Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874 –
October 20, 1964), the thirty-first President of the United States (1929–1933), was a world-famous mining engineer and humanitarian administrator. As the United States Secretary of Commerce in the 1920s under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he promoted economic
modernization. In the presidential election of 1928 Hoover
easily won the Republican nomination. The nation was
prosperous and optimistic, leading to a landslide for Hoover over the Democrat Al Smith, a
Catholic whose religion was distrusted by many. Hoover deeply believed in the Efficiency
Movement (a major component of the Progressive Era), arguing that there were
technical solutions to all social and economic problems. That position was challenged by the Great Depression, which began in 1929, the first
year of his presidency. He energetically tried to combat the depression with volunteer efforts and government action, none of
which produced economic recovery during his term. The consensus among historians is that Hoover's defeat in the 1932 election was caused primarily by failure to end the downward spiral into
deep depression, compounded by popular opposition to prohibition,
Hoover's lack of charisma in relating to voters, and his poor skills in working with politicians.
Family background and early life
The son of a blacksmith, Hoover (whose family's name was originally Huber) was born into a
Quaker family of German (Pfautz,
Wehmeyer) and German-Swiss (Huber, Burkhart) descent on his father's side and English and Irish
descent on his mother's side, in West Branch, Iowa. He was the first President to be
born west of the Mississippi River. Both of his parents, Jesse Hoover and Hulda
Minthorn, died when Hoover was young. His father died in 1880 and his mother in 1884. He lived in Kingsley, Iowa, shortly after
his parents died. In 1885, Hoover moved to Newberg, Oregon, to live with his Uncle John
Minthorn. There he attended Friends Pacific Academy (now George Fox University) and worked as office boy in his uncle's real estate office in
Salem. Though he did not attend high school, the
young Hoover attended night school and learned bookkeeping, typing, and math.[1]
At a very young age, Hoover was self-kept and goalgetting. "My boyhood ambition was to be able to earn my own living, without
the help of anybody, anywhere" he once said. As an office boy in his uncle's Oregon Land Company he mastered bookkeeping and
typing, while also attending business school in the afternoon. Thanks to a local schoolteacher, Miss Jane Gray, the boy's eyes
were opened to the novels of Charles Dickens and Sir
Walter Scott.
Hoover entered Stanford University in 1891, the year the school officially opened
and, like all its first students, attended with free tuition.[1] He would claim to be the first student ever at Stanford, by virtue of having been the first
person in the first class to sleep in the dormitory.[2]
While at the school he would be the student manager of both the baseball and football teams, and was a part of the inaugural
Big Game versus rival California (Stanford won).[2] Hoover graduated in 1895 with a degree in geology.
Mining engineer
Herbert Hoover as a younger man.
Herbert Hoover spent almost twenty years as an active mining engineer and
consultant. He began his career with the United States Geological Survey
(USGS) in the Sierra Nevada range of California.
Hoover went to Australia in 1897 as an employee of Beswick, Moreing and Company, a
London Mining engineering consulting firm. It was in Australia that he made his name as a geologist/mining engineer. In August and September 1905, Herbert Hoover
visited the mines at Broken Hill, NSW Australia. There was considerable zinc in the Broken Hill lead-silver ore, but
it could not be recovered and was lost to the tailings. Hoover devised a practical and profitable method to use the then-new
froth floatation process to treat these tailings and recover the zinc.[3]
Herbert Hoover was also the mining engineer at the Prince of Wales Mine, Gundagai,
New South Wales about 1900.[4] He was also hired in
London to be a company representative at various gold mines in Western Australia. In 1902, Hoover travelled to Big
Bell, Cue, Leonora,
Menzies and Coolgardie.[5][6]. His house in
Gwalia is now a historical tourist attraction. Hoover is profiled as a mining
pioneer in the Kalgoorlie Miners Hall of Fame, with a biography not mentioning his subsequent role as US President.
In 1908 he became an independent mining consultant, and travelled worldwide until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. In 1912, Hoover and his wife published their English translation of the Renaissance
mining classic De re metallica by Georgius
Agricola; their translation is still in print.
Humanitarian
Hoover's family business came from his mother's side. Delores S. Morehouse. Bored with making money, the Quaker side of Hoover
was very anxious to be of service to others. When World War I started in August 1914, he
helped return home 120,000 American tourists and businessmen from Europe. Hoover led five hundred volunteers to pass out food,
clothing, steamship tickets and cash. "I did not realize it at the moment, but on August 3,
1914 my career was over forever. I was on the slippery road of public life." The difference between
dictatorship and democracy, Hoover liked to say, was simple: dictators organize from the top down, democracies from the bottom
up.
Belgium faced a food crisis after being invaded by Germany in fall 1914. Hoover undertook an unprecedented relief effort as head of the Committee for Relief in
Belgium (CRB). He worked together with Emile Francqui, who led the Belgian
National Relief and Food Committee. The CRB became, in effect, an independent republic of relief, with its own flag, navy,
factories, mills and railroads. Its $11-million-a-month budget was supplied by voluntary donations and government grants. He
spent the next two years working fourteen hours a day from London to distribute over two and half million foodstuffs to nine
million war victims. In an early form of shuttle diplomacy, he crossed the
North Sea forty times seeking to persuade the enemies in Berlin to allow food to reach the
war's victims. Long before the Armistice of 1918, he was an
international hero. The Belgian city of Leuven named a prominent square after him. In addition,
the Finns added the word hoover, meaning "to help," to their language in honor of his two years of humanitarian work.
After the United States entered the war in April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson
appointed Hoover head of the American Food Administration, with
headquarters in Washington, D.C. Hoover believed that, "food will win the war." He
established days to encourage people to not eat certain foods in order to save them for the soldiers: meatless Mondays, wheatless
Wednesdays, and "when in doubt, eat potatoes." These days helped conserve food for the war. He succeeded in cutting consumption
of food needed overseas and avoided rationing at home (dubbed "Hooverizing" by government propagandists, although Hoover himself
continually - and with little success - gave orders that publicity should not mention him by name, but rather should focus
entirely on the Food Administration itself). After the end of the war, Hoover, a member of the Supreme
Economic Council and head of the American Relief Administration,
organized shipments of food for millions of starving people in Central Europe. To this
end, he employed a newly formed Quaker organization, the American Friends
Service Committee to carry out much of the logistical work in Europe. Against the opposition of Henry Cabot Lodge and other Senate Republicans, Hoover saw to it that
the German people received aid, and he extended aid to famine-stricken Bolshevist
Russia in 1921. When a critic inquired if he was not thus helping Bolshevism, Hoover retorted, "Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be
fed!"
At war's end, the New York Times named Hoover one of the Ten Most Important Living
Americans.
During this time, Hoover realized that he was in a unique position to collect information about the Great War and its
aftermath. Returning home in 1919, Hoover confronted a world of political possibilities. At one point, Democratic party bosses
looked on him as a potential candidate for the presidency. "There could not be a finer one," claimed a young and rising star from
New York Named Franklin D. Roosevelt. However, Hoover rejected the call of the Democrats, confessing that he could not run for a
party whose only member in his boyhood home had been the town drunk. In 1919, he pledged $50,000 to Stanford University to
support his Hoover War Collection and donated to the University the extensive files of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, the
U.S. Food Administration, and the American Relief Administration. Scholars were sent to Europe to collect pamphlets, society
publications, government documents, newspapers, posters, proclamations, and other ephemeral materials related to the war and the
revolutions and political movements that had followed it. The collection was later renamed the Hoover War Library and is now
known as the Hoover Institution.
Secretary of Commerce
In this 1926 photo, William P. McCracken, assistant secretary of commerce for civil aviation, is shown with Secretary Hoover
(center) and assistant secretary of commerce Walter Drake.
Hoover was touted as a possible Democratic Party presidential
candidate in 1920 by some party leaders (including, ironically enough, by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D.
Roosevelt, then a great admirer of Hoover; reportedly, Woodrow Wilson also privately preferred Hoover as his successor),
but Hoover could foresee that 1920 would be a Republican year, and he had no desire to tie himself to a party that was destined
for defeat, and thus could accomplish little (Hoover had been a registered Republican before the war, but was briefly willing to
join the Democrats in 1920; he had already bolted the party once in 1912 to support Theodore
Roosevelt's "Bull Moose" Progressive Party). Announcing himself as a Republican and available for the
nomination, he placed his name on the ballot in the California state
primary, where he came close to beating the popular Hiram Johnson. By failing to win in his home state, however, Hoover relegated himself to dark horse
contender at the convention, and even when it deadlocked over several ballots between Illinois
Governor Frank Lowden and Army General Leonard Wood, few delegates seriously considered turning to Hoover as their compromise choice. Although he
had personal misgivings about the capability of the nominee, Warren G. Harding, Hoover
publicly endorsed him, and even made a pair of speeches on Harding's behalf.
In 1921, in part as a reward for his support in the election, President Harding offered Hoover the post of either
Secretary of the Interior or Secretary of Commerce, ultimately chosing Commerce. Established just eight years
earlier following the division of the earlier Department of
Commerce and Labor, Commerce was considered a minor Cabinet post, a department with
limited and somewhat vaguely defined responsibilities. But Hoover aimed to change that, envisioning the Commerce Department as
the hub of the nation's growth and stability. He demanded from Harding, and received, authority to help coordinate economic
affairs throughout the government. He created a great many sub-departments and committees, overseeing and regulating everything
from manufacturing statistics, the census, and radio to air travel. In some instances, he "seized" control of responsibilities
from other Cabinet departments when he deemed that they were not carrying out their responsibilities well enough. Hoover became
one of the most visible men in the country, often overshadowing Presidents Harding and Calvin
Coolidge. Washington wags were soon referring to Hoover as "The Secretary of Commerce...and Under-Secretary of Everything
Else!"
As secretary and as President, Hoover revolutionized the relations between business and government. Rejecting the adversarial
stance of Roosevelt, Taft, and
Wilson, he sought to make the Commerce Department a powerful service organization,
empowered to forge cooperative voluntary partnerships between government and business. This philosophy is often called
"associationalism."
Many of Hoover's efforts as Commerce Secretary centered on the elimination of waste and the increase of efficiency in business
and industry. This included such things as reducing labor losses from trade disputes and seasonal fluctuations, reducing
industrial losses from accident and injury, and reducing the amount of crude oil spilled during extraction and shipping. One
major achievement was to promote progressive ideals in the areas of standardization products and designs. He energetically
promoted international trade by opening offices overseas that gave advice and practical help to businessmen. He was especially
eager to promote Hollywood films overseas. [Hart 1998] His "Own Your Own
Home" campaign was a collaboration with organizations working to promote ownership of single-family dwellings, including the
Better Houses in America movement, the Architects' Small House Service Bureau, and the Home Modernizing Bureau. He worked with
bankers and the savings and loan industry to promote the new long term home mortgage, which dramatically stimulated home
construction.[7]
Hoover listening to the
radio.
Radio conferences
Among Hoover's other successes were the radio conferences, which played a key role in the early organization, development and
regulation of radio broadcasting. Hoover played a key role in major projects for navigation, irrigation of dry lands, electrical
power, and flood control. As the new air transport industry developed, Hoover held a conference on aviation to promote codes and
regulations. He became president of the American Child Health Organization, and he raised private funds to promote health
education in schools and communities.
Although he continued to consider Harding ill-suited to be President, the two men nevertheless became friends, and Hoover was
accompanying Harding on his final trip out West in 1923. It was Hoover who called for a specialist to tend to the ailing Chief
Executive, and it was also Hoover who contacted the White House to inform them of the President's death. The Commerce Secretary
headed the group of dignitaries accompanying Harding's body back to the capital.
By the end of Hoover's service as Secretary, the newly important status of the Department of Commerce was reflected in the
vast and modern headquarters that would be built for it in Washington D.C.
Mississippi flood
In early 1927, the Great Mississippi River flood broke the banks and
levees of the Mississippi River. Although such a disaster did not fall under the duties of the
Commerce Department, the governors of six states along the Mississippi specifically asked for Herbert Hoover in the emergency, so
President Calvin Coolidge sent Hoover to mobilize state and local authorities, militia, army engineers, Coast Guard, and the
American Red Cross. He set up health units, with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, to work in the flooded regions for a year. These workers stamped out
malaria, pellagra, and typhoid
fever from many areas. His work during the flood brought Herbert Hoover to the front page of newspapers almost everywhere,
and he gained new accolades as a humanitarian. The great victory of his relief work, he stressed, was not that the government
rushed in and provided all assistance. Rather, it was that much of the assistance available was provided instead by private
citizens and organizations in response to Hoover's appeals. "I suppose I could have called in the Army to help," he said, "but
why should I, when I only had to call upon Main Street."
Election of 1928
-
In 1927, when President Coolidge declined to run for a second full term of office, Herbert Hoover became the leading
Republican candidate for the 1928 election, despite the
fact that Coolidge was lukewarm on Hoover (the President would often deride his ambitious and popular Commerce Secretary as
"Wonder Boy"). His only real challenger was Frank Lowden, but in the months leading
up to the convention, Hoover received so much favorable press coverage, Lowden's campaign manager complained that the newspapers
were full of "nothing but advertisements for Herbert Hoover and Fletcher's Castoria." Hoover’s reputation, experience, and public popularity coalesced to give him the
nomination on the first ballot, with Senator Charles Curtis named as his running mate.
He campaigned against Democratic candidate Alfred E. Smith on the basis of efficiency and
prosperity. Although Smith was the target of anti-Catholicism from some
Protestant communities, Hoover avoided the religious issue and publicly repudiated those
Republicans who attempted to exploit it. (Quakers were themselves often under attack as pacifists.) There was actually not much difference between the candidates on the issues, as both Hoover and
Smith positioned themselves as pro-business, and each promised to improve conditions for farmers, reform immigration laws, and
maintain America's isolationist foreign policy. Where they did differ was on the Volstead
Act. Smith was a "wet" who called for its repeal, whereas Hoover gave public support for Prohibition, calling it an experiment "noble in purpose". What few voters knew, however, was that
Hoover was much more tentative in his support for Volstead in private, and that for years he practiced a certain ritual: often
after work at the Commerce Department, he would stop by the Belgian Embassy for a visit with friends. While there, as it was
technically foreign soil, he was able to enjoy an alcoholic drink before heading for home. Hoover also used to grumble that all
Prohibition successfully did was to force him to dispose of his celebrated wine cellar.
Historians agree that Hoover's national reputation and the booming economy, combined with the deep splits in the Democratic
party over religion and prohibition, guaranteed his landslide victory of 58% of the vote. Hoover even managed to crack the
so-called "Solid South," winning such traditionally Democratic states as Florida,
North Carolina, Virginia, Texas and Tennessee from Smith. As advertising executive Bruce Barton put it, "Americans knew they may have more fun with Smith, but that they would make
more money with Hoover."
Herbert Hoover's wife, Lou Henry Hoover, came to the White House unlike her
predecessors as First Ladies. She had already carved out a reputation of her own, having graduated from Stanford as the only
woman in her class with a degree in geology. Although she had never practiced her profession formally, she remained very much a
new woman of the post-World War I era: intelligent, robust, and possessed of a sense of female possibilities.
On poverty, Hoover promised: "We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history
of any land." Within months, the Stock Market Crash of 1929 occurred, and the
nation's economy spiraled downward into what became known as the Great
Depression.
Presidency 1929-1933
Policies
Even if the Hoover presidency has a negative imprint on it, it must be noted that there were some important reforms under the
Hoover administration. A progressive and a reformer at heart, Hoover saw the presidency as a vehicle for improving the conditions
of all Americans not by resorting to dictatorship or socialism, but rather through lawful regulation and by encouraging
volunteerism.
The President expanded civil service coverage, canceled private oil leases on
government lands, and led the way for the prosecution of gangster Al Capone by instructing the
Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service to go after gangsters for tax evasion. He appointed a commission which
set aside 3 million acres (12,000 km²) of national parks and 2.3 million acres (9,000 km²)
of national forests; advocated tax reduction for low-income Americans (not enacted); closed certain tax loopholes for the
wealthy; doubled the number of veterans hospital facilities; negotiated a treaty on St.
Lawrence Seaway (which failed in the U.S. Senate); wrote a Children's
Charter that advocated protection of every child regardless of race or gender; built the San Francisco Bay Bridge; created an antitrust division in the Justice Department; required air mail carriers to adopt stricter safety measures and
improve service; proposed federal loans for urban slum clearances (not enacted); organized the Federal Bureau of Prisons; reorganized the Bureau
of Indian Affairs; instituted prison reform; proposed a federal Department of Education (not enacted); advocated fifty-dollar-per-month pensions
for Americans over 65 (not enacted); chaired White House conferences on child health,
protection, homebuilding and homeownership; began construction of the Boulder Dam (later
renamed Hoover Dam); and signed the Norris-La Guardia
Act that limited judicial intervention in labor disputes.
Hoover's humanitarian and Quaker reputation—along with a Native
American vice president—gave special meaning to his Indian policies. His Quaker upbringing influenced his views that
Native Americans needed to achieve economic self-sufficiency. As President, he appointed Charles J. Rhoads as commissioner of
Indian affairs. Hoover supported Rhoads' commitment to Indian assimilation and sought to minimize the federal role in Indian
affairs. His goal was to have Indians acting as individuals (not as tribes) and assume the responsibilities of citizenship which
had been granted with the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.[8]
In the foreign arena, Hoover began formulating what would later become Roosevelt's Good
Neighbor policy following the 1930 release of the Clark Memorandum, by
withdrawing American troops from Nicaragua and Haiti; he also
proposed an arms embargo on Latin America and a one-third reduction of the world's naval
power, which was called the Hoover Plan. The Roosevelt
Corollary ceased being part of U.S. foreign policy. In response to the Japanese invasion of
Manchuria, he and Secretary of State Henry Stimson
outlined the Hoover-Stimson Doctrine that said the United States would not recognize
territories gained by force. Between his election and his inauguration as President, Hoover broke precedent by undertaking a
goodwill tour of many Latin American countries.
During his presidency, he mediated between Chile and Peru to
solve a conflict on the sovereignty of Arica and Tacna that
in 1883 by the Treaty of Ancón had been awarded to Chile for ten years, to be followed
by a plebiscite that had never happened. By the Tacna-Arica compromise at the Treaty of Lima in 1929, Chile kept Arica, and Peru regained
Tacna.
Great Depression
-
The economy was put to the test with the onset of the Great Depression
in the United States in 1929. It is not accurate, as was routinely claimed by his Democratic opponents, that Hoover "did
nothing" in the face of the crisis, nor that he was a believer in laissez-faire policies.
He explicitly denounced laissez-faire in his 1922 book American Individualism, took an active pro-regulation stance as
Commerce Secretary, and saw tariff and agricultural support bills through Congress. In his memoirs he recalled his rejection of
Treasury Secretary Mellon's suggested "leave-it-alone" approach. However, Hoover opposed direct relief from the federal
government, seeking instead to organize voluntary measures and encourage state and local government responses. Except for
accelerating public works expenditures, Hoover largely shunned legislative relief proposals until late in his term. While his
efforts were small in comparison to that of the Roosevelt administration, they exceeded that of any federal administration before
him.
Children are sitting in front of signs criticizing Hoover's policies. One sign says "Hard Times Are Still Hoover-ing Over
Us."
Soon after the stock market crash, Hoover summoned industrialists to the White House and secured promises to maintain wages.
Henry Ford even agreed to increase workers' daily pay from six to seven dollars. From the
nation's utilities, Hoover won commitments of $1.8 billion in new construction and repairs for 1930. Railroad executives made a
similar pledge. Organized labor agreed to withdraw its latest wage demands. The President ordered federal departments to speed up
construction projects. He contacted all forty-eight state governors to make a similar appeal for expanded public works. He went
to Congress with a $160 million tax cut, coupled with a doubling of resources for public buildings and dams, highways and
harbors. He appointed a Federal Farm Board that tried to raise farm prices.
Praise for the President's intervention was widespread. "No one in his place could have done more," concluded the New York
Times in early 1930. "Very few of his predecessors could have done as much." In February, Hoover announced—prematurely—that
the preliminary shock had passed and that employment was on the mend.
Together government and business actually spent more in the first half of 1930 than the previous year. Yet frightened
consumers cut back their expenditures by ten percent. A severe drought ravaged the agricultural heartland beginning in the summer
of 1930. The combination of these factors caused a downward spiral, as earnings fell, smaller banks collapsed, and mortgages went
unpaid. Hoover's hold-the-line policy in wages lasted little more than a year. Unemployment soared from five million in 1930 to
over eleven million in 1931. A sharp recession had become the Great Depression.
In 1930, although he had opposed its passage, Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff
Act, which raised tariffs on over 20,000 dutiable items, despite the protests of economists. Major trading partners, like
Canada, immediately retaliated. The tariff, combined with the 1932 Revenue Act, which hiked taxes and fees across the board, is
often blamed for deepening the depression. It brought on a wave of retaliation and choked world trade.
Also, between 1930-1932, some 5,100 banks alone in those two years failed as panicked depositors withdrew their funds. Those
losses amounted to $3.2 billion. These are considered by some to be Hoover's biggest political blunders (although Hoover himself,
years later, said that he felt his only real mistake was to not immediately repudiate the foreign debt, which would have relieved
the financial burden on much of Europe early on during the worldwide economic crisis, and thus
spurred more trade with the United States). Moreover, the Federal Reserve
System's tightening of the money supply (for fear of inflation) is regarded by Milton
Friedman and most modern economists as a mistaken strategy, given the situation.
Hoover's stance on the economy was based on volunteerism. From before his entry to the
presidency, he was among the greatest proponents of the concept that public-private cooperation was the way to achieve high
long-term growth. Hoover feared that too much intervention or coercion by the government would destroy individuality and
self-reliance, which he considered to be important American values. Though he was not averse to taking action which he considered
was in the public good, such as regulating radio broadcasting and aviation, he preferred a voluntary, non-government approach to
economic recovery. As if to prove the president's point, the First Lady exhorted her forces to service. She pressed the more than
250,000 Girl Scouts nationwide to join in relief work and helped to promulgate the Rapidan Plan in 1931 to achieve that end. As
the First Lady used the radio, she rallied support for volunteerism, encouraging groups such as the 4-H clubs to devote
themselves to local relief. Behind the scenes, she mobilized informal networks of friends and women's organizations and ensured
that appeals to the White House found their way to local sources of aid.
In June 1931, to deal with a very serious banking collapse in Vienna that threatened to cause a worldwide financial meltdown,
Hoover issued the Hoover Moratorium that called for a one-year halt in
reparations payments by Germany to
France and in the payment of Allied war debts to the United States. The Hoover Moratorium had the
effect of temporarily stopping the banking collapse in Europe. In June 1932, a conference canceled all reparations payments by
Germany.
The following is an outline of other actions Hoover took to try to help end the Depression through government
intervention:
- Signed the Emergency Relief and Construction Act, the nation's
first Federal unemployment assistance.
- Increased public works spending. Some of Hoover's efforts to stimulate the economy through public works are as follows:
- Asked Congress for a $400 million increase in the Federal Building Program
- Directed the Department of Commerce to establish a Division of
Public Construction in December 1929
- Increased subsidies for ship construction through the Federal Shipping Board
- Urged the state governors to also increase their public works spending, though many
failed to take any action.
- Signed the Federal Home Loan Bank Act establishing the Federal Home Loan Bank system to assist citizens in obtaining financing to purchase a home.
- Increased subsidies to the nation's struggling farmers with the Agricultural
Marketing Act; but with only limited impact.
- Established the President's Emergency Relief Organization to coordinate local private relief
efforts resulting in over 3,000 relief committees across the U.S.
- Authorized the repatriation to Mexico of 1-2 million people living in barrios throughout California, Texas and Michigan, 60%
of whom were U.S. citizens of Mexican-descent, in an effort to ease unemployment.
- Urged bankers to form the National Credit Corporation to assist banks in financial trouble
and protect depositors' money.
- Actively encouraged businesses to maintain high wages during the Depression, in line with the philosophy, called
Fordism, that high wages create prosperity. Most corporations maintained their workers' wages
early in the Depression in the hope that more money into the pockets of consumers would end the economic downturn.
- Signed the Reconstruction Finance Act. This act established the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which made loans to the states
for public works and unemployment relief. In addition, the corporation made loans to banks, railroads and agriculture credit
organizations.
- Raised tariffs. After hearings held by the House Ways and
Means Committee generated more than 20,000 pages of testimony regarding tariff protection, Congress responded with
legislation that Hoover signed despite some misgivings. Instead of protecting American jobs, the Smoot-Hawley tariff is widely blamed for setting off a worldwide trade war which only worsened
the country's (and the world's) economic ills.
Economy
In order to pay for these and other government programs, Hoover agreed to one of the largest tax increases in American
history. The Revenue Act of 1932 raised income
tax on the highest incomes from 25% to 63%. The estate tax was doubled and
corporate taxes were raised by almost 15%. Also, a "check tax" was included that placed a
2-cent tax (over 30 cents in today's dollars) on all bank checks. Economists William D. Lastrapes and George Selgin,[9] conclude that the check tax was "an important contributing
factor to that period's severe monetary contraction." Hoover also encouraged Congress to investigate the New York Stock Exchange, and this pressure resulted in various reforms.
National debt and gross national product climbs from 20% to 40% under Hoover; levels off under FDR; soars during World War II.
From
Historical Statistics US (1976)
For this reason, years later libertarians argued that Hoover's economics were statist.
Franklin D. Roosevelt blasted the Republican incumbent for spending and taxing too
much, increasing national debt, raising tariffs and blocking trade, as well as placing millions on the dole of the government.
Roosevelt attacked Hoover for "reckless and extravagant" spending, of thinking "that we ought to center control of everything in
Washington as rapidly as possible," and of leading "the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history."
Roosevelt's running mate, John Nance Garner, accused the Republican of "leading the
country down the path of socialism".
These policies pale beside the more drastic steps taken later as part of the New Deal.
Hoover's opponents charge that his policies came too little, and too late, and did not work. Even as he asked Congress for
legislation, he reiterated his view that while people must not suffer from hunger and cold, caring for them must be primarily a
local and voluntary responsibility.
Even so, New Dealer Rexford Tugwell[10] later remarked that although no one would say so at the time, "practically the whole New Deal was
extrapolated from programs that Hoover started."
Unemployment rose to 24.9% by the end of Hoover's presidency in 1933, at the depth of the Great Depression. Hoover also vetoed
the Muscle Shoals Bill in 1931, which would have provided cheap energy to the
Tennessee river valley, which could have silenced some critics.
1932 campaign
