by Adam Cohen
Roosevelt had asked Reverend Peabody to preside. Although he had voted for Hoover, whom he deemed the “more capable man,” Peabody was happy to do his part for his old student. The service was a mixture of thanksgiving, homage to country, and supplication for the future. Peabody led the congregation in the hymn “Faith of Our Fathers” and recited a special prayer for the new president, which asked for the Lord’s blessings on “Thy servant, Franklin, chosen to be President of the United States, and all others in authority.” In twenty minutes, it was over. Roosevelt continued to kneel, his face cupped in his hands, even after the strains of the recessional had died out. The other worshippers looked on silently as Roosevelt pulled himself up and, as Perkins later recalled, “turned and smiled at all of us in a sort of friendly, fatherly way” before exiting through the same side door he had entered.26
St. John’s emptied out quickly. The worshippers who knew their way around Washington had arranged to have cars waiting to take them to the inauguration. Perkins watched the incoming secretary of state, Cordell Hull, who had been in Congress since 1907, and the secretary of the navy, Claude Swanson, who had been in town even longer, escort their wives to waiting limousines. Harold Ickes, the interior secretary, and his wife and children headed off in another limousine. Other worshippers quickly hailed taxis and headed downtown. When the crowd dispersed, Perkins found herself standing on the sidewalk beside a man she recognized from his photograph as Henry Wallace, the incoming secretary of agriculture.27
The forty-four-year-old Wallace was in many ways Perkins’s rural counterpart. He had spent his adult life advocating for the nation’s beleaguered farmers, who had suffered at least as much from the ravages of the Depression as her urban workers had. Unlike Perkins, who had fled her family to find her life’s mission, Wallace had been born into his. He represented the third generation of his family to edit Wallaces’ Farmer, an influential Iowa journal, and now he was following in the footsteps of his father, who had served as secretary of agriculture in the 1920s. While Perkins had joined the administration to promote unemployment relief and public works, Wallace wanted to establish a program of government aid for agriculture. He was one of the leading proponents of “domestic allotment,” a plan for propping up battered farm prices. Conservatives considered domestic allotment as dangerous as the unemployment relief programs Perkins was advocating. Time magazine’s rightward-leaning editors had warned that “[a]round the Cabinet table” Wallace’s “radicalism will probably need checking by cooler, more conservative heads.”28
Wallace, despite his country-boy appearance, was no Farm Belt rube. He had traveled extensively throughout the United States and across Europe researching agricultural methods, and had visited his father in the Department of Agriculture. He was, however, a scientist at heart, more comfortable holding forth on the biology of hybrid seeds than navigating his way through a traffic-clogged city. Perkins, who was desperately looking for a way to get to the inauguration, did not realize that the Labor Department had two cars that were being used by outgoing officials. Wallace had the same problem. “We were very green, and knew nothing about the sort of arrangements that could be made,” Wallace’s wife, Ilo, said later, “not even that we could ask for a limousine from the Department of Agriculture.”29
Perkins turned to Wallace and said, “I suppose we’re all going to the same place.”
“You’re Miss Perkins, aren’t you?” he responded.
“Yes,” Perkins said. “You’re the Wallaces, I’m sure.” They shook hands, and Perkins introduced Susanna.
“We better make common cause, get the first cab we can, and go all together, don’t you think?”30
Perkins agreed that they should. The incoming labor secretary and the incoming agriculture secretary ran in opposite directions and waved furiously until a taxi finally stopped. Then the four of them piled in and headed toward the fast-growing crowds that were descending on the Capitol.31
After the service at St. John’s, Roosevelt returned to his suite on the seventh floor of the Mayflower Hotel. He made a few last-minute changes to his inaugural address and then headed to the White House. By tradition, the incoming and outgoing presidents traveled together to the swearing-in ceremony. This year, the journey would be awkward because of Hoover’s undisguised dislike of his successor. The low regard that Hoover had for Roosevelt going into the 1932 election had turned into bitterness after his landslide defeat. Hoover was especially unhappy about the roles that history had assigned them. It was already clear that Hoover would be remembered for having failed the nation, while Roosevelt was looking like he might be its savior. Roosevelt could afford to be gracious to his predecessor. “No cosmic dramatist could possibly devise a better entrance for a new President—or a new Dictator, or a new Messiah—than that accorded to Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” the playwright Robert E. Sherwood would later observe. “Herbert Hoover was, in the parlance of vaudeville, ‘a good act to follow.’ ”32
It was not supposed to be this way. Hoover had been elected four years earlier as a progressive technocrat for an optimistic new era. An Iowa-born Quaker, he had been orphaned as a boy, and through his own ingenuity and drive had entered with the first class at Stanford University. After success in the mining industry, he acquired the nickname “the Great Engineer” and became a self-made millionaire. During World War I, Hoover turned his skills to humanitarian ends, serving as U.S. food administrator, which made him responsible for ensuring that there was enough food for the Allied armies and for Americans living in Europe. Hoover had considerable power over what crops farmers in the United States produced, how much those farm produts sold for, and where they ended up. Rather than regulate or ration, Hoover led a food conservation program that relied on patriotic appeals, featuring posters with slogans like “Food Will Win the War.” This approach, dubbed “Hooverizing,” worked well. Domestic food consumption declined during the war by about 15 percent. 33
When the World War ended, Hoover was put in charge of Europe’s recovery. His success in distributing 30 million tons of food to the hungry and bringing medical care to the sick made him a hero at home and in Europe, where several cities named streets for him. When Hoover’s European work was done, President Harding appointed him secretary of commerce. Hoover used his relatively minor Cabinet post to drive American business to modernize and become more efficient. He was reappointed by President Coolidge, and took on more wide-ranging responsibilities in the new administration. When the Great Mississippi River Flood hit in 1927, Coolidge sent Hoover to coordinate the massive relief effort. As he had during the war, Hoover relied on private entities and individuals to deliver the necessary aid. For Hoover, rugged individualism had become more than a personal philosophy. In his book American Individualism, he declared it to be nothing less than “the one source of human progress.”34
When Coolidge decided not to seek reelection, Hoover was the leading Republican contender. He easily won the nomination, and his defeat of Al Smith continued Republican control of the White House. Hoover’s individualistic ideology worked well enough at the start of his presidency, when the economy was strong. It left him unprepared, however, to deal with the Great Crash that occurred in the fall of his first year in office. Hoover’s reverence for laissez-faire capitalism and his commitment to small government led him to see the Depression as a temporary economic aberration that would soon right itself. He blamed the economic crisis on international forces, a focus that blinded him to the measures that could be taken domestically. Even his approach to the international aspects of the Depression made things worse. Hoover signed the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which Republicans had pushed through Congress, even though more than one thousand economists had signed a letter urging him not to. The law, which raised American tariffs to new highs—“a virtual declaration of economic war on the rest of the world,” one historian called it—was precisely the wrong prescription, contributing to a global tariff war that made the hard times
even worse. 35
Many intellectuals were coming around to the view that the Depression was unprecedented and likely to persist for some time. “An Appeal to Progressives,” which ran in The New Republic’s January 14, 1931, issue, asserted that it might be “one of the turning-points in our history, our first real crisis since the Civil War.” Hoover did not take the blithe approach of Charles M. Schwab, the chairman of Bethlehem Steel. “Just grin, keep on working,” Schwab declared. “We always have a way of living through the hard times.” Hoover did, however, insist that the economy was improving. “I am convinced,” he said, “we have passed the worst and with continued effort we shall rapidly recover.” Reporters Drew Pearson and Robert Allen observed in their book Washington Merry-Go-Round that Hoover responded to the Depression with inaction. “Facts, statistics, plan, organization—there have been none, and when proposed by others have been rejected and stifled,” they wrote. “One policy alone has dominated his course: not to do or say anything that would reveal the truth about the great catastrophe.”36
Hoover’s belief in rugged individualism led him to firmly oppose federal aid to the Depression’s victims. He insisted that relief should come only from local governments and private charities. “The help being daily extended by neighbors, by local and national agencies, by municipalities, by industry and a great multitude of organizations throughout the country today is many times any appropriation yet proposed,” Hoover declared. “The opening of the doors of the Federal Treasury is likely to stifle this giving.” The federal relief proposals that were being put forward, he said, would be “disastrous.” Hoover spoke against relief bills and vetoed them when they reached his desk, “usually accompanying his actions,” one Washington journalist noted, “with homilies such as ‘We cannot squander ourselves into prosperity.’ ” Hoover was echoing the views of big business. A special committee established by the United States Chamber of Commerce to look into the unemployment problem came out strongly against federal aid. Relief should be provided by “private contributions” and “state and local governments,” it recommended. “There is every evidence that all requirements can in this manner be adequately met.” In a debate over whether to provide the Red Cross with relief funds in early 1931, Senator David Walsh, a Massachusetts Democrat, declared that “not a single bill for adequate relief will pass this Congress” because of the Hoover administration’s determination that “those who pay large income taxes and the corporation-income taxpayers of the country must not be burdened with relief obligations.”37
The federal government that Hoover presided over was small and limited in scope. The government collected little revenue, and therefore it had little money to dispense. The federal income tax had been in effect a mere twenty years, and only about 5 percent of Americans paid it. The total federal budget was just $3.3 billion. Hoover did not believe the federal government should grow to any great extent to meet the challenges posed by the Depression. His first major response to the hard times was to establish, in the fall of 1930, the President’s Emergency Committee for Employment, chaired by Colonel Arthur Woods. The Woods Committee did not actually provide relief. Its mission was to encourage states, localities, and the private sector to do more. The committee’s efforts to encourage industry to hire more workers did not get far, since companies were more interested in cutting their payrolls to bring them in line with declining revenues. The committee’s attempts to persuade local governments to undertake more building projects were no more successful, because so many cities and towns were bankrupt or close to it. Colonel Woods tried to persuade Hoover to reduce unemployment by increasing federal public works programs, and after Hoover refused, he resigned in frustration. In August 1931, Hoover created the President’s Organization on Unemployment Relief. POUR, which was headed by American Telephone and Telegraph president Walter S. Gifford, had the same mission as the Woods Committee, and it was no more effective. It persuaded college football teams to play games for charity, and it distributed posters with the slogan “Of Course We Can Do It.” POUR’s impact on unemployment, however, was negligible. On his radio show in November 1931, Will Rogers imagined how the conversation must have gone when Hoover offered Gifford the position.
“Gifford, I have a remarkable job for you; you are to feed the several million unemployed.”
“With what?” says Gifford.
“That’s what makes the job remarkable. If you had something to do it with, it wouldn’t be remarkable.”
Hoover’s refusal to spend federal funds on relief reached a low point when a severe drought hit Arkansas. Hoover supported millions of dollars in loans to buy feed and animal seed, but he opposed relief for starving farmers. “Blessed be those who starve while the asses and mules are fed,” Senator George Norris, a progressive Republican from Nebraska, fumed, “for they shall get buried at public expense.”38
The calls for federal relief grew louder, but Hoover continued to resist. The “federal dole,” he insisted, was foreign to the “philosophy and creed of our people.” Hoover’s prescription for the Depression was a pair of conservative standbys: keeping federal spending in check; and remaining on the gold standard, the policy that anyone holding dollars could turn them in for gold. Even some conservatives worried that by sticking so strictly to free-market capitalism, Hoover was actually undermining it. “They also serve who only stand and wait,” two prominent economists wrote in a syndicated column, “but they serve the cause of Communism.” Congressional progressives finally succeeded in getting Hoover to sign a bill drafted by Robert F. Wagner, Democrat of New York, that allocated $300 million to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to distribute to the states for unemployment relief. The funds, however, would be given out in the form of loans, not grants. The problem was, the states that were in the worst shape would be the least likely to take the money, out of fear of making their financial situation even worse. As one critic pointed out, the federal government was asking “what can a state afford,” not “what ought it to afford?”39
The incident that cemented Hoover’s reputation for callousness came in the summer of 1932. The Bonus Army, which was made up of impoverished veterans of the World War, rolled into Washington. They were seeking early payment of a bonus that Congress had awarded to returning soldiers, which was scheduled to come due in 1945. Thousands of veterans camped out in Anacostia Flats, in southeast Washington, clamoring for relief. The Hoover administration did not merely turn down the Bonus marchers. It crushed them. Federal troops attacked, using tanks, bayonets, and tear gas, and they set fire to the shacks the veterans were living in with their families. The public was not entirely sympathetic with the veterans’ demands for early payment of their bonuses, but they had even less sympathy with the Hoover administration’s brutal response. Movie theaters across the country were soon showing newsreel footage of the clashes, which the narrator described as “a day of bloodshed and riot.” The villain of the story was the current occupant of the White House.40
The reluctant steps that Hoover took to address the Depression, such as his approval of the RFC funds, have led some of his admirers to portray him as an activist president, a modest hero of the Depression, and even as the originator of New Deal values. In an influential 1963 essay, “The Ordeal of Herbert Hoover,” the historian Carl Degler argued that Hoover should be credited with “breaking precedent to grapple directly with the Depression.” These revisionist accounts have a kernel of truth, but they vastly overstate Hoover’s role. As the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., observed, a logical place to look to for an accurate assessment of Hoover is the accounts of the elected officials, journalists, and academics who were there in 1933. They were all but unanimous in seeing him as a conservative who resisted taking action against the Depression. It also makes sense, as Schlesinger argued, to take Hoover at his own word. Not only did Hoover not promote New Deal values—he fulminated against them as dangerous radicalism. “When the American people realize,” he wrote in December 1933, “
that they surrendered the freedom of mind and spirit for which their ancestors had fought and agonized for over 300 years, they will, I hope, recollect that I at least tried to save them.”41
The 1932 presidential campaign was, Hoover declared, not “a contest between two men” but one “between two philosophies of government.” Roosevelt and Hoover had some points of common ground. The two canditates sounded similar when they talked about government spending. Roosevelt campaigned on a pledge of “government economy,” or slashing the federal budget, and he agreed with the Democratic Party platform, which called for reducing spending by 25 percent. On other issues, however, the differences between the two men were pronounced, especially on the one that dominated the campaign, the Depression.42
Hoover minimized the significance of the economic crisis and its impact on the American people. In an odd campaign tactic, he went to hard-hit parts of the country and tried to convince his audiences that things were not all that bad. In a speech in Iowa, which was reeling from low crop prices and soaring farm foreclosures, Hoover argued that “it could be so much worse that these days now, distressing as they are, would look like veritable prosperity.” To a nation that was demanding government action, Hoover continued to preach his gospel of individualism. It is not the federal government’s role, he insisted, to “relieve private institutions of their responsibility to the public, or of local governments to the States, or of state governments to the Federal Government.”43
Roosevelt offered a clear alternative. He had been a progressive even before the Crash of 1929. He had been elected governor of New York on a promise of liberal social reform, in the tradition of his predecessor Al Smith, emphasizing the positive impact that government could make on the lives of ordinary people. As governor, he had been a strong advocate for public power, insisting that the state had a duty to harness water power and make it available to the people at the lowest possible rates. Roosevelt had supported workers’ rights, fighting for safer workplaces and more generous worker compensation laws, and he had opposed the use of injunctions against striking workers. It was the Depression and his singular response to it, however, that had pushed Roosevelt into the top ranks of the nation’s liberals. In a pathbreaking speech to the New York State Legislature in August 1931, he had declared that when citizens are unable to find work, the state must help them “not as a matter of charity, but as a matter of social duty.” Roosevelt, who was governor of the nation’s most populous and wealthiest state, then proceeded to establish a major relief program for the unemployed that became a model for other states.44