In 1928, Herbert C. Hoover was elected president with nearly three-fifths of the popular vote in a landslide victory over his Democratic opponent, Alfred E. Smith. Four years later, in the depths of the Great Depression, Hoover lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt by margins as sweeping as those of 1928. The election of 1932 was not just a rejection of the Republican Party but also a repudiation of Hoover. For decades afterward, Hoover’s image was that of a do-nothing, even heartless, president who deserved the political fate of 1932. More recently, however, historians have reexamined the Hoover presidency and found it more complicated and innovative than the prevailing stereotype. Some have even claimed to find significant origins of Roosevelt’s New Deal in Hoover’s policies.
Hoover entered the White House with high public expectations. A mining engineer educated at Stanford, Hoover was a millionaire by the time he was 40 and devoted the rest of his life to public service. He earned a glowing reputation administering important programs during World War I, and in the 1920s was an active and powerful secretary of commerce under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Apparently one of the architects of the decade’s prosperity, Hoover came to the presidency hailed as “the great engineer” and (because of his leadership in World War I relief efforts) as “the great humanitarian.” On his inauguration in March 1929, the journalist
Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote that “We were in a mood for magic. . . . We had summoned a great engineer to solve our problems for us; now we sat back comfortably and confidently to watch the problems being solved.”
And Hoover, a deeply thoughtful man committed to his ideas and principles, was prepared to act. Convinced that modern technocratic skills could be brought to bear on public problems, he envisioned a “New Day” of ongoing prosperity. He believed that government had a role to play in sustaining economic growth and social progress, but he also believed that the role of government must be limited and that the federal government should not intrude upon the responsibilities of the private sector or local government. Public policy should help to catalyze and coordinate voluntary “associational” activities in the private sector to stabilize the economy by promoting cooperation and efficiency, and it should facilitate a “new individualism” devoted to service and social progress. But the federal government should not direct and control those efforts and must above all avoid moving toward a regulatory or welfare state. He brought to the executive branch a number of “Hoover men” who shared his view and aims and his confidence in establishing coordinating mechanisms for addressing economic and social issues.
The Hoover presidency opened with a number of initiatives. The new president called a special session of Congress to deal with agriculture, and within two months won passage of the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929 that created the Federal Farm Board to sustain prices in a number of commodities by means of farm cooperatives and stabilization corporations. The administration planned a series of conferences and studies on other economic and social problems, with the intent of coordinating efforts to address them, and it began action in other areas too. But the early energy and high promise of the Hoover presidency soon ebbed. Little ultimately came from the detailed social and economic studies in terms of policy. Congress turned Hoover’s request for tariff revision to provide flexibility into the Hawley-Smoot Tariee Act of 1930, which imposed the highest tariff ever. Signed by Hoover despite criticism from virtually all the experts, the tariff suggested Hoover’s deficiencies as a political leader. So did his unsuccessful efforts to revise immigration policy, to reach agreement on oil production policy, and to find solutions to the vexing problem of Prohibition.
But it was the Great Depression that came to dominate administration priorities and policymaking. The depression also exposed the shortcomings of Hoover’s leadership and produced his crushing defeat in 1932 and his unenviable public reputation for years after. Contrary to that public reputation, however, Hoover rejected orthodox advice to let the economy recover by itself. Rather, he took quick action to try to restore confidence and reverse the economic downturn. He issued statements declaring that the ECONOMY was fundamentally sound; he held meetings with business leaders urging them not to cut production, prices, wages, or employment; he met with labor leaders requesting them not to press new wage demands or to conduct strikes; he promised to maintain and increase public works spending and urged local government to do the same; he supported lower interest rates and lower taxes to stimulate investment and buying.
Although such steps were in the right direction and went well beyond what previous presidents had done during depressions, none went far enough to have significant effect, and economic indexes continued down. The Agricultural Marketing Act was also unsuccessful, for in relying on voluntary action it gave the Federal Farm Board no authority to restrict production, and mounting surpluses overwhelmed the board’s capacity and helped send agricultural prices plummeting still further. And the Haw-ley-Smoot Tariff went in exactly the wrong direction: It helped keep prices of American manufactured goods too high, and it invited retaliation from other nations to restrict markets for American industrial and agricultural goods. As the depression deepened, Hoover became less innovative, more resistant to new federal initiatives, and increasingly insistent that the origins of the depression lay abroad and that his policies were correct.
Two areas of policy—relief and banking—reveal how Hoover’s ideology shaped and constrained his action. They reveal as well how a number of significant initiatives of his presidency—such as the Norris-La Guardia Act of March 1932 that limited the use of court injunctions against labor unions—often came from Congress with Hoover’s reluctant acquiescence. With UNEMPLOYMENT mounting catastrophically in the early 1930s and with private and local relief efforts entirely inadequate, pressure mounted in the nation and in Congress for federal action. But Hoover’s principles were clear: The federal government might encourage, support, and coordinate local and private efforts, but the federal government must not take on direct responsibility for relief. He created two agencies to collect information and to encourage and assist private and local efforts—the President’s Emergency Committee for Employment and then the President’s Organization on Unemployment Relief—but they had little impact. As the depression worsened, moreover, Hoover insisted all the more on limiting government spending and trying to balance the budget. (In June 1932 he signed, with Democratic support, the largest peacetime tax increase ever.) Finally, after rebuffing or vetoing congressional measures for public works and relief spending, Hoover reluctantly signed the compromise Relief and Reconstruction Act in July 1932, which authorized the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend (not grant) states up to $300 million for relief and up to $1.5 billion for self-liquidating public works projects (toll roads, for example). But the administration allowed little of that money to be spent, and federal unemployment relief did not come until the New Deal.
In banking, Hoover took more action than he did with relief. The great problem of banking in the early 1930s was one of liquidity: how to turn declining paper assets (mortgages and business loans, for example) into the cash needed to pay off depositors. The Glass-Steagall Act of February 1932 expanded the currency supply by permitting the use of government securities to back Federal Reserve notes. In July 1932 the Congress passed the Federal Home Loan Bank Act, which did less than Hoover had recommended but did allow home loan banks to accept mortgages as collateral for loans. But these significant measures could not provide the help needed by faltering and failing commercial banks. Pressured by Hoover, who preferred private cooperative action, a number of the nation’s major banks organized the National Credit Corporation late in 1931, with a fund of $500 million to help banks in need. But the bankers had exacted from Hoover a promise of federal assistance if the NCC proved inadequate to the task, as indeed it did. At Hoover’s request, Congress in January 1932 created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), authorized to lend up to $2 billion to banks and other financial institutions. But although it marked a significant new departure, the RFC disbursed money slowly, advanced loans largely to the largest banks and institutions, and did little to shore up the banking system. Under Roosevelt, the RFC was used far more dynamically to spur lending and expansion, not just to protect financial institutions.
Although his presidency came to be all but consumed by domestic economic matters, Hoover also gave attention to foreign policy. He sought to reduce American intervention in Latin America, anticipating Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy of the 1930s. At the London Naval Conference in 1930, he succeeded in winning modest expansion and a five-year extension of naval arms limitations. But the growing global depression and advancing militarism in Europe and Asia became the major problems; and here Hoover, like other heads of state, had little success. He sought major reductions in armaments at the World Disarmament Conference in 1932, and tried to tie them to resolving economic problems, but nothing came of his proposals. As the collapse of the American economy dried up the American loans abroad that had helped finance German reparations, Allied war debts, and European purchases of American goods, pressure mounted to reduce American tariffs and implement a moratorium on intergovernmental debts. Hoover finally agreed to the latter in June 1931, but the moratorium, unpopular among many Americans, could not rescue the international financial system. Nor did the administration take effective action to check militarism and aggression. After Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson could only persuade Hoover to respond with an essentially toothless “nonrecognition” policy with respect to Japanese territorial gains that violated international treaties involving the United States.
By mid-1932, then, the Hoover presidency and its efforts at home and abroad were in disarray. For most Americans, it was the domestic, not the global, situation that mattered, with the Great Depression approaching its nadir. By the fall election, Hoover’s reputation was badly tarnished not only by the depression and by his unsuccessful policies to deal with hard times, but by what seemed his hard-hearted refusal even to grant relief assistance. His role in sending military troops in late July to evict the Bonus Army that came to Washington to seek prepayment of the bonus voted them in the 1920s came to symbolize Hoover’s presidency. The widely respected “Great Humanitarian” of 1928 had become the butt of jokes by 1932, with the shantytowns of the unemployed called Hoovervilles. In the election that fall, Hoover went down to overwhelming defeat, losing the popular vote by 57.4 to 39.7 percent and carrying just six of the 48 states.
Although the electoral verdict of 1932 is understandable, the lingering image of a reactionary, do-nothing
With between 12 million and 14 million people out of work during the early 1930s, many Americans sought shelter in towns constructed of cardboard shacks on vacant land. In a gesture aimed at the government's unwillingness to act on their plight, they ironically dubbed these towns Hoovervilles. Shown is the Hooverville outside of Seattle, Washington. (Private collection)
Hoover—in part the result of artful Democratic politicking in the 1930s—needs revision. Hoover did more than any president previously in combating a depression, and he often went beyond orthodox economic thought. Few leading Democrats advocated more far-reaching policies, and a number criticized him for doing and spending too much. Some of Hoover’s initiatives were continued and expanded by Franklin Roosevelt, who also shared Hoover’s concern about deficit spending and about the corroding effect of relief on initiative and self-respect. But the differences between the New Deal’s regulatory welfare state and Hoover’s policies far outweigh the continuities and similarities; and while the New Deal failed to end the depression, it did bring a variety of highly visible programs to provide relief and to effect social and economic reform.
Above all, perhaps, Hoover was an ideologue and a technocrat, unwilling to violate his ideas and principles, often contemptuous of politics and politicians, and unsuited by his shy and aloof temperament to providing public leadership. Roosevelt by contrast was a politician and a leader, at ease with people and in touch with public opinion, and ready to experiment in using government to provide humanitarian assistance and to preserve the American democratic capitalist system. The depression pushed Hoover’s ideas and leadership ability to their limits and beyond, and then brought his defeat and the demise of his reputation. Indeed, the very failure of Hoover’s programs helped set the stage for the far more expansive use of the federal government by the Roosevelt presidency.
Further reading: William J. Barber, From New Era to New Deal: Herbert Hoover, the Economists, and American Economic Policy, 1921-1933 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); David Burner, Herbert Hoover: A Public Life (New York: Knopf, 1979); Martin L. Fausold, The Presidency of Herbert Hoover (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1985); Albert U. Romasco, The Poverty of Abundance: Hoover, the Nation, the Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965); Jordan Schwarz, The Interregnum of Despair: Hoover, Congress, and the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970); Joan Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975).
Hopkins, Harry L. (1890-1946) White House adviser, government official, diplomat Harry Lloyd Hopkins, RELIEF administrator for the New Deal in the 1930s, was one of the principal advisers of Franklin D. Roosevelt and during World War II served as the president’s personal ambassador on key FOREIGN POLICY and military issues. A wisecracking, practical, and sometimes cynical man who was as comfortable at the race tracks as at the White House, Hopkins was tenderhearted as well as tough-minded, and he brought to public service deep concern for underprivileged and destitute Americans and unflagging dedication to Roosevelt and the nation.
Born and raised in Iowa and educated at Iowa’s Grin-nell College, Hopkins moved to New York City in 1912, and for nearly two decades worked as a social worker and administrator. In those capacities he developed his convictions that public and private agencies needed to do more to alleviate poverty and ill health and that every American should “have access to the opportunity to provide for himself and his family a decent and American way of living.” In 1931, Roosevelt, then governor of New York, named Hopkins to head the state’s Temporary Emergency Relief Administration; in 1933, Roosevelt brought Hopkins to Washington to head the first major national relief program, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA).
From 1933 to 1938, Hopkins served as Roosevelt’s relief administrator, heading not just the FERA but subsequently also the CiviL Works Administration (CWA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Like Roosevelt, Hopkins preferred work relief, which preserved dignity and self-respect in addition to building the national infrastructure, over direct relief (cash payments or food and clothing) to the unemployed and needy. He took part throughout the decade in an often vitriolic and usually successful struggle for works projects money with Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who headed the Public Works Administration and preferred carefully planned, capital-intensive public works projects over the labor-intensive work relief projects that could quickly get money into the economy. Hopkins’s enormous energy and bureaucratic talents helped the relief programs accomplish what they did in the face of fiscal, ideological, and political obstacles. Despite the heavy and sometimes inefficient spending on relief, Hopkins’s reputation for probity was never ques-tioned—although he did come under fire, sometimes justified, for using relief spending for political purposes.
In Roosevelt’s second term, Hopkins’s role changed, and he became even more important in New Deal politics and policymaking. He had a significant part in Roosevelt’s decision to try (with little success) to “purge” the Democratic Party of anti-New Deal conservatives in the election of 1938, and by 1938 he was among the New Dealers pushing hardest to adopt fiscal policy based on Keynesianism to lift the economy out of the recession of 1937-1938. Late in 1938, he resigned as relief administrator to become secretary of commerce, and in the latter capacity not only tried to reconcile business to the New Deal but also continued to push for Keynesian spending to underwrite recovery and reform. By the late 1930s, however, Hopkins was suffering from stomach cancer and a severe digestive disorder that led him to resign from the cabinet in 1940. But when Roosevelt decided to run for a third term in the election of 1940, he relied on Hopkins to help assure his renomination and the somewhat unpopular nomination of Henry A. Wallace for vice president.
During World War II, Hopkins served as Roosevelt’s adviser and personal envoy on diplomatic and military matters and lived for long spells in the White House. He worked especially to find ways to speed the defeat of the Axis and to ensure the effectiveness of the Grand Alliance. Early in 1941, Hopkins visited England to help enhance coordination and cooperation between the two nations, and until August 1941 headed the Lend-Lease Act program sending assistance to Great Britain and later the Soviet Union. He worked with General George C. Marshall on military policy, served as FDR’s envoy to British prime minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin, and played significant roles at the Casablanca Coneerence, the Cairo Coneerence, and the Teheran Coneerence in 1943. At Teheran he helped persuade Churchill to agree to open a second ERont in the spring of 1944.
But cancer and his digestive disorder continued to ravage Hopkins and to diminish the energy of this once indefatigable man. His health kept him on the sidelines for much of 1944, and after participating in the February 1945 Yalta Coneerence he returned to the United States for treatment at the Mayo Clinic, where he was when Roosevelt died in April 1945. Although he resigned from the government in early May, he undertook at the request of new president Harry S. Truman another mission to Moscow later that month to try to persuade Stalin, with some limited success, to be more cooperative on a number of issues. Hopkins died in January 1946.
Further reading: Searle F. Charles, Minister of Relief: Harry Hopkins and the Depression (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1963); George T. McJimsey, Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).
World History
