The U.S. Food Administration experience revealed some other characteristics as well. Hoover was extremely good at running complicated and high-stakes logistical operations, but he was a micromanager who liked to be in charge of nearly every decision. He was masterful at crafting persuasive messages and compelling propaganda, but he felt strongly that persuasion should not slide into coercion. Calling up “the spirit of self-sacrifice,” and encouraging Americans to consume less was preferable to forcing them to do so by rationing.25
After the end of the war, Hoover for President clubs sprang up spontaneously around the country, even though voters still did not know what party he belonged to. There was a huge amount of pressure on Hoover to run in 1920. Rich, accomplished, and looking for another challenge, he reluctantly put his hat in the ring for the California primary election—as a Republican. He lost the primary, in a big way, to iconic progressive (and Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 running mate) California governor Hiram Johnson, who had by then left the enfeebled Progressive Party and returned to the Republican fold.
So Hoover picked up the pieces, endorsed Warren Harding, and got repaid for his loyalty by being appointed secretary of commerce after Harding won. Commerce wasn’t that big a job, but Hoover made it bigger. Focused, visionary, and eager to shake things up in Washington, he negotiated leadership on a broad portfolio of issues, from housing to infrastructure to business relations. The newspapers called him secretary of commerce and “assistant secretary of everything else.”26
Two years into his tenure, Hoover published a book that gave a window into the way he approached the world. He titled it American Individualism. In it, Hoover revealed himself as a moderate-to-conservative thinker with a political philosophy that focused on individual ability rather than collective responsibility. Hoover thought laissez faire approaches allowed inequality and inefficiency. Centralized state planning, however, dissuaded useful social collaboration and stifled individual autonomy. Instead, he argued that the true American system was one that mixed individual freedoms with measures that steered and encouraged the nation in a direction that ensured the greatest opportunity. He believed in fairness, and he believed in meritocracy. Hoover was an orphan who had become a millionaire. He felt this was a true American success story—and that anyone had the potential to do the same.27
Hoover’s individualism was not rugged but collaborative. Translated into policy terms, this meant voluntary coordination between business, labor, and government. The best outcomes came when leaders got together and decided on the wisest course of action, informed by data, above petty politics, and acting cooperatively. Hoover believed in strategic deployment of government resources, but he did not think the government needed to do the work of charity. His response to another crisis before his presidency illustrates that vividly, and helps explain how the triumphal “Great Engineer” became a “forgettable” president.
In 1927, the Mississippi River flooded its banks. About 27,000 square miles of land in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi was underwater. Close to a million people had to leave their homes. The official death toll was 246, but unofficial accounts placed the deaths in the thousands. Already desperately poor and in the throes of the 1920s farm depression, the flooded region could not cope with the devastation.
Hoover coordinated the government response. Just as in wartime, he reassured the public, coordinated private relief efforts, and deployed government resources to build new infrastructure. Individual economic assistance, however, was not part of his relief effort. That, in Hoover’s eyes, should be the job of private charity. Thus, the Red Cross became the organization that distributed food and tents to the flood victims. The federal government stuck to directing emergency evacuations and building levees along the Mississippi’s banks so that a disaster of this magnitude would not happen again.
The 1927 flood vindicated Hoover’s belief that private aid, not government help, was the way to handle individual needs. Many people in the Mississippi Delta felt differently. The Red Cross did not have the resources to help people over the long term. Once the food and tents ran out, residents still needed homes and jobs. Private charity did not have the capacity to provide that, and the recovery in the Delta was long, hard, and incomplete. In times of deep distress, Hoover’s approach wasn’t enough. The Great Depression proved it.28
The Natural
On 5 November 1930, as the economy hurtled downward and the credibility of the Republican in the White House sank along with it, reporters lounged in the headquarters of the New York State Democratic Party, gossiping about the day’s big political story: the landslide reelection victory of Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt already was a darling of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, so much that he complained privately that the chatter about his possible 1932 candidacy had “become a positive nightmare.”29 The margin of victory had been huge, twice as large as the predictions of the Democratic Party itself, and reporters wanted to know what this might mean for Roosevelt’s future political prospects. Jim Farley gave it to them. “I fully expect,” the state Democratic chair read in a prepared statement, “that the call will come to Governor Roosevelt when the first presidential primary is held, which will be late next year.… I do not see how Mr. Roosevelt can escape becoming the next presidential nominee of his party, even if no one should raise a finger to bring it about.”30
For Franklin Roosevelt, this was an extraordinary political ascent. He had been elected governor only two years before, in one of the few Democratic bright spots in the debacle of 1928. He brought charm and ease to the office and the campaign trail, making a big job seem effortless, disarming reporters and voters with his wit and joviality. He seemed a natural at politics. Yet part of his mastery was how well he hid the great deal of effort he put into this effortless political persona, and how much sharp-eyed political maneuvering he did to ensure that he would become the nominee, and win the presidency.
At the heart of Roosevelt’s disguise were the elaborate measures he took to overcome the crippling disability he had developed less than a decade earlier, and to hide the fact that he could not walk unassisted. Only insiders like Farley fully understood the daunting odds Roosevelt had overcome to get this far in politics in the first place, and how close he had come to being written off as a possible contender for anything only a few short years before.
In contrast to Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt was a child of privilege. He was born in 1882 into a wealthy New York family, and he was so much younger than his older half-siblings that he was raised, effectively, as an only child by an adoring and overprotective mother. Theodore Roosevelt was a distant and much-admired cousin, but his branch of the family was quite different. When they got together on vacation, TR’s children derided their cousin Franklin because he liked sailing. Teddy had insisted his children row their boats—because it was more “strenuous.” The young FDR was witty and friendly, but didn’t seem to impress anyone with his intellect. Cosseted and protected in his early home life, he struggled to fit in socially at prep school and Harvard, where he was crushed by his failure to be invited into its most elite secret society, the Porcellian, of which both Roosevelt’s father and his illustrious cousin Theodore had been members.31
Yet soon after graduating, the young aristocrat started to chase more serious pursuits, driven to do something more than live a life of leisure. Roosevelt was a lifelong Democrat. His only vote on the Republican side was in 1904, when his cousin Theodore was running for reelection. He entered Democratic politics formally in 1910, when he ran for and won a New York State Senate seat. His home district of Dutchess County was mostly countryside, and the experience gave him an understanding of rural life, and credibility with rural voters. This proved valuable in his political career ahead. Yet even as he embarked on a career in politics, he brought with him an aristocratic demeanor that failed to impress potential allies and voters. His colleagues in the New York state legislature, in a play on his first two initials, took to
referring to him with the dismissive nickname “Feather Duster.”32
However, by the time he won reelection in 1912, Roosevelt was a man to watch. He had tamped down his upper-class mannerisms after enlisting the help of a gruff and intensely pragmatic campaign advisor, Louis M. Howe, who helped him cultivate key political alliances and build a more down-to-earth public persona. Before Roosevelt could dig into his second term, however, he was recruited by the newly elected Woodrow Wilson to join his administration in Washington, and take up the job that had been his cousin TR’s first appointment as well: assistant secretary of the navy.
During his time in the Wilson administration, Roosevelt and Hoover became friendly with each other. They attended the same dinner parties, were colleagues, and had rather similar political views—centrist, yet also progressive and reformist. Roosevelt still projected more style than substance. Hoover was still the organizational master and the consummate technocrat. Roosevelt admired him greatly. “I wish we could make him President of the United States,” he enthused in 1918. “There could not be a better one.”33
However, by 1920 their political lives had diverged. While Hoover ran as a Republican for president, Roosevelt became vice presidential nominee on the Democratic ticket. Now on opposite sides of the aisle and consumed with other things, they rarely saw each other. Thus, their Wilson-era impressions proved important to the 1932 campaign. Each believed that the man he was running against was essentially the same person—in temperament and political beliefs—as the person he had known during the wartime years in Washington. But the 1920s changed both men in important ways. Especially Franklin Roosevelt.
During the summer of 1921, after visiting a Boy Scout camp, Roosevelt contracted polio. The devastating disease, also known as infantile paralysis, was a child’s illness. The sheltered and pampered childhood of Roosevelt had kept him largely isolated from other children, and their germs. So, as a vigorous, athletic adult, he contracted the viral illness that ate away at his spinal cord and left his lower body withered and nearly useless.
Polio upended Roosevelt’s life. He had to drop out of the public eye, enduring months and years of rehabilitation. His wife Eleanor later observed that the experience of polio made him far more patient. For once, the restless and energetic Roosevelt had to sit still. The disease forced this strong-minded son of privilege into a deeply uncomfortable new state of extraordinary vulnerability, reliant on the help of others for his recovery. His response was to try to take charge of his life, and his health, as much as he possibly could—even if it meant pushing away those who loved him most. His mother Sara pleaded with him to abandon his political aspirations; he would hear none of it. He distanced himself from his wife Eleanor, both emotionally and geographically, spending months in Florida and Georgia in search of remedies to eradicate his disease. Yet even amid his self-absorbed quest to regain his former life, Roosevelt now had personal experience that people could not do it alone. They needed to belong to something bigger.34
The relentless optimism that would characterize the public Roosevelt for much of his presidency came through in his letters to friends and family in the early months of his recovery. If he could not beat the disease, he at least could try to convince everyone otherwise. He was “in better health than I have been for years,” he assured one friend in 1922. Yet his physical fitness did not match his sunny prognostications, and he was a no-show at two years of political events, fueling speculation in the political world that he was too disabled to carry through on his once-considerable political ambitions.35
FDR’s return to the political spotlight came in 1924, at the Democratic National Convention to give a speech in support of his political mentor and fellow New Yorker, Governor Al Smith, who was running for president. It was a dramatic moment. Everyone knew of Roosevelt’s illness. Everyone knew how disabling polio could be. Roosevelt had prepared for this moment for months and years, reviving himself not through the power of medicine but through sheer grit and tenacity over hours of physical rehabilitation. The audience may have expected a man in a wheelchair, but Roosevelt came to the stage on crutches. He stood as he addressed the throng, gripping the podium with every ounce of upper-body strength he possessed in order to stay upright. He had gone from a thin, average shaped man to a person with a broad chest and powerful arms—on top of spindly and useless legs.
Roosevelt altered his speaking style to take people’s attention away from his disability. He leaned forward over lecterns and used a powerful voice and intonation to get his audience to focus only on the waist up. Revealing his genius for delivering a political catchphrase and making it stick, he extolled Smith as the “Happy Warrior,” fighting for the common man. While the convention (and the election) turned out to be a disaster for the Democrats, FDR’s 1924 nominating speech was triumphal, and it resurrected his political career. Continuing to improve his physical strength, he went back to work behind the political scenes, building important networks and alliances within the Democratic Party. And this became another unintended advantage that the horror of polio bestowed on Franklin Roosevelt. It kept him out of the spotlight—and away from running for office—during a decade when Democrats were losing election after election.
In 1928, he got back in the game. Al Smith decided to run again for president, and with Smith’s blessing Roosevelt ran for governor. On the stump, he tested ideas and rhetorical tactics he would use to great effect four years later. As a New York City Catholic whose core political constituency was urban working people, Al Smith had governed New York State on a platform of an activist labor and welfare program. Recognizing the crucial importance of this bloc, Roosevelt pledged to continue Smith’s approach. Along with the growing Democratic base in the cities, he made direct appeals to the economically struggling rural voters like those who had populated his home district when he was a state senator. “I want our agricultural population … to be put on the same level of earning capacity as their fellow Americans who live in cities,” he proclaimed in an October 1928 speech. He urged his audience not to “doze upon the Hoover pillow” and be lulled into thinking that prosperity had been equally shared.36
With this coalition and this message, Roosevelt won the governorship, despite the Hoover landslide. So by the time Herbert Hoover got to the White House, Franklin Roosevelt was one of the most prominent and powerful leaders of his party. Two years into their respective terms, Hoover was battling the Great Depression and Roosevelt was being talked up as the most likely man to take the White House back for the Democrats.
Figure 11. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Hyde Park, New York, 1927. As he recovered from polio and reentered political life in the late 1920s, Roosevelt carefully staged his public appearances to mask the evidence of his disability. A few family photographs are the only places the viewer can clearly see the braces that always encircled his ankles. Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum.
Two men, with different visions. One thought government action should be limited to building things—not government handouts or mandates on business. The other thought the government had a bigger role to play—and that in times of trouble the government needed to do more to help individual people get back on their feet. These differences mattered in 1932, as did the way they were communicated to the voters.
The Selling of the President
The political rises of both Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt attested to changing winds in American electoral politics. In the years since 1912, which had been a presidential election that bobbled unpredictably between party-dominated deal-making and candidate-centered public appeals, the system of electing presidents had shifted markedly toward the latter. Mass media had a great deal to do with this. It was the golden age of newspaper reporting, and the beginning of the golden age of radio. The modern professions of marketing and public relations also emerged during these decades, developing ever more sophisticated techniques to persuade American consumers to buy new products. As the marketpl
ace became more crowded, messages relied on striking visuals and punchy slogans to grab the viewer’s attention. Companies began to break their customers into market segments, targeting products and advertising to different groups depending on their gender, age, and purchasing power. Unsurprisingly, the American automobile industry led the way, with Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors famously promising “a car for every purse and purpose.”37
By the early 1920s, these trends of market segmentation, streamlined messages, and strategic deployment of mass media had reached politics. Journalist Walter Lippmann homed in on this trend in his 1922 Public Opinion. Aided by speedy communications technologies and a crowded and chaotic marketplace, Lippmann observed, leaders had started to deploy simplistic, symbolically loaded messages that played on stereotypes and ignored the messy realities of modern society.38
Herbert Hoover was the master of this new political style. From wartime food administration to the Department of Commerce, he had been a refined practitioner of the arts of public persuasion through posters (“Food Will Win the War!”, “Sow the Seeds of Victory!”), targeted marketing (promoting “Better Homes in America” to young families as commerce secretary), and savvy media outreach. “The world lives by phrases,” he commented, “and we are good advertisers.” As a candidate, Hoover made himself an accessible figure to the Washington press corps, but he also carefully controlled the terms of that accessibility and kept his remarks as restrained as his starched shirt collars. He sensed that marketing and advertising, not just newspaper reportage, could be powerful tools to win voters’ hearts. In 1928, he looked at his base of political support like corporate CEOs looked at their prospective customers, identifying their main interests, and breaking them into market segments.
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