Herbert Hoover

D

Great Depression

Hoover had been in office less than eight months when the Wall Street crash occurred. At first the president treated this financial catastrophe and the decline in business and employment that followed as a speculative panic, and said that the economy was sound and would soon be normal again. In March 1930 he assured the nation that the crisis would be over in 60 days. He repeated similar opinions to restore public confidence in the face of business failures and mounting unemployment.

Public confidence was not restored. Although earlier declines in the stock market had not caused depressions (periods with low sales and production, many business failures and high unemployment), this stock market crash highlighted important weaknesses in the economic structure of the country. In the agricultural sector prices for farm goods dropped, and farmers were less able to purchase manufactured goods. Although industrial productivity had increased, industrial wages had not kept pace with the rise in efficiency. Here, too, more products were produced, but not many more could be purchased. Finally, the benefits of the economic growth of the 1920s were distributed unequally. Farmers were losing ground and industrial workers were improving their standard of living only slowly, while the top 5 percent of the population received 30 percent of the income of the entire country. These wealthy families could not purchase all of the goods that were being produced by the increasingly efficient industries or all the food grown by the increasingly efficient farms.

Democrats found in the Great Depression the issue they had been lacking two years earlier. They campaigned vigorously in the fall elections of 1930, won a small majority in the House of Representatives, and elected several governors. From this point on, Congress began to harass the president.

By the time Congress met in December 1931, Hoover had abandoned his reliance of private measures and began proposing direct action by the government to defeat the depression. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was created in 1932 to provide emergency financing for troubled banks, insurance companies, and other associations, and by the end of 1932, it had loaned out $1.5 billion. The Glass-Steagall Act extended more credit and released some of the government's gold reserves to aid industry. The Federal Home Loan Bank Act created discount banks to help refinance private homes and prevent foreclosures. Hoover also encouraged the reform of bankruptcy laws to aid the speedy reorganization of businesses and the settlement of overwhelming debts. He supported a loan of $300 million to states for direct relief, further expansion of public works, and drastic cutbacks in the federal government. However, Hoover refused the demand of Democrats in Congress, who pleaded for government to distribute money to the unemployed.

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E

Bonus Army

Hoover's worst mistake may have been the way he dealt with the so-called Bonus Army. In 1924 World War I veterans had been given certificates that the government promised to redeem with money in 1945. When the Great Depression hit, however, many veterans demanded immediate payment, and in June 1932 about 17,000 veterans marched on Washington to press their case. The Senate refused to pay off the certificates, and most servicemen went home. About 2,000, however, refused to leave the capital, and Hoover sent federal troops under General Douglas MacArthur, who evicted those remaining by using tear gas and bayonets.

F

Foreign Affairs

As a Quaker humanitarian and a man who had seen the ravages of war, the president strove for peace in his pursuit of foreign affairs. His Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, cooperated with the disarmament efforts of the League of Nations, but Hoover did not favor U.S. membership in the league. At the London Naval Conference of 1930, the United States, Britain, and Japan agreed to limit the number and size of warships they would build. Under Hoover the nation also attended a world disarmament conference at Geneva, Switzerland, in 1932, but the meeting was less successful than the London conference.

When a financial crisis developed in Austria and spread to Germany in 1931, Hoover proposed a one-year moratorium on the payment of debts to foreign governments and on war reparations, which Germany had been forced to pay to the victors of World War I as compensation for the damage caused by the war.

President Hoover initiated toward Latin America what was to be called the good-neighbor policy under his successor. Hoover wanted to persuade Latin American countries that the United States took their interests into consideration as well as its own. To do that he paved the way for the removal of U.S. Marines from Haiti, and he withdrew them from Nicaragua. As the depression toppled numerous regimes throughout Latin America, Hoover recognized the new regimes without questioning the means by which they came into power.

Hoover did not agree with Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson over the best response to Japan's invasion of Manchuria. The president did not believe that the United States should go beyond expressions of disapproval, but the secretary of state wanted to initiate strong sanctions against Japan, whatever the consequences. The League of Nations finally agreed with Stimson, but in response Japan withdrew from the league.

G

Election of 1932

When Hoover ran for reelection against Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York in 1932, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. For two years the Democrats had conducted a vigorous campaign, blaming the president and his Republican supporters for the depression. The Republicans were branded as the “party of hard times” and burdened by an ambiguous stand on the 18th Amendment, which the Democrats favored repealing. In November, Roosevelt captured 472 electoral votes to Hoover's 59. The popular vote was: Roosevelt, 22,829,501; Hoover, 15,760,684.

As president the world-renowned and financially successful Hoover could neither adapt to the give-and-take necessary to political life, nor could he completely embrace the transition to a government-regulated economy, a move he had reluctantly initiated. Never having campaigned for elective office before 1928, he never learned to reach the people at large, but it was the depression that doomed his administration.

V

Last Years

Retired from the presidency, Hoover settled in his Palo Alto, California, home. He built up the Hoover Library on War, Revolution, and Peace to 200,000 volumes and donated it to Stanford University.

Hoover did not forget politics, however. He attacked President Roosevelt's New Deal in his book The Challenge to Liberty (1934). Early in 1938 the former president visited Europe. He talked with German dictator Adolf Hitler and became convinced that Germany had designs on territory to the east. The following year, Hoover organized a relief fund to help Finland defend itself against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). He figured prominently in the 1940 Republican National Convention, but he remained cool to the presidential candidacy of Republican Wendell Willkie.

During 1940 and 1941, Hoover publicly criticized President Roosevelt's policy toward World War II. In 1942, after America entered the conflict, he published two books on foreign policy, America's First Crusade and, with Hugh Gibson, The Problem of Lasting Peace.

After the war, Hoover made several trips abroad, at the request of President Harry S. Truman, to assess the need for food and to recommend ways of averting a postwar famine. In 1947, Truman again made use of the former president by appointing Hoover chairman of the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, commonly called the Hoover Commission. Its purpose was to recommend ways of simplifying and economizing the administrative structure of the government. Two years later the Hoover Commission issued several reports, and Congress enacted some of its recommendations into law. Several years later, Hoover published his Memoirs (1951-1952) in three volumes.

In 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed a second Hoover commission, with the former president as chairman. When the commission completed its work in 1955, Hoover, at 81, retired from public service.

Hoover maintained his lifelong interest in young people. In 1962, excerpts from his correspondence with boys and girls appeared in his book On Growing Up. Hoover died in New York City on October 20, 1964.

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