Herbert Hoover

by Glen Jeansonne

  Over the course of the skirmish, several versions of the Garner bill evolved. Hoover vetoed Garner measures that passed Congress on June 6 and June 11. The initial bill contained provisions for hundreds of public works scattered throughout the country, many of them post offices, to be built chiefly by mechanical labor, concentrated in middle-class, vote-rich areas of medium unemployment. Hoover contended that Garner’s public works would employ only 100,000 of a pool of 8 million jobless, none of them in permanent jobs. Garner proposed that all RFC loans be handled directly by the small RFC board of directors, which would overwhelm the six members, bypassing private banks, which had much greater resources, and effectively putting independent banks out of business. Further, the chief executive desired to focus on remunerative public works that would provide some permanent jobs and repay the costs of construction and maintenance over time, such as toll highways, tunnels and bridges, docks and harbors, dams for generating and selling electricity, and trees that could be planted and later harvested. Hoover framed a bill of his own, which included most of these provisions, but it was killed in a House committee. Congress was deadlocked; the need for legislation was urgent; the nominating conventions had met, Garner had been chosen for vice president on the Democratic ticket, and adjournment lay only days away. With the help of Senators Robinson and Wagner, Hoover and his allies cobbled together a last-minute compromise deleting most of the objectionable provisions in the Garner bill and giving Hoover most of what he wanted. One troublesome provision remained. The clerk of the House, with the consent of the Speaker, could publish the names of banks that had received RFC loans. This might ignite a run on banks by panicked depositors. Hoover did not believe the provision would be used—it was too patently self-destructive. Ultimately, the Emergency Relief and Construction Act of 1932 was passed by the House on July 14 and by the Senate on July 16, and Hoover signed it on July 21.16

  The bold step failed to save Hoover politically, and recovery would take time. It was subsequently undermined by Garner’s publication of recipients of RFC loans, fueling a runaway banking panic during the winter of 1932–33. Yet the law itself stood as a Mount Everest–sized testimonial compared to some of the previous, less vigorous attempts to lift the economy. It showed how far Hoover was willing to go and how far he had come, and it left a blueprint for his successors. In fighting this final battle over a desperately needed landmark measure, Hoover had proved his mettle. Both firm and flexible, a seminal thinker, he had grown into an accomplished legislator, working under unforgiving deadlines and enormous stress. Yet there was no gloating in the White House in July 1932. Whether America would emerge from its economic collapse as Europe was doing, and whether the president faced a Waterloo at the polls, remained to be seen.17

  For a divided Congress functioning in an election year during hard times, the 72nd Congress had remarkable achievements to its credit. Unemployment relief from self-liquidating public works projects totaled about $700 million. Other important bills were enacted, including ones limiting uses of injunctions for labor disputes, reorganizing procedure in federal juvenile cases, and rendering kidnapping a federal crime. Yet much time had been lost in endless debates, even as banks collapsed and mortgages fell due. Congress, and the president, could have done more and acted more expeditiously. Bankruptcy reform was not passed until after the 1932 election and budget reform was not enacted until June 1932. Congress failed to act on railroad reorganization. Nonetheless, with his program fleshed out, Hoover felt the pieces were in place for recovery. Long-term confidence, however, had not yet been achieved. Perhaps without the inflammatory oratory of the campaign that followed, the national economy might have lifted off, for there were glimmers of recovery, especially in the stock market, during the summer of 1932. But the economy remained fragile, and fear threatened to upset the delicate balance. The foremost accomplishment of this productive session was the RFC, which hurled $5 billion into the vortex of the Depression. The Glass-Steagall Act helped stabilize world currency exchanges. Near the end, Hoover and Garner became fierce antagonists, as the savvy Texan injected the rhetoric of class war into the clash. As recovery inched forward, yet buckled amid the scathing invective surrounding the campaign, progress continued throughout much of the world. The United States remained potentially the world’s mightiest nation, but the glimmer of a sunrise in the summer of 1932 proved merely a firefly in the night.18

  President Hoover spent more time seeking a solution to farm poverty than to any other issue during his tenure. A Jeffersonian in his view of the yeoman farmer, Hoover—like historian Frederick Jackson Turner, one of his contemporaries who shared many of the president’s beliefs—considered the family farm the crucible of democracy. If democracy were to survive, farming would have to change, but farming was so ingrained in the roots of American traditions that the family farm as an institution must endure. Hoover proposed to amalgamate farms not by selling off small plots but by connecting them into cooperatives in which independent farmers acting in unison could practice economies of scale. These farmer-owned cooperatives were to resemble a pyramid, with the base at the grass roots. Hoover had evangelized for such a cooperative movement while secretary of commerce, and by the time he became president the movement had grown rapidly.19

  In light of the spike in rural poverty caused by the Great Depression, Hoover renewed his push for a holistic farm program based on cooperatives. Hoover’s program was interlocking. Cooperatives would provide better negotiating power on the marketplace, in selling and purchasing. The key features were warehouses and grain elevators, constructed with government loans, which could store nonperishable crops and allow them to be released gradually rather than flooding the market at once, competing against one another. Hoover’s wide-ranging program also included reduced rail rates, a system of inland waterways for bulk traffic, and a St. Lawrence Seaway to connect the hinterlands with the Atlantic. Hoover urged farmers to diversify rather than overproducing staples such as wheat, corn, and cotton. Some agriculture advocates viewed exports as the solution. Yet, abroad, prices were lower, due largely to cheaper labor overseas, and foreigners would not buy at the high American prices. Unfortunately, the simple cure-alls evoked more political pizzazz than Hoover’s more scientific program. The Farm Board created during the 1929 special session enjoyed substantial success in recruiting members to the cooperative movement, and by October 1929 more than one-third of farmers belonged to co-ops. During the winter of 1930 the board began purchasing bales of cotton and bushels of wheat to prevent them from overwhelming the market and driving down prices ruinously. Gradually, the stabilization program expanded, yet farm prices still continued to plummet. Prices never reached a level where the board could recoup its original purchase price, and the board ended up selling at a loss, negotiating cheap foreign sales, and using the surpluses for disaster relief or giving them away to the Red Cross. By October 1931 wheat prices had fallen an additional 29.5 cents per bushel in a single year. Farmers suffered more than city people financially but ate a more plentiful diet. Industrial unemployment drove two hundred thousand people back to the countryside in 1931 alone, despite grim conditions in rural regions. The Farm Board proved a valiant experiment, but the law of supply and demand defeated efforts to legislate it out of existence.20

  Among the most infamous episodes of the Great Depression was a march of some twenty thousand veterans to lobby for immediate cash payment of a bonus for their service in the Great War. During the Harding administration, legislation was enacted to pay them $3.4 million twenty-five years later, when many of them would approach retirement age. The government placed $112 million yearly into a fund, supporting bonds that would mature in 1945. However, with the Depression, the vets demanded immediate cash payment, not at the 1932 value, but with future accrued interest at the 1945 value. Hoover felt sympathy for the veterans and had been a better protector of their interests than any recent president, constructing twenty-five new veterans’ hospitals, exten
ding pensions for many disabilities not related to combat, and consolidating the Veterans’ Bureau and the veterans’ homes into the streamlined Veterans’ Administration, which provided prompt and efficient care. Hoover should have been the most popular recent president among veterans. In 1931 Congress passed over Hoover’s veto a bill loaning 50 percent of the value of the bonds to veterans immediately but did not appropriate any funds, conveniently blaming Hoover for the lack of money. Not all veterans were impoverished; in fact, some were wealthy. The president supported legislation that would pay needy veterans alone, but the vets insisted on all or nothing. The issue heated up in 1932, an election year. In January 1932, Representative Wright Patman, a Texas Democrat, submitted a bill to pay the veterans’ bonus in full, based on $2.4 billion in unbacked greenbacks. Hoover pointed out that this would make it impossible to help many of the truly needy nonveterans. However, Congress was aware that the truly needy were not an organized voting bloc glamorized by military valor. Hoover was labeled stingy and unpatriotic. The president pointed out that the cost of the plan, $2.4 billion, was more than half the entire national budget of $3.7 billion. Basing the payment on unbacked currency would devalue the worth of all assets, including salaries, bonds, and the veterans’ own pensions. It would create chaotic inflation and disrupt exports. Commodities produced by Americans would be worth less and banks would fail. There would be no faith in government credit.21

  Meanwhile, unemployed veterans journeyed from the West Coast, picking up supporters along the way. Traveling from town to town, from state to state, by foot, auto, truck, or train, and sometimes transported by local police and civil authorities to keep them moving, some twenty thousand eventually set up ramshackle camps just across the District of Columbia line on the Anacostia Flats. A few camped out in abandoned buildings scheduled for demolition along Pennsylvania Avenue. Some men even brought along their families. Hoover provided army tents, food, and milk for young children covertly, lest he inspire other disaffected groups to march on Washington. The throng’s purpose was to lobby for passage of the Patman bill. The House passed the measure, but it was rejected soundly by the Senate, 62–18. Had it cleared both chambers, Hoover’s veto pen awaited. Hoover never doubted that many of the veterans were sincere, honest, patriotic Americans who believed in their cause. Yet among them were agitators, including a handful of Communists, who wanted to exploit the situation and inflame the public in order to destabilize capitalism. After the Senate defeated Patman’s bill, all but some five thousand of the veterans departed, and Congress, at the president’s request, appropriated money providing full rail fare home. Congress adjourned and left Washington. The stragglers now lacked a tangible reason to remain in the capital. At the orders of District of Columbia commissioners, the district police attempted to evict the squatters in the abandoned buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue. A scuffle erupted, and two veterans were killed by a capital policeman after one of them tried to seize his revolver. The district commissioners asked the president, in writing, to mobilize a contingent of the army to remove the veterans from all of Washington. Hoover instructed his immediate assistants, Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley and Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur, to use minimal force, including nightsticks but not rifles. On his own authority, Hurley decided that the outnumbered troops would be endangered, and he armed them with rifles. Assisting MacArthur were Major Dwight D. Eisenhower and Major George S. Patton. With MacArthur commanding, only tear gas was used; no bullets were fired; and there were no deaths or serious injuries. The army drove the retreating men, who called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, to the district line at the Anacostia River, where Hoover had ordered MacArthur to stop. MacArthur halted for dinner and rest, then crossed the bridge as the campers fled. Accounts vary as to whether the troops, the campers themselves, or both, burned the camps, already in ruins. After returning, MacArthur received two stern tongue-lashings from an irate Hoover, who also rebuked Hurley for going beyond his orders.22

  Democrats and opposition journalists inflamed the issue, and FDR allegedly gloated, “This will elect me.” Yet in reality, while the episode hurt Hoover marginally, it had occurred near the beginning of the presidential campaign season. The unfortunate affair might have changed some individual votes, but it is unlikely that it changed a single electoral vote.23

  ELEVEN

  Democracy Is a Harsh Employer

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

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

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

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