Herbert Hoover

by Glen Jeansonne

  Hoover made specific errors as well. He should have opposed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Mandatory crop controls would have been preferable to his system of cooperatives if they could have been enforced. He should have clamped down sanctions on Japan when the island nation invaded Manchuria, though the Japanese might have conquered additional territory to obtain raw materials. Idealistically, Hoover relied too heavily on world opinion to deter aggression. This approach had no teeth. He should have compromised with Senator George Norris to begin development of hydroelectric power in the Tennessee Valley. He should have lobbied Congress more aggressively, including distribution of patronage. Hoover was not pursuing a fool’s errand; his methods had worked in the past. He was too intellectually honest for the times, which were saturated with hypocritical intrigue. What might Hoover’s place in history have been if he had never run for president at all? He was virtually unsurpassed as a humanitarian and an administrator.

  Hoover’s good deeds and sharp mind, his generosity and his sincerity outweigh these faults, and his mistakes constituted errors in judgment, not mortal sins. He was both human and humane, and if he does not deserve a spot on Mount Rushmore, he does not deserve to be pilloried as the scapegoat of the Great Depression either. History is more complicated than that.

  TWELVE

  Challenging the New Deal

  “I knew from the experience of all public men from George Washington down that democracies are fickle and heartless,” Hoover reflected on his thrashing in the 1932 presidential election. “When the ultimate bump came, I was well-fortified to accept it philosophically . . . for democracy is a harsh employer.” America had welcomed him home as a conquering hero following World War I, elected him president by a landslide in 1928, and defeated him overwhelmingly only four years later. Tad would later recall that his brother’s ascension to the presidency was the worst event in the lives of their family, causing a great deal of discomfort without compensating gratification. Herbert Jr. suggested that his father and his family would have been better off had he simply returned to America after the war and rested on his laurels. “If the might and dignity of a lion may be judged by the crowd of jackals yelping in his train,” Herbert Jr. reflected, “Herbert Hoover may look with complaisance on his following.” Despite his disappointment, Hoover held a hopeful, perhaps naïve belief that he might eventually persuade the public that the election of Roosevelt had been a mistake.1

  Immediately following the inauguration, Lou traveled to California with Herbert Jr. to finally spend time in her dream house. Meanwhile, her husband embarked with Allan for New York, where he had numerous loose ends to tie up. Exhausted, Hoover slept twelve hours undisturbed at his Waldorf suite the first night, then drove to Connecticut the following day to visit his devoted friend Edgar Rickard, who had handled Hoover’s financial affairs during his presidency. On March 6, the ex-president issued a terse statement urging the nation to cooperate with the new president’s bank holiday, though privately he had doubts about the total closing, which he considered overkill. He believed in closing only troubled banks and permitting sound banks to continue operation. His view was confirmed when most banks reopened almost immediately. The legislation enacted to rectify abuses might do harm to sound banks, he feared.2

  On March 7, his energy refreshed, Hoover rose early and reviewed his personal financial situation, finding sufficient assets for him and Lou to continue comfortably at a reduced standard of living. He transferred some investments from bonds to stocks, which stood to appreciate along with Roosevelt’s currency inflation, and deeded his Rapidan fishing camp to the federal government for the use of future presidents. Falling into a routine of activities and appointments, which delayed his return to Palo Alto, he met with admirers, investment counselors, and charitable trusts he represented, such as the American Child Health Association, the Boys Clubs of America, the Belgian-American Educational Foundation and the American Children’s Relief Association. Finally, after several busy weeks, he boarded a train for California. Several hundred well-wishers gathered at the station to say good-bye.3

  Lou had their home ready by the time her husband arrived in Palo Alto, and they spent several months relaxing. “It was a release not only from political pressures but from the routines of twelve to fourteen hours of work seven days a week,” he explained. For the first time in memory, he slept without an alarm clock. He and Lou read newspapers and listened to the radio while dining on a leisurely breakfast. They hired a team of secretaries to answer the twenty thousand friendly letters that poured in, signing the responses personally. Hoover puttered with engineering projects with old colleagues. His friends secured for him a seat on the board of the New York Life Insurance Company, which brought extra income. When he was greeted at home by the governor, the mayor, Stanford students, and old friends, his subdued wit emerged. In his last address before going into temporary political retirement, Hoover quipped, “You will expect me to discuss the late election. Well, as nearly as I can learn we did not have enough votes on our side.” This was the Hoover his friends knew.4

  Initially, unchained from telephones and no longer tied to secretaries, he enjoyed a sense of liberation. For the most part he was his own boss, setting his own pace. The typical day began with a stroll along Fraternity Row accompanied by two pets, a police dog and a Norwegian elkhound, before he returned to his study, where he passed the hours surrounded by his books, journals, and projects. With Lou he traveled thousands of miles, visiting wilderness regions, cities, factories, and slums. He combined fishing expeditions with exploration, heading down rural roads at breakneck speeds. He roared into Reno and Grass Valley, where he and Lou visited the old Comstock mine, and sped down to his son Allan’s home in Los Angeles. In his first major excursion, the ex-president covered eight thousand miles in ten weeks. Most people he encountered were friendly. Yet Hoover’s nature demanded satisfying, productive work. He wanted to remain active, useful, and immersed in public affairs. He would never again be a completely contented man. Quakers are a determined people, and Hoover was not simply purposeful; he was driven. His interest in Stanford, and specifically the War Library, consumed him. He opened avenues to influential friends, and to Stanford streamed a steady traffic of endowments, funds for special projects, and rare books. He resumed a more active role in the affairs of Stanford, the Huntington Library, Mills College, the Carnegie Institute, the Boys Clubs of America, the American Children’s Fund, the Belgian-American Educational Foundation, and other committees. “I am engaged part-time in making a living in farming and mining on such moderate scale that keeps me out of the haunts of capital and enables me to reject offers of corporations and of radio and press or platforms for cash,” he wrote Henry L. Stimson, his former secretary of state.5

  Palo Alto might have seemed idyllic, yet it was also tame for a man of Hoover’s drive and ambition. Finding the local newspapers insufficiently meaty with political news, he was soon devouring thirty national papers daily, receiving them via airmail. Not content to leave their old life behind, the Hoovers traveled extensively on the East Coast and rented a part-time apartment in the elite Waldorf Towers to be near the intellectual, political, and philanthropic action. For more than a year after his involuntary retirement, the elder statesman refrained publicly from partisan political statements, but privately he formulated plans to redesign the GOP as a clear, definitively conservative alternative to the New Deal, which was moving leftward at warp speed.6

  By early 1934, the ex-president was hard at work on a book that critiqued the “statist” and collectivist ideologies sweeping the globe, such as Communism and Fascism, and he included the New Deal. Hoover rejected a $25,000 offer to publish a serialized version in American Magazine in lieu of a $10,000 offer from The Saturday Evening Post, in which it would reach more readers. The manuscript was boosted when adopted by the Book-of-the-Month Club. However, the publisher decided to pair its publication with a book defending the New Deal written by Secr
etary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace. The Challenge to Liberty was published on August 10, 1934, Hoover’s sixtieth birthday. He felt a sense of release; he had gotten his views off his chest. However one might disagree with his viewpoint, the book’s intellectual honesty is transparent. Hoover did not mention the New Deal by name, simply by implication. It was also an indirect attempt to answer the critics of his own policies by demonstrating that he had maintained a nation free of coercion.7

  In The Challenge to Liberty, the Chief dealt with the causes and consequences of the Great Depression. Hoover believed that even if regimentation could resolve the Depression—which it could not—it would be purchased at the cost of liberty. He called his slender volume “the gospel according to Palo Alto.” He believed the American System had been designed for peace and the Depression had been caused by the Great War and its aftermath. It was a worldwide phenomenon, not solely an American invention, and its solution must be found in international remedies. Regimentation would only curtail production and consumption, and bureaucracy would weigh down the economy with ponderous regulations and deter creative innovation. Hoover did not consider the feeding and shelter of the needy inherently collectivist. Americans had always taken care of those in need. The New Deal was dangerous because it usurped local responsibility and concentrated power in the federal government. People receiving direct relief from the government feared losing it if they did not vote for the party in power. There was further danger that the government could distribute relief as a form of patronage.8

  In some respects, The Challenge to Liberty was an elaboration of Hoover’s 1922 philosophical treatise, American Individualism. By early October the volume had become a bestseller. To spread his creed, the ex-president purchased and gave away thousands of copies. Hoover’s friend William Allen White, a fellow product of the Progressive movement, explained that the former president opposed the New Deal’s methods, not its goals. In a review of the book, Professor Wesley C. Mitchell of Columbia cautioned that it would be improper to label Hoover either a reactionary or a radical; he occupied a middle ground. Still, there was no doubt that he stood to the right of the New Deal. Hoover believed that the New Dealers had kidnapped the word “liberal.” The ex-president himself might best be described as a nineteenth-century classical liberal or a progressive similar to Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson.9

  Hoover realized that no nation could have both absolute liberty and absolute security. Although firm on bedrock principles, he compromised on implementation and over specific solutions to practical problems. The engineer planned carefully, but the artist in him could improvise and he accommodated and anticipated human error. The man who was at home roaming the fields and forests never underestimated the power of imagination. Without it, pure logic faltered. Emotion fueled him; he was no robot. A practical man, he considered drive more important than intelligence, common sense more important than a gilt-edged education.

  The administrator’s belief in waste reduction was not a technical fetish. His work with the Boys Clubs of America demonstrated that he detested human waste as even more obnoxious than industrial waste or despoliation of natural resources. Although he was a careful analyst who believed in order, the idea of a planned society was anathema to him. Order did not mean regimentation. He disliked all forms of totalitarianism and authoritarianism and revered individualism. Rather than view Hoover as an archetypical conservative or liberal, it is more realistic to appreciate the changes in his philosophy as he aged and the circumstances changed. It is more accurate to describe him as an individualist than to pigeonhole him as the apostle of any doctrine.

  Hoover spent the Roosevelt years as an outsider looking in, working as a critic, writer, and speaker. He was, nonetheless, the single most influential Republican strategist, writer, and speaker, as well as a formidable fund-raiser. Hoover was profoundly embittered by his treatment by FDR during the 1932 campaign, and by what he considered Roosevelt’s economic naïveté and political ruthlessness, and his criticism ranged from the satirical to the sardonic. Hoover condemned as unrealistic FDR’s narrowly nationalistic approach to the world and the Depression. The ex-president believed the worldwide Depression could be resolved only by cooperative, international recovery, not by an every-nation-for-itself mentality. Later, Hoover condemned Roosevelt for going too far in the opposite direction, for letting the needs and priorities of other nations guide American foreign policy at the expense of domestic interests. He saw Roosevelt moving the nation toward war. When the Nazis attacked the Soviets, Hoover proposed to hedge diplomatic bets rather than immediately siding with the Soviets, because he viewed both ideologies as equally odious.10

  During this period, Hoover honed his writing and speaking skills. His style grew increasingly erudite, and his speeches, books, and articles are sprinkled with epigrams. Speaking before small audiences, he let his natural, nuanced humor show. Though he employed secretaries and research assistants to check facts and perform clerical duties, Hoover’s style remained inimitably his own, and it improved. He worked at it doggedly and daily. In 1940, Professor Elmer E. Nyberg of the New York University School of Commerce, who had made a study of the speaking ability of prominent public speakers, wrote in the New York Times that “Herbert Hoover has improved as a speaker more than any man in public life and at the present time leads all possible Presidential candidates in the content of his speeches.” He rated Hoover an A-plus in oratory, while President Roosevelt, whom he graded an A-minus, had lost ground, wrote the professor.11

  Hoover was a man on a mission, determined to right the listing ship of state and prevent it from sinking into a quagmire of unconstitutional laws and procedures. He viewed the New Deal jobs programs as naïve in an economic sense and a vote factory in a political sense. It was FDR’s largesse with government money to targeted interest groups, not his success in conquering the Depression, which was borderline, that explained the New Deal’s electoral victories. The people were duped into following a primrose path because the jobs were only temporary. They would end when the appropriations expired or the projects were completed. At the end of it all, the country would be worse off than before, mired in a sinkhole of debt left to future generations and future presidents to pay. Moreover, while Roosevelt spent billion upon billion on public works to generate temporary jobs, it never occurred to him to cut taxes, stimulate the private sector, and restore old, permanent jobs. Hoover wrote with passionate eloquence and improved in the process. This period brought out the hidden writer in him. Perhaps all he had ever needed was the time, the practice, and the cause. As an ex-president, he commanded a forum.12

  Hoover was relentless and determined. He pointed out that Roosevelt’s sympathy for the poor was feigned. His humor and his ideas were borrowed, like some of his programs. Roosevelt even plagiarized some ideas from Hoover while simultaneously claiming that Hoover had done nothing. The nation was on a treadmill of deficit spending, appropriating more and more to remain in essentially the same place. At the rate recovery was progressing, everyone on the planet would be dead by the time it occurred.

  Hoover regarded Roosevelt as animated by a mixture of unmitigated ambition and political savvy, yet considered the president jumbled in his witches’ brew of economic theories, which he barely comprehended: a short-run politician with an eye on the next election, offering the nation slogans and platitudes, fiddling while the nation was consumed in an economic wildfire. Roosevelt was an all-or-nothing leader. Like many charismatic leaders, the New Yorker was better at inflaming emotions than he was at solving real-world problems. Grasping at straws of ideas from all directions, he would pile them up until they broke the nation’s fiscal back. He pretended to care about the common man, but what he cared about was their votes. Yet because the New Deal morphed into a much larger bureaucracy with the coming of the war, a time when no one questioned the need for big government, and FDR’s death virtually coincided with the end of the war, the bureaucracy built for ba
ck-to-back emergencies was never completely dismantled and many equated the bureaucracy itself with prosperity and expected the government to guarantee prosperous times permanently. The circumstances created a system of dependency. The crutch would not be discarded after the leg had healed.13

  In many respects, Hoover and Roosevelt were opposites. Hoover had a firm grasp of economics, both practical and theoretical, whereas Roosevelt’s perception of economics resembled a dalliance—he would flirt with an idea and then move on. His approach was glib. Hoover, in contrast, took ideas seriously and mulled them over before attempting to leap a canyon. He could be decisive but was not prone to snap judgments. He wanted to use power to achieve a practical result yet revered spiritual values and cared little for the vanities of political fame. His attachments, to ideas and to people, were lifelong. Roosevelt jettisoned friends if doing so became politically expedient. Both men could be stubborn. Hoover could be obstinately self-righteous; however, he spurned flattery, whether sincere or otherwise. The Iowa orphan had worked with his hands, something the former governor had never done. Until he became president, there was nothing in FDR’s background to foreshadow greatness; Hoover had already been one of the most famous men in the world at the time of his election. The Great Engineer wanted a slimmed-down, efficient, gazelle-type government. Hoover was profoundly religious, though not an ingrained churchgoer, and had a philosophical respect for tradition, especially for the American political institutions, with carefully designed balancing of powers.