Hoover also strongly urged people of means to donate funds to help the poor, and he himself gave significant private donations to worthy causes. But these private efforts could not alleviate the widespread effects of poverty. Congress pushed for a more direct government response to the hardship. Hoover stood fast in his refusal to provide food, resisting any element of direct relief. But Hoover opposed the bill, stating that it ruined the balance of power between states and the federal government, and in February , it was defeated by fourteen votes.
His personal sympathy for those in need was boundless. Hoover was one of only two presidents to reject his salary for the office he held. As conditions worsened, however, Hoover eventually relaxed his opposition to federal relief and formed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation RFC in , in part because it was an election year and Hoover hoped to keep his office.
This model was flawed on a number of levels. First, the program only lent money to banks with sufficient collateral, which meant that most of the aid went to large banks.
Small town and rural banks got almost nothing. Furthermore, at this time, confidence in financial institutions was not the primary concern of most Americans. They needed food and jobs. Many had no money to put into the banks, no matter how confident they were that the banks were safe. This was the Emergency Relief and Construction Act. This program failed to deliver the kind of help needed, however, as Hoover severely limited the types of projects it could fund to those that were ultimately self-paying such as toll bridges and public housing and those that required skilled workers.
While well intended, these programs maintained the status quo, and there was still no direct federal relief to the individuals who so desperately needed it. Their anger stemmed instead from what appeared to be a willful refusal to help regular citizens with direct aid that might allow them to recover from the crisis. Hoover became one of the least popular presidents in history. Desperation and frustration often create emotional responses, and the Great Depression was no exception.
Throughout —, companies trying to stay afloat sharply cut worker wages, and, in response, workers protested in increasingly bitter strikes. As the Depression unfolded, over 80 percent of automotive workers lost their jobs.
Even the typically prosperous Ford Motor Company laid off two-thirds of its workforce. In , a major strike at the Ford Motor Company factory near Detroit resulted in over sixty injuries and four deaths.
At the Dearborn city limits, local police launched tear gas at the roughly three thousand protestors, who responded by throwing stones and clods of dirt. When they finally reached the gates of the plant, protestors faced more police and firemen, as well as private security guards. As the firemen turned hoses onto the protestors, the police and security guards opened fire.
In addition to those killed and injured, police arrested fifty protestors. One week later, sixty thousand mourners attended the public funerals of the four victims of what many protesters labeled police brutality. The event set the tone for worsening labor relations in the U. Farmers also organized and protested, often violently. The most notable example was the Farm Holiday Association. Although they never comprised a majority of farmers in any of these states, their public actions drew press attention nationwide.
To achieve their goals, the group called for farm holidays , during which farmers would neither sell their produce nor purchase any other goods until the government met their demands. However, the greatest strength of the association came from the unexpected and seldom-planned actions of its members, which included barricading roads into markets, attacking nonmember farmers, and destroying their produce. He borrowed money to buy food before he had succeeded in getting government assistance.
He persuaded George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, and other leading authors to publish statements in support of his efforts. He negotiated with food brokers and shipping companies. At a time when the world adored people who had spectacular organizational skills, here was somebody using them not to build a factory or administer an empire but for purely humanitarian purposes. Hoover was a logistical saint. In , after many years in London, Hoover returned to the United States, won the friendship and admiration of President Woodrow Wilson, and was made the director of a new government agency called the United States Food Administration, which was charged with managing the national food supply now that the country was a participant in the war.
He wound up not entering the race, but he eventually declared himself a Republican and was appointed Secretary of Commerce by President Warren Harding. Hoover turned that usually obscure position, which he held through most of the nineteen-twenties, into a platform for further increasing his fame, culminating in one more turn as the orchestrator of a vast relief effort, after the Mississippi River flood of In those days, Hoover was, Whyte observes, on the liberal edge of the Republican Party.
Hoover, who as Commerce Secretary made himself into the first federal official with power over new industries like aviation and broadcasting—Congress created the F. He also loved taking on projects like standardizing the sizes of bricks and wood screws.
Whyte, however unsympathetic he finds Hoover personally, is almost entirely on his side as a policymaker—not least when it comes to his handling of the economic crisis that began a few months into his Presidency.
As early as , Hoover was warning publicly that, sooner or later, the booming economy of the nineteen-twenties was going to go bust. In the early months of his Presidency, he began selling his own stocks in anticipation of a crash. And when the crash came, on October 29, , Hoover immediately grasped its importance and began exploring what to most of Washington seemed like the outer acceptable limit of an aggressive government response to an economic crisis.
Hoover launched infrastructure-building projects unprecedented in scale. Convinced that the heavy reparations payments imposed on Germany after the First World War were making the Depression more severe in Europe, he organized a politically risky moratorium on them. The atmosphere surrounding these activities was typically Hooverian: he confronted the Depression the way he had the humanitarian crises that brought him to the Presidency, with sheer hard work. Surrounded by a circle of loyal aides who had served him for decades and who were known collectively as the Firm, he apportioned his long days at the office he was the first President to keep a telephone on his desk into series of eight-minute appointments.
Progressivism did not rest firmly within either of the political parties; it produced Presidents who were Republican, like Theodore Roosevelt, and Democratic, like Wilson. The coming of the New Deal turned most Republican Progressives into conservatives, though, and none more than Hoover. Like many politicians, Hoover preferred to think of himself as someone who had reluctantly answered a call to public service, rather than as someone who craved power, but he took losing very hard.
As the rise of Adolf Hitler forced Roosevelt to become a foreign-policy President, Hoover began to disapprove of him diplomatically just as much as he did economically. He believed that, if left alone, Hitler, whom he had visited in , would direct his ambitions eastward and wage a mutually destructive war with the Soviet Union, leaving Britain and Western Europe alone.
He used this as an occasion to reprise his decades-past role as a one-man food-distribution tsar in postwar Europe. The following year, a newly Republican Congress put him in charge of a vast efficiency study of the federal government. The Hoover Commission, run with typically obsessive thoroughness by its septuagenarian namesake, produced nineteen separate reports and two hundred and seventy-three recommendations.
The magnitude of the economic disaster was just too great to be politically survivable. Even if Hoover had been able to devise a perfect plan for surmounting the disaster, his lack of political skills would have prevented him from enacting it. Finally, many historians, with the benefit of hindsight, argue that Hoover in reality could have done little to solve the Depression.
Nonetheless, many scholars still criticize Hoover's refusal to authorize large-scale relief programs that might have alleviated suffering and hunger, his unwillingness to use significant federal spending to stimulate the economy, and his general failure to recognize the all-encompassing nature of the Great Depression. Quite simply, Hoover seemed never to have grasped the grave threat that the economic crisis represented to the nation—and that solutions to the Depression might have required abandoning some of his deeply held beliefs.
Hoover compounded these missteps, each of which had political implications, with inept political maneuvering. Hoover proved unable to handle Congress, the press, and the public—or difficult situations like the Bonus Army—in ways that built confidence in his leadership.
It should also be noted that Hoover's questionable political judgment and leadership was not brought on by the "Great Crash. The Great Depression, though, brought these political failures, as well as Hoover's ideological and policy limitations, into sharp relief, exaggerating their effects and paving the way for Franklin Roosevelt's victory in the presidential election.
What emerges, then, for Hoover is a mixed and perhaps still damning verdict, but one that takes a more accurate measure of the President, his policies, and his politics. Grant Rutherford B. Hayes James A. Garfield Chester A. Roosevelt Harry S.
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