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. Hoover set out to govern in the manner in which he had accomplished the spectacular feats that had brought him to the Presidency: as an administrator of genius. He tried to defeat the Depression by grinding it down from behind his desk.
He had been raised in a strict teetotalling environment. He occasionally fell under the influence of liquor; therefore in the opinion of our village he represented all the forces of evil.
It concerned the size and the scope of the federal government. Roosevelt created the Works Projects Administration, Social Security, and other programs that conferred benefits directly on people in need. Roosevelt had more than doubled that figure even before the Second World War began. By the time of his death, it was twenty per cent, where it would roughly hover for the next seven decades. Roosevelt increased the number of federal employees from about five hundred thousand to more than six million.
Hoover believed that a small central government was the only possible distinctively American alternative to Socialism, Communism, and Fascism. They might be found keeping warm by a trashcan bonfire or picking through garbage at dawn, but mostly, they stayed out of public view. As the effects of the crash continued, however, the results became more evident.
Those living in cities grew accustomed to seeing long breadlines of unemployed men waiting for a meal, as shown in Figure Companies fired workers and tore down employee housing to avoid paying property taxes. The landscape of the country had changed. The hardships of the Great Depression threw family life into disarray. Both marriage and birth rates declined in the decade after the crash.
The most vulnerable members of society—children, women, minorities, and the working class—struggled the most. Parents often sent children out to beg for food at restaurants and stores to save themselves from the disgrace of begging.
Many children dropped out of school, and even fewer went to college. Childhood, as it had existed in the prosperous twenties, was over.
And yet, for many children living in rural areas where the affluence of the previous decade was not fully developed, the Depression was not viewed as a great challenge. School continued. Play was simple and enjoyed. Families adapted by growing more in gardens, canning, and preserving, wasting little food if any. Home-sewn clothing became the norm as the decade progressed, as did creative methods of shoe repair with cardboard soles.
By one estimate, as many as , children moved about the country as vagrants due to familial disintegration. Some wives and mothers sought employment to make ends meet, an undertaking that was often met with strong resistance from husbands and potential employers. Many men derided and criticized women who worked, feeling that jobs should go to unemployed men. Some campaigned to keep companies from hiring married women, and an increasing number of school districts expanded the long-held practice of banning the hiring of married female teachers.
Despite the pushback, women entered the workforce in increasing numbers, from ten million at the start of the Depression to nearly thirteen million by the end of the s. This increase took place in spite of the twenty-six states that passed a variety of laws to prohibit the employment of married women. Others took jobs as maids and housecleaners, working for those fortunate few who had maintained their wealth. Unsurprisingly, African American men and women experienced unemployment, and the grinding poverty that followed, at double and triple the rates of their white counterparts.
By , unemployment among African Americans reached near 50 percent. In rural areas, where large numbers of African Americans continued to live despite the Great Migration of —, depression-era life represented an intensified version of the poverty that they traditionally experienced.
Subsistence farming allowed many African Americans who lost either their land or jobs working for white landholders to survive, but their hardships increased. Life for African Americans in urban settings was equally trying, with blacks and working-class whites living in close proximity and competing for scarce jobs and resources. Life for all rural Americans was difficult. Farmers largely did not experience the widespread prosperity of the s.
Although continued advancements in farming techniques and agricultural machinery led to increased agricultural production, decreasing demand particularly in the previous markets created by World War I steadily drove down commodity prices.
As a result, farmers could barely pay the debt they owed on machinery and land mortgages, and even then could do so only as a result of generous lines of credit from banks. While factory workers may have lost their jobs and savings in the crash, many farmers also lost their homes, due to the thousands of farm foreclosures sought by desperate bankers.
Between and , nearly , family farms disappeared through foreclosure or bankruptcy. Even for those who managed to keep their farms, there was little market for their crops. Unemployed workers had less money to spend on food, and when they did purchase goods, the market excess had driven prices so low that farmers could barely piece together a living.
This concept gained greater attention beginning in the Progressive Era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when early social reformers sought to improve the quality of life for all Americans by addressing the poverty that was becoming more prevalent, particularly in emerging urban areas.
However, the sheer volume of Americans who fell into this group meant that charitable assistance could not begin to reach them all. The country had no mechanism or system in place to help so many; however, Hoover remained adamant that such relief should rest in the hands of private agencies, not with the federal government.
Unable to receive aid from the government, Americans thus turned to private charities; churches, synagogues, and other religious organizations; and state aid. But these organizations were not prepared to deal with the scope of the problem. Private aid organizations showed declining assets as well during the Depression, with fewer Americans possessing the ability to donate to such charities.
Likewise, state governments were particularly ill-equipped. Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first to institute a Department of Welfare in New York in City governments had equally little to offer.
In Detroit, allowances fell to fifteen cents a day per person, and eventually ran out completely. In most cases, relief was only in the form of food and fuel; organizations provided nothing in the way of rent, shelter, medical care, clothing, or other necessities. During this time, local community groups, such as police and teachers, worked to help the neediest. New York City police, for example, began contributing 1 percent of their salaries to start a food fund that was geared to help those found starving on the streets.
Chicago teachers did the same, feeding some eleven thousand students out of their own pockets in , despite the fact that many of them had not been paid a salary in months. These noble efforts, however, failed to fully address the level of desperation that the American public was facing.
President Hoover was unprepared for the scope of the depression crisis, and his limited response did not begin to help the millions of Americans in need. The steps he took were very much in keeping with his philosophy of limited government, a philosophy that many had shared with him until the upheavals of the Great Depression made it clear that a more direct government response was required.
The steps Hoover did ultimately take were too little, too late. He created programs for putting people back to work and helping beleaguered local and state charities with aid. But the programs were small in scale and highly specific as to who could benefit, and they only touched a small percentage of those in need. As the situation worsened, the public grew increasingly unhappy with Hoover.
He left office with one of the lowest approval ratings of any president in history. In the immediate aftermath of Black Tuesday, Hoover sought to reassure Americans that all was well. Reading his words after the fact, it is easy to find fault. Yet Hoover was neither intentionally blind nor unsympathetic. He simply held fast to a belief system that did not change as the realities of the Great Depression set in.
Hoover believed strongly in the ethos of American individualism: that hard work brought its own rewards. His life story testified to that belief. Hoover was born into poverty, made his way through college at Stanford University, and eventually made his fortune as an engineer. This experience, as well as his extensive travels in China and throughout Europe, shaped his fundamental conviction that the very existence of American civilization depended upon the moral fiber of its citizens, as evidenced by their ability to overcome all hardships through individual effort and resolve.
The idea of government handouts to Americans was repellant to him. Whereas Europeans might need assistance, such as his hunger relief work in Belgium during and after World War I, he believed the American character to be different. Likewise, Hoover was not completely unaware of the potential harm that wild stock speculation might create if left unchecked.
As secretary of commerce, Hoover often warned President Coolidge of the dangers that such speculation engendered. In the weeks before his inauguration, he offered many interviews to newspapers and magazines, urging Americans to curtail their rampant stock investments, and even encouraged the Federal Reserve to raise the discount rate to make it more costly for local banks to lend money to potential speculators.
However, fearful of creating a panic, Hoover never issued a stern warning to discourage Americans from such investments. Neither Hoover, nor any other politician of that day, ever gave serious thought to outright government regulation of the stock market.
This was even true in his personal choices, as Hoover often lamented poor stock advice he had once offered to a friend. When the stock nose-dived, Hoover bought the shares from his friend to assuage his guilt, vowing never again to advise anyone on matters of investment.
He immediately summoned a conference of leading industrialists to meet in Washington, DC, urging them to maintain their current wages while America rode out this brief economic panic.
The crash, he assured business leaders, was not part of a greater downturn; they had nothing to worry about. Similar meetings with utility companies and railroad executives elicited promises for billions of dollars in new construction projects, while labor leaders agreed to withhold demands for wage increases and workers continued to labor.
However, these modest steps were not enough. By late , when it became clear that the economy would not improve on its own, Hoover recognized the need for some government intervention. 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. As the Depression became worse, however, calls grew for increased federal intervention and spending. But Hoover refused to involve the federal government in forcing fixed prices, controlling businesses, or manipulating the value of the currency, all of which he felt were steps towards socialism.
He was inclined to give indirect aid to banks or local public works projects, but he refused to use federal money for direct aid to citizens, believing the dole would weaken public morale. Instead, he focused on volunteerism to raise money. During his reelection campaign, Hoover tried to convince Americans that the measures they were calling for might seem to help in the short term, but would be ruinous in the long run.
He was soundly defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in Roosevelt promised Americans a "New Deal" when he took office, and during his first "Hundred Days" as president, he signed a number of groundbreaking new laws. New Deal bills supported direct federal aid, tightened government control over many industries, and eschewed volunteerism in favor of deficit spending, all in the hopes of jump starting both consumer confidence and the economy.
In a letter to a friend written seven months after he left office, Hoover expressed his fears about the flurry of New Deal legislation. Hoover saw the country already "going sour on the New Deal. Hoover was correct when he predicted that the role of American government would fundamentally change because of the New Deal.
No matter what improvement there may be in our economic situation during the fall, we shall unquestionably have considerable continuance of destitution over the winter. I am wondering if it would not be advisable for us to get the machinery of the country into earlier action than last year in order that there may be provision for funds substantially made before the winter arrives.
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