Herbert Hoover

by Glen Jeansonne

  Hoover underestimated Roosevelt and believed he would be the easiest Democrat to defeat. He assumed FDR would find it impossible to do the work of the presidency from a wheelchair. Also, he derided Roosevelt as long on style but short on substance, calling FDR’s promise to give a job to every unemployed American “cruel” for building false hope. Hoover and Roosevelt had been personal friends, or at least convivial acquaintances, until FDR turned on Hoover during the 1928 campaign. As a result, the president considered Roosevelt fickle and unprincipled, with a win-at-all-costs ethical code. Nonetheless, the Depression, not Roosevelt, was the real enemy. Under ordinary circumstances Hoover would have been a strong candidate, but these were unusual conditions. One supporter of Hoover summed up the dilemma of the GOP. “It was natural to claim for the Republican Party the great prosperity of 1928, but unfortunately it is equally natural to lay at its doors the misfortune of 1932.” He explained that FDR was a more formidable opponent than Al Smith, whose Roman Catholic faith Protestants viewed with suspicion and whose links to Tammany Hall lent him an unwanted aura of big-city corruption. “Although infinitely inferior in mentality to Smith, Roosevelt has a pleasing personality; a good voice; a good appeal as a speaker, without any of the disqualifications of his opponent since religion is not an issue. . . . All he really has to do is to capitalize on the present discontent, and let that current bear him in.” The writer’s advice was that Hoover should be bold and assertive, frame pithy, catchy slogans, and take the offensive. He should emphasize the challenger’s lack of qualifications and lack of viable alternatives to the Hoover program, placing the Democrat on the defensive.7

  Republicans had not faced so grave a challenge for a long time. Money was an enormous problem for the GOP. The party eventually patched together about $2.5 million, more than the Democrats, but less than the $4 million they had spent in 1928, during booming times. Ironically, the Democrats spent less in winning in 1932 than they had in losing in 1928. The parties were fairly evenly matched in total spending, though the Republicans had a slender edge. Hoover and the best orator on his campaign team, Ogden L. Mills, paid for radio time out of their own pockets. The president was forced to spend a good deal of time raising money to keep the campaign solvent, finally obtaining a pledge of $500,000 from J. P. Morgan on the condition that Hoover raise matching funds. The president found the money, which lasted through the end of the GOP campaign.8

  In mid-September, the returns in Maine, a rock-ribbed, reliably Republican state that voted in advance of most state elections in November, dumped a dose of cold reality on Republicans’ hopes of carrying New England. Maine residents elected only their fourth Democratic governor since the Civil War, and two of three Democratic representatives won. There were no local issues; the election was considered a referendum on the economy. “No Maine election in modern times has appeared so ominous to Republican Presidential prospects,” the New York Herald Tribune concluded. The results helped ignite the president’s campaign, although he still did not campaign on a nationwide scale as Roosevelt was doing.9

  The contrast in strategy was clear. Throughout the summer and fall Roosevelt barnstormed the country. Although he used a wheelchair, he carefully concealed his disability from the general public and refused to be photographed on crutches. Hoover did not plan his first major speech until October 1, believing speeches before that date were forgotten. Rather than campaigning personally, he planned to rely on surrogates and to avoid campaigning west of Des Moines. Ogden L. Mills, not the president himself, would shadow Roosevelt and refute the challenger’s allegations. Hoover’s aides warned that though farmers were angry, heartland votes were crucial, but the president was slow to respond. He was reluctant to leave Washington, where he was working on a program to end the Depression. Campaigning had little interest for him. He conceded that the West and the South would be carried by Democrats, and he felt his best option would be to cobble together an electoral majority in the Northeast, New England, the Mid-Atlantic States, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois.

  The Des Moines speech on October 4 was only Hoover’s second since his acceptance speech on August 11. The president’s press secretary, Theodore Joslin, had suggested Kansas City would be better, but Hoover insisted on speaking in the state of his birth. As his train traveled west from Washington, Hoover polished his address until the last minute. The parade from the train station to the coliseum, where the speech was delivered, was watched by 125,000 onlookers, who provided a rousing reception. Hoover, moved by speaking in his native state, rose to the occasion, delivering his remarks, which dealt specifically with agriculture, with vigor and emotion. Congratulatory telegrams poured in afterward. Joslin considered the effort at Des Moines the best speech of the campaign. “I have never experienced one like it before and I have traveled with Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, La Follette, among other Presidents and would-be Presidents,” Joslin remarked.10 Later that night the president informally discussed his Iowa boyhood with journalists, regaling them with off-the-record stories, showing a human side the public rarely witnessed. He was relaxed and among friends. Hoover reminded old friends, acquaintances, and reporters of his rural roots and his love of agriculture, but the election was now only five weeks away and much of the agrarian heartland was already lost. The defeat in Maine had galvanized the Republicans, but the Democrats had a head start and the mood of the country was sour. It was, Hoover sensed, too little, too late.11

  Hoover was confronted with an almost entirely negative campaign waged by his opponent and his surrogates, who accused him of feeling no sympathy for the suffering of Americans and denounced his economic policies for causing the Depression. Roosevelt, who had once expressed admiration for Hoover, now held him responsible not only for sinking the ship of state, but for sinking it in a sea of red ink. In a campaign speech, FDR called for reducing the federal budget “not less than by 25%.” Like Hoover, he believed in balanced budgets, although he never achieved one as president. Roosevelt made few promises with specific content. He vowed to help people but was vague on specifics. He pledged to preserve sound money but did not define “sound money.”

  Roosevelt needed only to exploit already existing discontent that was steaming over. He tried to be all things to all people without alienating anyone. Lamentations about the “Hoover Breadlines” for the hungry and the “Hoovervilles” for the homeless that sprang up in big cities helped make political capital of human misery. They also covered up the fact that the Democrats had few plans of their own to improve conditions. Lies were told about Hoover. Drew Pearson, writer of the syndicated newspaper column “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” depicted the president as a man who was rude to his wife and habitually lost his temper, and who as a boy had peddled worthless land by duping settlers as a mere office boy for his uncle’s Salem land company. But that was the least of Hoover’s crimes, according to Pearson. He claimed that Hoover also swindled the unwary during his mining career. Moreover, he employed Chinese coolies as virtual slaves to mine for him and chained them to a stake in the hot sun for a full day to discourage strikes.12

  For most of the campaign Hoover kept his peace. Only once, in his address at Fort Wayne, Indiana, on October 4, 1932, did he attempt to even partially respond. “During my public life, I have believed that sportsmanship and statesmanship called for the elimination of harsh personalities between opponents,” he said. “I shall now say the only harsh word that I have uttered in public office,” he explained. “When you are told that the President of the United States, who by the most sacred trust of our nation is the President of all the people, a man of your own blood and upbringing, has sat in the White House for the last three years of your misfortune without troubling to know your burdens,” he continued, “without heartaches over your miseries and casualties, without summoning every avenue of skillful assistance, irrespective of party or view, without using every ounce of his strength and straining his every nerve to protect and help,” he concluded, “without u
sing every possible agency of democracy that would bring aid, without putting aside personal ambition and humbling his pride of opinion if that would serve—then I say to you that such statements are deliberate, intolerable falsehoods.”13

  In his Fort Wayne speech, Hoover also refuted the imputation that the worldwide Depression had originated on his watch, due partly to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, and that he personally had perpetuated it. The chief executive discussed at length the Depression’s origins. He cited the destruction of the Great War, the harsh treaties imposed on the defeated nations, the expenses of large standing armies, which weighed down the European economies, revolutions in Russia and China, overproduction in agriculture in many parts of the world, and a general attitude of malaise. These developments had heaped calamity upon calamity. The downturn was more complex and deep-rooted than the American stock market crash or the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. In fact, the Depression had begun abroad before the American tariff was even passed. The highly respected Bureau of Economic Research stated that the Depression had begun in eleven nations with populations totaling 600 million prior to its origins in America. The president then paused and asked why no Democrat had predicted the Depression. “I did not notice any Democratic Jeremiahs.” The president slammed home that the insinuation that his administration had fomented the Depression was woefully ignorant or deliberately designed to sow political blame. He might have gone further and added that the Democrats had not proposed any solutions to the Depression, either. They wanted people to believe that if Hoover disappeared, the Depression would evaporate. Roosevelt might make complex problems appear simple, but that did not make the reality of the problems any simpler.14

  Slander is endemic in American political campaigns, but in 1932 it reached epic proportions, destroying the image of one of the kindest men ever to occupy the White House. Some Americans were willing to believe even the most scurrilous whispers about Hoover, given the depth of the economic crisis and his image of cold detachment. During the campaign, a rumor spread implicating the president in the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. (Charles Lindbergh was actually a close friend of Hoover.) The fiercely loyal Lou exclaimed that after hearing the bombastic hyperbole that had smeared her husband she would have voted against him herself, had she been sufficiently gullible. Some of Roosevelt’s closest advisers found the lies difficult to stomach, and several prominent New Dealers later admitted so. Raymond Moley, who subsequently broke with Roosevelt, grew to like and appreciate Hoover’s skills and honesty. Rexford Tugwell, like Moley a Brain Truster and a Roosevelt speechwriter, admitted in 1974 that much of the substance of the New Deal’s programs had been borrowed from Hoover. FDR’s first vice president, John Nance Garner, also became a Hoover convert in later years and regretted the vindictiveness of his attacks.15

  One of the first supporters Hoover recruited to speak on his behalf was ex-president Coolidge, who remained popular among many Republicans, although his reputation had lost some of its luster. Coolidge, resentful of the Democratic criticism, was anxious to speak, yet his health had declined and he could not travel extensively. In early September The Saturday Evening Post published an article by Coolidge strongly backing his former commerce secretary. Coolidge had additional incentive, because FDR had blamed Coolidge for countenancing the conditions that led to the Depression during his administration with his laissez-faire philosophy toward business interests. Coolidge wrote that Hoover had done a superb job as president, had the Depression almost under control when factors abroad pulled the world economy down in 1931, and had performed his duties better than any other world leader of his time. Coolidge reiterated that message in a speech to twenty thousand responsive Republicans at Madison Square Garden on October 11, carried nationwide via radio. He delivered a second national radio address directed at getting out the vote on election eve, the same evening Hoover delivered a related talk.

  Initially, Hoover planned to deliver only three or four major speeches, yet during the final six weeks of the campaign he reached out to all sections of the nation. He believed in his policies and was persuaded that they were working. He felt he could help lift the nation out of the doldrums of the slumping economy, given a second term. To elect Roosevelt would delay recovery and might encourage the imposition of a leviathan government. If Hoover were defeated, he felt certain his policies would be abandoned. He feared the prospect of reckless experimentation and unwise concentration of power in a Democratic administration. He believed Roosevelt’s plans were poorly conceived—indeed, barely thought out—and would result in bureaucracy, not prosperity. Hoover would have preferred to remain in Washington and work on the nation’s problems, but now he forced himself to play a more active role in his own campaign. None of his loyal supporters had his national credibility. Some of his best orators, such as Senator Borah, had broken with him, and Curtis was no longer popular in the party because of his bone-dry position on Prohibition. Hoover knew he must still rely partly on surrogates, but he continued to write his own speeches. He felt it was necessary to travel more than he had intended to and utilize radio as much as his meager budget would permit.16

  During October, Hoover’s team saturated the Midwest with speakers, including cabinet officials, congressmen, and other high-ranking GOP spokesmen. Treasury Secretary Ogden Mills, an eloquent upstate New Yorker who was a neighbor of FDR and the most effective orator in the Republican arsenal, made the most grueling tour, trekking all the way to California to shadow the Democratic candidate and rebut his speeches. Altogether, the GOP put some 260 speakers into the field during October to refute FDR’s charges, defend Hoover, and outline the Republican program. Mills and Indiana congressman Will R. Wood led the attack in the Midwest, where they compared the substance of Hoover’s agricultural program with the vague promises of the Democrats. The Republicans depicted Roosevelt as a candidate with a pleasing personality who lacked both a program and principles. Wood, in particular, attacked the Roosevelt claim that Hoover was an extravagant waster of federal dollars. Wood said the only increase in expenses was for construction work needed to provide the unemployed with jobs. FDR had claimed that the current administration had spent the most money in history without mentioning the jobs created by the federal construction. Wood pointed out that the Democratic House had denied the president the authority to thoroughly reorganize the government in the interest of economy. Roosevelt had condemned the president for pyramiding “bureau upon bureau,” yet the only additions made, such as the RFC and the home loan bank system, had enabled the government to combat the Depression and save homes, banks, and farms.17

  Addressing the Republican State Convention at Detroit and reaching the nation via a national radio network, Mills defended Hoover’s record and assailed Roosevelt for lacking “any indication of having a program to lead the American people out of this valley,” contrasting Hoover’s integrated plan with Roosevelt’s “intellectual lassitude.” Mills resisted ad hominem attacks but criticized FDR’s skeleton program of vague platitudes point by point.18 On October 12, Senator Henry D. Hatfield of West Virginia accused FDR of taking a hypocritical stand on the tariff. Noting that the Democrats had accused the GOP of logrolling in enacting the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, he struck back. Hatfield insisted that “they propose a system of reciprocal tariffs wherein treaties will be entered with some forty-eight different foreign nations, and they ask the American people to believe that in the making of these treaties there will be no log-rolling or bartering.” The following day, at Chicago, Ogden Mills asserted that Roosevelt blamed Hoover for his actions yet had presented no package of his own. Mills cited Hoover’s massive programs of public works, job creation, relief, mortgage protection, and home and business loans and charged that the Democrats offered nothing specific. “Governor Roosevelt has no answer,” he declared. Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley charged that Roosevelt’s tracing of the Depression solely to American roots was a historical distortion. The calamity and its origins were worldwide and the
Depression had taken effect in some countries before leaping the Atlantic to America. FDR himself had had the tools to prevent or mitigate the stock market crash and major bank failures and had not exerted them, he claimed. The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that banks and the New York Stock Exchange operated in intrastate, not interstate, commerce. Roosevelt, not Hoover, had the responsibility to regulate them, and he had not done so.19

  At a speech in Cleveland, Hoover focused on economic problems, including unemployment and the tariff. He continued to defend his policies, yet he urged his countrymen to think beyond the material aspects of life and, even in their suffering, to view material possessions as a means to wholesomeness and a happy home rather than as an end in themselves. Hoover spoke to twenty-four thousand people at the city auditorium and to a nationwide radio audience. He was warmly received, yet the crowd was less enthusiastic than that at Des Moines, where he was on native turf. Along the way he made several short speeches from the rear platform of his train. Now in a fighting mood, the incumbent had decided he must be more assertive in defending his administration and not leave all the work to his surrogates. The president denied that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff had incited the Depression. It increased the general duty only 2.2 percent, and two-thirds of American products were nondutiable, he explained. Once more he emphasized that it was simplistic to attribute the Depression to a single event in a single nation. Shortly after his Cleveland address, Hoover spoke in Detroit, where he took the offensive, charging the Democrats with condemning his ideas because they lacked original ideas of their own. Virtually all of Hoover’s criticism of the Democrats was directed toward them as a party and their policies, however, and he rarely employed personal invective. He challenged Roosevelt, who was avoiding the issue, to take a clear stand on the veterans’ bonus and said he did not intend to make Prohibition a campaign issue.20