¹³

In many respects, Hoover and Roosevelt were opposites. Hoover had a firm grasp of economics, both practical and theoretical, whereas Roosevelt’s perception of economics resembled a dalliance—he would flirt with an idea and then move on. His approach was glib. Hoover, in contrast, took ideas seriously and mulled them over before attempting to leap a canyon. He could be decisive but was not prone to snap judgments. He wanted to use power to achieve a practical result yet revered spiritual values and cared little for the vanities of political fame. His attachments, to ideas and to people, were lifelong. Roosevelt jettisoned friends if doing so became politically expedient. Both men could be stubborn. Hoover could be obstinately self-righteous; however, he spurned flattery, whether sincere or otherwise. The Iowa orphan had worked with his hands, something the former governor had never done. Until he became president, there was nothing in FDR’s background to foreshadow greatness; Hoover had already been one of the most famous men in the world at the time of his election. The Great Engineer wanted a slimmed-down, efficient, gazelle-type government. Hoover was profoundly religious, though not an ingrained churchgoer, and had a philosophical respect for tradition, especially for the American political institutions, with carefully designed balancing of powers.

Two men, two sets of ideas, one anchored in a firm historical foundation, the other filching ideas ad hoc. Roosevelt had the attention and the heart of the nation. Hoover, repudiated, fought patiently, relentlessly, hoping to influence contemporary opinion and legislation, but also arguing before the tribunal of history. The winners of political wars, like the winners of military wars, write the histories. In that sense, Hoover was on the losing side of history. But in the realm of ideas, and the long-run repercussions of policies, Hoover left an abundant and thorough written record of his philosophy.

Hoover predicted that FDR’s New Deal would not end the Depression, and it did not, though the unemployed waited and waited. Roosevelt nonetheless used the New Deal jobs to entrench himself in office, a tactic Hoover deplored. In the campaign of 1932 FDR had pilloried Hoover for deficit spending, yet the spending of his administration made a mockery of that criticism. During the 1932 campaign, much of Roosevelt’s rhetoric proclaimed that Hoover was a spendthrift president who had gone too far in exploding federal power, although, simultaneously, he accused Hoover of being a do-nothing president. Sadly, much of this has been lost in the jumble of historical legends. The New Deal that began in 1933 and unfolded was not the New Deal promised in 1932, as Hoover clearly pointed out.¹⁴

Some of those who had earlier opposed Hoover now regretted losing him, as the New Deal produced layer upon layer of bureaucracy. The Democratic Baltimore Sun lamented that the New Deal was like Hoover with a second helping. Yet, to some degree, Hoover remained a loner in the Republican Party, in which many professional politicians had always considered him an interloper. They refused to renominate him not simply because his administration had been marred with failure but because they had never wanted him in the first place.¹⁵

Hoover himself was more unpopular than his ideas, which remain relevant. The election of 1932 marked a fork in the road of our political and economic history. The residue of opposition to the prolific spending of government, the growth of entitlements, and the addictive nature of welfare verify Hoover’s critique, which provides a more comprehensive exposition of enlightened, sophisticated, humane conservatism than Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater enunciated. Hoover put flesh on the bones of theory. Yet, in subsequent elections, his name was seldom evoked by GOP presidential contenders except as a bogeyman. In foreign policy, only a few insulated scholars have used Hoover as a prophet of the dangers of overreach. Ironically, many of his ideas continue to gain credence, while Hoover himself is overlooked due to the stigma of the Great Depression. Few prophets in American history have been more scorned in their own country.¹⁶

Hoover was titular head of the GOP, but he wondered if he genuinely aspired to leadership of a party that seemed down and out. His friend Mark Sullivan wrote that he believed it would be a mistake to reveal the faintest interest in another term as president. For the moment, many in his party considered him neither a resource nor a leader but a millstone. Still, as an ex-president, Hoover immediately commanded an audience. As more and more Republicans came to see the New Deal as a threat to American institutions, some gravitated to Hoover. His life had been one of leadership. He needed to find new outlets for his energy without asserting himself too overtly in the beginning. He also nourished an ambition for exculpation, possibly in a political sense, but certainly in a historical manner. The ex-president helped organize a group of Republicans, many of whom had served in his administration, called the Republican Federal Associates. They constituted the embryo of opposition to the New Deal and possibly a stepping-stone for Hoover, yet in the short run the organization worked for the election of Republicans in the 1934 congressional elections. Among the most active were former Hoover cabinet members Ogden Mills and Walter F. Brown.¹⁷

When he left office Hoover seemed to have no aspirations for the 1936 GOP nomination, yet his friends urged him to remain in readiness should a call come. He maintained a prudent silence during the early months of the New Deal, though dismayed by the rush to legislate a hodgepodge of measures by a rubber-stamp Congress during the Hundred Days. Roosevelt’s appetite for power might prove insatiable, he predicted. Hoover considered FDR’s unsystematic inflation of the currency ill-advised and questioned his lack of consultation with congressional leaders, who nonetheless followed him. The ex-president did not oppose all aspects of the National Recovery Administration, yet he doubted that mandated scarcity could produce prosperity and warned that the new agency’s monopolistic division of the markets would ruin small business. Hoover found many aspects of the early New Deal needlessly polarizing. Already, he had moral qualms about the New Deal, yet he considered it unseemly to enter the fray. He lamented the element of class war and the dicing of the population into interest groups, which reminded him of the march toward totalitarianism in Europe and the Soviet state. He was growing edgy, but he wanted to give the New Deal a chance and feared some would interpret criticism from him as spite. Hoover felt the flaws in the economy were flaws in individual men, not in the system. He worried not simply about the future of the country under the New Deal, but about the future of the GOP. There was no heir apparent, nor a spokesman grounded in experience. He cautioned prudence, not demagoguery, but he feared some in his party wanted to emulate the New Deal rather than redirect it. Hoover was tempted to speak out, but he resisted and instead tried to influence party policy behind the scenes. Hoover disliked the prospect that Republicans would imitate the New Deal and he did not believe they could win on that basis. Privately, he conceded that elements of the New Deal were salutary, including some taken from his own administration. He had mixed feelings about the state of affairs in both parties but was not optimistic. He would reenter the public sphere, but timing was crucial.¹⁸

Hoover believed that if recovery occurred, it would take place in spite of, not because of, the New Deal, and also that the public would accept a more powerful, intrusive, leviathan state that crushed liberty. Hoover further worried that any recovery might not take place at all. He realized that if he criticized the New Deal and subsequently good times returned, he would be labeled a carping reactionary. So, for a variety of reasons, Hoover pondered his options. He did not race into battle, but he kept his powder dry. Hoover did, however, encourage surrogates to discharge volleys he considered inappropriate for himself. He also quietly began to cultivate Republican policies that might furnish an alternative to the New Deal, which appeared to him a runaway train. Further, he wanted to bind the GOP into a united fulcrum of opposition, because some congressmen were already tilting toward the forbidden apples of the New Deal. Even Republican National Chairman Everett Sanders was inclined to lean in that direction. Hoover’s view, which was consistent throughout his life, was that responsible criticism was the mantra of the opposition party and that the two-party system was vital to American democracy. It was, in fact, the very purpose of freedom of speech. The ex-president pointed with alacrity to nations that lacked healthy opposition parties as they toppled down a rabbit hole into worlds of bizarre ideologies. However, criticism must be prudent and constrained, and it should focus on faulty policies, not indict the opposition as evil individuals. To cross these lines would be to lose credibility and to abuse freedom of speech. He did not believe in “fighting fire with fire.” Moreover, he once admitted to fellow Republican Thomas E. Dewey that he might have signed much of the legislation Roosevelt had signed, though he hardly would have insisted on a rubber-stamp Congress.¹⁹

Hoover knew that he would be watched carefully, and he did not want to ignite prairie fires that would rage out of control. Neither did he believe in the aphorism “Divide and conquer,” even to win elections. He never countenanced unscrupulous tactics to obtain political advantage, though certainly some of his surrogates indulged, and in later battles his wit could be biting. But negativity was never a major weapon in his arsenal, especially nitpicking of a personal nature. He persistently condemned policies, not people. Although he had more common sense than to deny the existence of evil in the world, or human imperfection, including his own, his chief villains were not persons but ideas, and his approach remained primarily leery of personal invective. Yet he persistently condemned policies that actually hurt people in the guise of helping them. Collectivism as a genre usually came to power by that route, he emphasized.

For all his caution, Hoover would have liked to make a political comeback in 1936. He wanted to prove his critics wrong. As the shadows of his life lengthened, he became more partisan as an ex-president than he had ever been as president, which led many to conclude that he had been more conservative as president than he actually was. The impression that Hoover was a hard-core conservative president probably owes a great deal to his crusades after his presidency. Primarily based on situational differences, he was more pragmatic as president. Further, he spent a long purgatory out of power, and if he never became a cynic, he doubtless grew dismayed and, beneath his stoicism, disappointed and impatient. He continued to avoid hyperbole, though he did indulge in wit, and he refused to join the American Liberty League, a group of conservative businessmen including Al Smith and John J. Raskob, Democrats and former opponents of Hoover. Neither did he campaign openly in the congressional elections of 1934.²⁰

Upon retiring to Palo Alto, Hoover gingerly, and incrementally, reentered the political arena, remaining above partisan politics for about a year while he worked behind the scenes to mold policy and orchestrate criticism of the New Deal. He was disturbed by the lack of enthusiasm of GOP congressmen for defending his administration. As he tiptoed gingerly into the shark-infested waters of partisan politics, Hoover initially declined to criticize specific New Deal policies or to offer a tangible program of his own. Neither did he attack Roosevelt personally. Rather, he condemned the New Deal’s overall philosophy of infringing on American liberties and leading to an aggrandizement of concentrated power designed to perpetuate the party of Jackson in power. Like Andrew Jackson, the contemporary Democrats practiced the spoils system with a vengeance.²¹

Some Republicans who believed Hoover was too tainted by the stigma of the Depression to make a viable candidate in 1936 identified the Republican Federal Associates as the seed of an organization to orchestrate his nomination and avoided connections with them. The association never became an important political tool and dissolved late in 1934. Hoover tacked to the winds and helped create a new organization designed to promote the return to sound money. With friends, he plotted a return to more active political involvement, beginning with lectures at universities and a series of articles for the daily press articulating traditional Republican principles.²²

During the summer of 1934 Hoover returned to the bucolic outdoor beauty and male camaraderie of the Bohemian Grove summer encampment. Set amid a cathedral-like stand of redwoods in Northern California within a preserve of 2,800 acres, the site included some 250 camps of from two to twenty old friends and invited guests. Hoover’s Caveman’s Camp included his two sons, Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, two writers, and an oilman. In this idyllic setting, the stress and residual resentment of politics drained out of him. He continued the annual pilgrimage until 1962, when he was nearly ninety.²³

Hoover played little role in the 1934 congressional elections, partly because his help was unwanted. Some candidates and party leaders were tilting toward a neutrality pact with the Democratic administration. Governor Alf Landon of Kansas was already planning a 1936 campaign for the nomination that to Hoover resembled a pale imitation of FDR. Nonetheless, Hoover realized the inherent difficulties of campaigning against Roosevelt. While unemployment in the private sector remained virtually stagnant, employment in the public sector was exploding. The jobless were desperate, and much of the population seemed to accept the proposition that gift-wrapped patronage plums came free of cost to anyone, except perhaps the “money changers.” Still, Hoover took no comfort in the election results. The Republicans lost yet more seats, defying the historical trend that the party that controls the White House usually suffers losses during off-year elections.²⁴

In March 1935 Hoover escalated his criticism of the New Deal in a nationally broadcast speech at Sacramento, although he conceded that Roosevelt had created a Byzantine patronage machine that would make him difficult to dislodge. He continued to inveigh against inflationary policies, which, he explained, punished endowed universities and hospitals, savings accounts, pension plans, and insurance policies. Initially he attempted to phrase his criticism in terms of policies rather than personalities, but the ex-president could hardly conceal his disdain for the president’s political opportunism. Still, he spoke in a calm voice and never shouted or resorted to demagoguery. He made it clear, however, that FDR’s policies would not end the Depression and in time would shipwreck the country economically and strangle human liberty. Hoover now embarked upon the role of leader of the opposition with relish. He vowed to define Republicanism and explain how it differed from the philosophy of his nemesis in Washington.²⁵

The ex-president attempted to explain that his administration had offered a blueprint for a more effective alternative. The Depression had been stopped by the summer of 1932, he argued, and reinvigorated by the November election, which spiked business fears by the uncertainty of Roosevelt’s policies, while a bank panic during the interregnum nose-dived the progress made to that point. The argument was plausible, and statistically arguable, yet Hoover had been demonized so consistently that the messenger poisoned the message. Journalist William Allen White, a Republican and a close friend of Hoover, feared the Republicans could not win merely by indicting the New Deal; they must be more constructive in describing their own program. There was no point in tearing down the house until the foundation of a new one was poured. Hoover wanted to indict and convict on the charges of unconstitutionality, incompetence, and government featherbedding. But that was insufficient. It exchanged the promise of a hot meal for a balanced budget. And times had been miserable when FDR took over, the Democrats retorted. Hoover wanted to raise the moral tone in politics and eliminate elements of class war and the spoils system that were creeping in. Roosevelt wanted a rubber-stamp Congress and a pliable Supreme Court, as well as an inert opposition party. The New Yorker seemed amoral, as if all that counted to him were material things. Hoover’s core beliefs remained progressive, yet increasingly he represented the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Many in the GOP believed it was unlikely they could win on such principles, and even more unlikely with Hoover as the candidate.²⁶

By mid-June Hoover believed he was making progress in saving the soul of a lost country and began seriously contemplating seeking the GOP nomination in 1936. However, the Republican Old Guard would have built a wall around the White House to keep Hoover out. The other obstacle was Hoover himself. He wanted his friends to wage the campaign for him without openly seeking the nomination himself, a method that had failed in 1920. There was no central organization, no fund-raising, only speeches, letters to editors, and the cultivation of friends. Efforts were made to compile a mailing list of men who had served Hoover in the CRB, the Food Administration, and the ARA, and to whet their appetites for a new crusade. However, the aspirant eventually dispatched a lieutenant to round up delegate support in the South.²⁷

Meanwhile, other Republicans sought to spear the nomination, most prominently Alf Landon, a fresh face, less critical of the New Deal than Hoover. Landon was more popular than Hoover among farmers and seemed more inclined to commit early and run hard. Landon’s chief advantages were the lack of a formidable GOP candidate and Hoover’s residual unpopularity. The party’s congressional delegation feared Hoover would drag them down with him. Neither did Hoover’s game of hide-and-seek impress party professionals. William Allen White considered Hoover’s unpopularity cruel and undeserved, yet cemented in place. “It still hangs on,” White wrote. “And everything he says, as well as everything his friends say, is discounted. It is unbelievable.”²⁸ Some Republican leaders warned that Hoover’s nomination would result in another fusillade of Democratic mudslinging, circa 1932, and the result would be the same. By early 1936 Landon had emerged as the front-runner. In a poll of Nebraska farm voters, Hoover trailed Landon and Idaho senator William E. Borah. Adding momentum, William Randolph Hearst cast the support of his newspaper chain behind Landon. Ironically, the chief qualification of Landon was that he was not Hoover. The ex-president was much better known, had a wealth of experience in public service, and had won a tsunami victory in 1928. But the nomination over which they squabbled would not be worth much unless it was complemented by a strong anti-incumbent sentiment, and that was absent. Meanwhile, Hoover delivered about a speech a month, pounding home his theme of New Deal irresponsibility. He reminded voters of Roosevelt’s 1932 promise to balance the budget, as well as other broken vows. He called for a balanced budget, a sound gold standard, and an end to pork-barrel public works. Unfortunately, there was nothing new in this. However sound these proposals might be in a theoretical sense, they resembled a rerun of the first Hoover administration. In November 1935 Hoover implied that he would not be a candidate in 1936, but he also implied that he would accept a draft. The Review of Reviews wrote that Hoover was the best-qualified candidate judged on any criterion but electability. Yet Hoover held back. He wanted the nomination to seek him, and while his excoriation of Roosevelt was strenuous, his assertion of his own availability was passive. The starter’s gun for the nominating race had been fired, yet Hoover had failed to sprint out of the blocks.²⁹

By February 1936, his campaign was as wobbly as a newborn calf. Sufficient funds to continue printing and distributing Hoover’s speeches could not be raised. The GOP National Committee had refused to help, and Landon’s strength was growing. A poll of sixteen hundred Ohio Republicans showed that only 4 percent supported Hoover’s nomination. Hoover remained highly visible because of his attacks on the New Deal, yet he neglected the mundane task of gathering delegates, instead relying on speeches and friends. Some counseled Hoover to withdraw if prospects did not improve by May 1, but a few urged him to remain in through the convention and hope for a deadlock. Finally, on May 18, Hoover withdrew from the nominating campaign. The GOP, it appeared, loved Hoover, but it loved winning more.³⁰

The taint of the Great Depression and the electoral debacle of 1932 still haunted Hoover. Governor Landon, the front-runner, was a popular personality yet a mediocre speaker who lacked experience in national and international affairs. Landon distanced himself from Hoover, wary that some of Hoover’s stigma from the Depression might rub off on him. Landon planned on running slightly to the left of Hoover but somewhat to the right of FDR, gaining the moderate vote and making inroads into the usually monolithically Democratic South. Hoover disdained this tactic as “me too, but cheaper,” implying that the governor was Roosevelt writ small. Hoover’s influential friends arranged a prime-time speaking engagement at the Cleveland convention. Like an old-time evangelist, Hoover inspired the delegates with GOP orthodoxy and almost ignited a stampede to his standard. He still held a place in the hearts of the Republican faithful. “I think these people are trying to tell Mr. Hoover that they are ashamed of the way they doubted him and deserted him and that now they are trying to convince him that their hearts are with him,” one spectator said.³¹

During the campaign, the Democrats dredged up Hoover and dragged him through the mud again, virtually ignoring Landon. Democratic orators, including President Roosevelt, reviled his predecessor, pounding him incessantly, making it a rerun of 1932. Landon was the real “forgotten man” of the election. He carried only two states, with nine electoral votes, Maine and Vermont. If Hoover was trounced in 1932, Landon was virtually annihilated in 1936. Hoover himself would doubtless have lost overwhelmingly to the incumbent in 1936, but almost certainly he would have fared better than Landon and might have helped generate more support for GOP congressional candidates. Landon was no more a rousing speaker than Hoover and his attempts to straddle made his speeches weaker in content. The Kansan wanted to reach out and expand the Republican base while Hoover preferred to solidify the base and reinforce it. Neither could have conceivably outflanked Roosevelt in 1936, because the New York aristocrat had driven a silver stake through the heart of Republican credibility.³²

Following the 1936 slaughter at the polls, the Republican Party was in disarray. Landon remained the titular head of the party, but as an ex-president, Hoover retained as much, if not more, clout. During 1937 and 1938 a power struggle ensued between Hoover and Landon. They had different visions for the GOP, and their followers believed the victor in the clash would emerge as the front-runner for the 1940 nomination. Both men considered a party reorganization vital, yet they veered in opposite directions. Hoover wanted to purify the party of left-leaning supporters of Landon and return to traditional Republican principles. His vehicle for this reorientation was a large general conference to meet in 1937, draft a set of Republican principles, and enunciate the party’s position prior to the 1938 congressional elections. Most Republicans in Congress, however, preferred not to challenge the New Deal directly and wanted to emphasize local issues. Landon’s approach was more radical. He wanted to detach conservative Democrats from their party, woo independents, and meld them with moderate Republicans to create a third party as an alternative to the conservative GOP and the leftist Democrats. Landon, like Hoover, wanted a conference, to serve as a launching pad for the new party and, possibly, a second run at the White House. Landon and Hoover were divided by personality, policy, and organizational differences, and both wanted recognition as the Republican spokesman and, possibly, the 1940 nominee. Hoover considered Landon’s third-party idea impractical because third parties had been relentlessly mowed down by major parties, despite Populist fervor for William Jennings Bryan in the 1890s and Progressive zeal for Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, both of whom were more engaging and charismatic than Landon. Further, Hoover considered the 1932 and 1936 elections aberrations. It might be more feasible, he believed, to resurrect the party that had dominated the 1920s than to quixotically spin off a new one.³³

Despite media battles, speeches, and a great deal of political intrigue, neither man saw his vision materialize and neither conference ever met. Landon lost the backing of prominent Democrats who had initially expressed interest in his coalition, and Hoover’s large general conference never moved beyond the planning stages. A face-saving compromise was arranged. Instead of a general meeting to formulate a united front on issues, the matter was handled by subcommittees of the Republican National Committee, which issued a watered-down, generic list of proposals. Hoover, though disappointed, professed to be satisfied, because his only purpose was to influence policy, not to reenter politics. The internal scrimmage ultimately produced little of lasting substance. Rather, the New Deal in 1937 and 1938 was weakened by its own excesses and a precipitous economic decline.³⁴

Frustrated by a conservative, narrowly divided Supreme Court, which nullified legislation intended to implement New Deal objectives, in 1937 FDR proposed to pack the Court with additional judges appointed by him, thereby obtaining a liberal majority. Rebellion against the plan was nearly universal among both Democrats and Republicans. Even Democrats considered the bill a flagrant power grab and led the fight against it. Republican congressional leaders, content with the internecine strife, avoided comment to preserve the bipartisan nature of the opposition. Hoover, however, could not resist delivering a vehement speech denouncing the bill, which troubled GOP strategists, who feared his intervention might drive some Democrats to the president’s defense. Hoover’s rhetoric produced nothing more than an irritation, but it did estrange him from some congressional Republicans, at least temporarily. The Court-packing bill was soundly defeated, an embarrassment for the president.³⁵

More choppy waters lay ahead for the incumbent, once considered invincible. In the summer of 1937 the economy plummeted, the worst sudden debacle in history, eclipsing the 1929 crash. It has been attributed to a backlog of overspending, a reduction in spending, overregulation, which paralyzed investment, or underregulation. Whatever the cause, the economy fell off a cliff. Between September of 1937 and the following June, industrial production plunged 33 percent, national income plummeted 13 percent, profits fell by an enormous 78 percent, payrolls eroded by 35 percent, and industrial stocks lost more than 50 percent in value. Manufacturing employment slid abruptly by 23 percent. Any hope that the Depression was ending was shattered. The Court-packing fiasco and the economic catastrophe, combined with simple battle fatigue among Democratic voters, opened a window of opportunity for the Republicans in the 1938 off-year elections. The economic and political furies also combined to bring the New Deal to a virtual standstill. In fact, except for the European war, the historical verdict on the New Deal’s success in dealing with the Depression might remain a hung jury.³⁶

In April 1938 Hoover claimed to have found another example of a Roosevelt power grab in New Deal legislation facilitating government reorganization, which the ex-president warned would permit the incumbent to perpetuate the spoils system. Forgetting that he had labored for reorganization during his own administration, Hoover descended into hyperbole by equating the reorganization bill with home-brewed Fascism. The ex-president was gratified when Congress handed his successor a thumping defeat on the bill, the House voting 204–196 against, including 108 Democrats who defected to the opposition. The Chief felt Roosevelt was on the ropes, dangling in a hangman’s noose.³⁷

Late in April Hoover resumed his attack, this time condemning the New Deal for encouraging immorality in government, which piggybacked on inefficiency. The New Dealers had virtually invited every community into “a conspiracy to get its share from the federal grab bag.” The New Deal had tested, and broken, Hoover’s patience. He had never dipped into comparable invective during his entire public life, avoiding it even during the 1932 campaign when he was the target for Roosevelt’s quiver of arrows. After Roosevelt’s reign in the White House was terminated by the Grim Reaper in 1945, Hoover’s voice never again reached a comparable decibel level. In Hoover’s lifetime, no era matched the “creeping collectivism” of the New Deal and its mountain of bureaucracy that resembled Mount Everest. The Chief argued that unleashing free enterprise from regulatory entanglements and government favoritism would extract the nation from the grip of the Depression. Deliberately imposed scarcity would retard, not reward private initiative. There was more than an element of truth in Hoover’s argument, and if he sometimes swerved into self-righteousness, self-righteous people are not inevitably wrong on the merits of their arguments.³⁸

Hoover felt frustrated by being steamrollered consistently by the Roosevelt machine. He was unapologetic about his viewpoint. “One of the most discouraging things going on in the Republican Party is the constant apology being made for it,” he reminded fellow Republicans. “The attitude on the part of many speakers implies that the party has no record of economic reform or humanitarian actions; that we must debase ourselves in sack cloth and apologies for the failure of our party; that we must acknowledge that the New Deal has the only righteousness in that field; that we must adopt New Deal methods; and that we will do it a little cheaper.” He warned, “It [the GOP] can never win on that foundation.” Hoover’s angry words carried conviction and were clothed in articulate indignation.³⁹

Hoover’s purpose was not merely the triumph of abstract principle; he wanted to hit the bull’s-eye in the 1938 elections. Silent in 1934, he planned three major speeches for 1938. He argued that Congress needed independent lawmakers instead of rubber stamps and felt driven by a sense of urgency. The stakes were high. Another defeat might be a knockout blow for the party of Lincoln. In addition to speaking, Hoover traveled through the Mountain and Western states, cultivating support. In his final speech at Philadelphia he rebutted FDR’s claim to have restored stability and prosperity, pointing out that 11 million remained unemployed. For the first time since Roosevelt had entered the White House, in 1938 the Republicans handed him a thrashing reversal in the congressional elections, gaining an additional eighty-one seats in the House, seven in the Senate, and several governorships. Hoover could reflect that he had contributed to the triumph, though events were in the saddle, notably the 1937 recession and the failed Court-packing plan. Further, the New Deal simply had not fulfilled its promise to end the Depression and Roosevelt’s star had dimmed. Hoover’s three nationally broadcast speeches were timely, and made an impact, nonetheless. He believed they solidified the grudge that barred him from the White House, though it hardly needed strengthening. Only Roosevelt knew his reasons. But the feud intensified. FDR would no more let Hoover set foot in the White House than he would free a caged tiger.⁴⁰