On Inauguration Day, a morning drizzle gave way to a downpour that drenched his motorcade as it crept along Pennsylvania Avenue, cheered on by thousands of celebrants. Rain pelted Hoover’s face as he leaned forward to kiss the Bible, opened to the Sermon on the Mount, his favorite passage. His speech, delivered in his typical monotone, reached the largest radio audience on record at that time. For all the distractions, and the president’s low-key delivery, the content was meaty, with a positive tone, including tributes to Coolidge and passages of moral and spiritual uplift. The longest portion dealt with maintaining peace in a world still impacted by the Great War. Excessive armaments wasted federal dollars and escalated tensions while bringing no additional security, Hoover insisted. He would settle disputes with other nations amicably and work to resolve differences without meddling in their affairs. In addition, the new president announced that to protect American agriculture he would summon Congress into a special session limited to two items, farm relief and moderate tariff increases. He promised to appoint a commission to investigate law enforcement, including Prohibition, and announced plans for public works, waterways, government reorganization, and improvements in public health and education. Although bursting with progressive ideas, Hoover had sliced fat from the speech, making it one of the shorter addresses for a modern president. Following the ceremony, the First Family changed into dry clothes in their quarters at the White House before Lou presided over a large tea. Hoover, who did not dance, skipped the Inaugural Ball, sponsored by Vice President Charles Curtis, attending a small charity benefit instead.6
The White House, muddled under Harding, somnolent under Coolidge, now became the heartbeat of government activity, blazing with action. Commandeering the desk used by Woodrow Wilson, whom Hoover admired for his high ideals, the new president had a telephone installed, the office’s first. Whereas previous presidents had utilized one primary secretary, usually male, Hoover had three, who were assigned responsibilities according to function and met each morning to plan the day’s work. The president outlined objectives, giving his secretaries flexibility to take the initiative and accomplish their goals. Each man shared his leader’s traits of resolve and probity. Walter H. Newton had served in Congress, as a political liaison with Capitol Hill, on the Republican National Committee, and with government agencies as well as with committees and commissions. A shrewd politician, he gathered political intelligence about pending legislation and helped steer bills through Congress. Lawrence Richey, a former Secret Service agent, had worked for Hoover at Commerce and was close to the president personally, the only one of the men who fished with Hoover. Richey handled the president’s personal correspondence and managed the office, and also took on personal assignments, such as political intelligence. George Akerson, a former Washington correspondent for a Minnesota daily, became press secretary, a position he had held previously during the campaign and at the Commerce Department.
Although not among the group of secretaries, French Strother, a former associate editor at World’s Work, contributed research to Hoover’s speeches and fact-checked, though he left the president’s prose alone. One of Hoover’s closest friends, Edgar Rickard, returned to private business following the campaign and handled the president’s personal finances. Hoover’s fortune had dwindled from both investment losses and personal generosity, and during his years in office his outside income rarely exceeded $40,000 annually. He customarily declined a government salary as president and paid his own expenses, including those covering White House entertainment.7
In consolidating his cabinet, Hoover had assembled men of strong executive experience. Two were holdovers from the Coolidge administration, Labor Secretary James J. Davis and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Hoover appeased the business wing of the party with Mellon, yet he also installed men who would faithfully implement his own policies, such as Ray Lyman Wilbur as interior secretary. Henry L. Stimson, who held influence in the Republican Party and had previously served as governor-general of the Philippines, was chosen as secretary of state, though Hoover would often prefer the advice of Ogden Mills, an assistant secretary of the treasury, and William R. Castle Jr., the undersecretary of state. The secretary of war, James W. Good, had served as a congressman from Iowa and held a seat on the House Appropriations Committee. He served only eight months in the cabinet before his death and was replaced by Patrick J. Hurley. For navy secretary, Hoover named Charles Francis Adams, scion of a family that had produced two presidents, and later lamented not appointing him as secretary of state. Hoover deemed Attorney General William D. Mitchell, a Democrat who had been Coolidge’s solicitor general, quite able. Walter Folger Brown, who had worked for Hoover at Commerce and shared his boss’s interest in government reorganization, was selected for postmaster general, and Arthur M. Hyde, former governor of Missouri and an old friend of Hoover’s, was appointed as secretary of agriculture. Robert P. Lamont, an engineer and businessman, was appointed as secretary of commerce. Hoover later said he regretted the choice because Lamont lacked initiative and imagination.
While legislation originated with the president or Congress, the cabinet worked at a tactical level, fleshing out, refining, and implementing policy. At meetings, cabinet members usually reached a consensus on major questions and then closed ranks before announcing programs, which was usually left to Hoover. Assembling weekly, they vetted the most significant topics, and everyone was encouraged to contribute. No written minutes were taken. Hoover worked without notes, drawing upon his precise memory.
The Hoover administration’s first eight months were a whirlwind of reform that indicates what might have been accomplished had the Great Depression not intervened. There had been a paucity of meaningful domestic reform for nearly a generation. Wilson’s second term had been preoccupied with the war, while Harding was unfit to engineer reform and Coolidge opposed it by principle. Hoover, however, moved rapidly, implementing new policies and issuing executive orders that laid the foundation for legislation. He planned conferences to study child health care, conservation, and law enforcement, and he commissioned studies on recent social and economic trends to explore his ideas for social and economic improvements.8
Over Andrew Mellon’s objections, Hoover urged legislation graduating income taxes more steeply, placing a lower burden on the poor and middle classes. He expanded civil service throughout the government and worked to expand the acreage of federal parks and forests. To head the federal prison system, he recruited Sanford Bates, a veteran prison reformer, who made the system more humane, emphasizing rehabilitation and the potential for parole, treating women and minorities more fairly, and reducing overcrowding. Hoover canceled oil leases on federal lands, which had been perpetrated during the Harding scandals, and he instructed Walter Newton to compile a plan to reorganize the federal bureaucracy that could be translated into legislation.9
Three months later Hoover requested a law creating a strong Federal Power Commission to regulate interstate transmission and rates of electricity. He also sought to regulate railroad rates and to reorganize and stabilize the banking system. Hoover believed in firm and fair regulation of business and was a long-established opponent of monopoly, which he believed strangled competition and drained dry the incentives vital to productive free enterprise. He placed the interests of consumers above the profits of businessmen. During his tenure in the White House, the Justice Department instigated antitrust suits against such leading industrial giants as Radio Corporation of America, General Electric, and Westinghouse. In fact, more antitrust suits were filed under Hoover than under any previous president. During the 1932 presidential campaign, Franklin D. Roosevelt would even advocate relaxation of Hoover’s stringent regulation of big business.
Hoover used the moral leadership of the presidency to protect the nation’s most vulnerable citizens, including children, women, Native Americans, and African Americans. During the 1920s, he had been instrumental in founding the American Child Healt
h Association, and he remained their most visible advocate in the White House. For many years he supported a constitutional amendment outlawing child labor, which was passed by Congress but never ratified by the states. He embraced causes important to women, including suffrage and women’s participation in politics. Hoover sought to improve the well-being of Native Americans, nearly doubling appropriations for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and appointing administrators sympathetic to their needs. Native American health and educational facilities were improved substantially, and Interior Secretary Wilbur became a leading proponent of the preservation of native traditions, religions, crafts, and lifestyles. In race relations, Hoover invited black educator Robert R. Moton to lunch in the White House and increased appropriations for Howard University, a federally funded black college in Washington, DC. In addition, the president gave more urgency to labor reform, defending the right of labor to organize and to strike if necessary.10
One of the most contentious issues throughout the 1920s was the enforcement of Prohibition. Hoover doubted the law’s enforceability and questioned its constitutionality.11 Nonetheless, Hoover considered it his duty as president to implement all laws as a matter of principle, and he became the only chief executive of the Prohibition era who made a good-faith effort to stiffen enforcement. The most certain way to ensure the repeal of an unpopular law, he felt, was to enforce it strictly, motivating citizens to advocate for repeal.
Viewing Prohibition as a law enforcement issue, he moved responsibility from the Treasury to the Justice Department, placed agents under civil service, and discouraged the use of firearms so as to protect innocent bystanders. Eventually, his reforms led to the FBI’s arrest of the nation’s most notorious mobster, Al Capone, on charges of income tax evasion. Privately, the president believed that the dry era was doomed. The chief problem in federal enforcement was that federal officials could intercept and prosecute only interstate commerce. States were responsible for bootlegging committed within their own borders, but they possessed neither the will nor the resources to arrest and incarcerate offenders. An army of agents was needed to impose the amendment, the president felt. Despite his reluctance to discuss the problem openly, Hoover spoke with GOP leaders to persuade them that the law was impractical.12
Hoover’s concern with law enforcement extended beyond Prohibition to comprehensive legal, judicial, and prison reform. During his inaugural address he had pledged to form a commission to study these problems and recommend solutions. On May 29, 1929, he appointed a Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement chaired by President Taft’s former attorney general, George W. Wickersham. The commission thoroughly probed numerous aspects of the legal system and wrote a series of detailed reports, but its findings had little influence on public policy.13
Shortly after his inauguration, Hoover met with House and Senate leaders to discuss the agenda for the special session. His first priority was farm relief, he explained, followed by a slightly increased tariff to protect farmers against the low cost of foreign labor. American farmers, who made up 30 percent of the population, had not shared in 1920s prosperity, when supply outweighed demand. Hoover had sought to restore that balance as commerce secretary, yet now he intended to go further. He wanted to reduce transportation costs of farm products by reorganizing railroads for efficiency and creating a waterway system for bulk traffic. A system of farm cooperatives, operating via loans and technical advice from the government, would help individual farmers combine, akin to industrial enterprises. They could pool their resources to negotiate down the goods they bought and bargain up the produce they sold. Aided by loans, they could construct grain elevators to keep nonperishable crops off the market, releasing them incrementally rather than flooding the market and depressing prices at harvesttime. A Federal Farm Board of eight members, appointed by the president along commodity lines, plus the agriculture secretary as an ex officio member, would provide technical and organizational expertise, yet the individual commodity-oriented cooperatives, pyramided from the local to the national level, would be owned and run by farmers themselves, who would formulate policy. It was not ideal for farmers—the solution was incomplete—but it was an improvement. These attempts to nationalize farming without stepping beyond constitutional boundaries made common sense, especially when combined with Hoover’s schemes to diversify farming and phase marginal lands out of cultivation and plant them with cover crops.
Ironically, the chief opposition to the measure came from farm-state senators the tariff was intended to benefit, such as Smith Brookhart of Iowa and William E. Borah of Idaho. Fashioning themselves “Progressives”—conservative Republicans termed them “insurgents”—they often voted as a bloc against administration policies, focusing on legislation related to their farm constituents. Individuals such as Borah were spellbinding orators who attracted headlines out of proportion to the significance of their small electorates, some less populous than a single big-city ward. Insurgents countered Hoover’s plan for cooperative marketing conflicted with a plan to pay export debentures on farm products, which would increase exports and raise farm prices to a higher level than collectives. Hoover complained that most of the debenture payments would go to middlemen rather than to farmers, exacerbating overproduction, and also precipitate trade wars when Americans tried to undersell foreign nations on their own domestic agricultural markets. The debate grew more heated than Hoover had expected, an eruption of political gamesmanship directed at a new president who wanted to be a collegial leader, not a bully. In the end, Hoover got what he wanted in the farm bill, minus the proposals he opposed. The president signed the Agricultural Marketing Act on June 16, 1929. During ordinary times, it might have mitigated the toil of American farmers, but it was not destined to function during ordinary times.14
If the farm bill had been a struggle, the tariff sparked outright war. Hoover had conceived a moderate tariff on farm goods to help protect farmers from lower pay scales for farm labor abroad. Yet the chief problem in agriculture was not foreign competition, but oversupply. Mandatory crop limitations were the only certain solution but would have been difficult to enforce.15 In addition, tariffs, which involved many commodities and regional interests, were the richest source of pork in Congress. Congressmen demanded favors and horse-traded with other leaders in return for higher rates to satisfy their own constituents. Hoover attempted to remove politics from the equation with his intention to appoint a powerful Tariff Commission to raise or lower rates without congressional oversight, but for parochially oriented congressmen, the more politics in the tariff, the better.16
In this first session of his term, Hoover did not believe it would be necessary to summon individual congressmen to the White House to lobby them, much less offer them patronage plums for votes. Previous presidents had done this only rarely, with little success. Rather, Hoover focused his efforts on party leaders, certain committee chairmen, and the officers of the House and Senate, as well as small groups of congressmen. Aides and members of the Republican National Committee conveyed the president’s wishes further.
The final measure, known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, had become almost an afterthought by the time it passed in June 1930, long after the stock market crash of October 1929 had stolen its thunder.17 In the end, the bill did more harm than good. Hoover’s Tariff Commission did not prove a powerful tool in ameliorating high rates. What’s more, though the Senate had attached 1,253 amendments to the House measure, it had been stripped of the Farm Bloc’s debenture. Perhaps most important, the levy impacted only 4.2 percent of American trade. The diminution in foreign trade in later years stemmed largely from diminished purchasing power worldwide. Neither did it incite trade wars. Other nations had leapfrogged America in erecting tariff walls.18 Still, Hoover would have been wise to veto the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, and wiser yet not to have introduced the issue at all.
As the Smoot-Hawley debates raged, President Hoover again attempted to implement his agenda of bold s
ocial reforms. On September 28, 1929, Hoover invited a group of life insurance executives to the White House to discuss a new program to provide old-age pensions for American workers. Essentially an early draft of Social Security, Hoover’s reforms differed in several respects from the program enacted in 1935, and in some regards might have been superior. Premiums would be paid yearly in a lump sum of less than $500 beginning at birth, with parents or guardians assuming the responsibility until their child became a wage earner. At the age of sixty-five, a citizen would begin receiving $50 per month. Premiums paid by those who died prior to age sixty-five would be placed in a pool and used to supplement funds available to other retirees. Those in the system would receive a flat fee; there would be no graduated scale based on previous earnings. Only those who actually needed the stipend would receive money, excluding the wealthy.
Extensive research by government staffers and private social scientists had preceded the meeting. Some of Hoover’s associates traveled to Europe to investigate retirement programs there. A corpus of actuarial data was drawn from the information furnished by Hoover’s Research Committee on Social Trends. The conferees agreed to build in a system to adjust income to inflation. In this plan, unlike the plan enacted in 1935, the government would not have been permitted to borrow from the fund. Unfortunately, the president’s meeting with insurance executives was ill timed. Planned during the prosperous 1920s, Hoover’s program was impossible to implement during the difficulties of the 1930s. Hoover and the insurance companies soon postponed the program until the return of better times. He hoped to complete the project during a second term.19
Hoover had also devised a strategy for public and private cooperation to insure workers against unemployment, a complement to Social Security with many of the same features. Under his plan, the states would distribute the stipends, which would be derived from annuities sold to workers or en bloc to businesses by the major life insurance companies. While at the Commerce Department, Hoover made headway in stirring interest in the plan, and several studies were produced by social scientists employed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, demonstrating that such a program was feasible. The state legislature of New York, where the major life insurance companies were located, disapproved of the plan, as did the American Federation of Labor and the National Association of Manufacturers. After he became New York governor in 1928, Franklin D. Roosevelt also expressed reservations. The idea was eventually thwarted by the onset of the Great Depression. During the 1920s, when most people were employed, insurance companies had difficulty selling unemployment insurance. By the 1930s, the unemployment problem had swollen to such dimensions that no private company was willing to invest in marketing such securities. Nonetheless, this marks another example of the degree to which Hoover was more often ahead of his times than behind them.20
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