Liberalism by Fawcett Edmund;

Author:Fawcett, Edmund;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

vi. Hoover and Roosevelt: Forgotten Liberal and Foremost Liberal

In American historical memory, the Great Depression comes in two guises. One is a drawn-out, many-sided crisis from 1929 to 1941, much longer than that in Europe, whose causes and cures are still in dispute. The slump came from underspending. It came from monetary disturbances. Government intervention saved the day, made things worse, or made no difference. Contrasting defenses in depth by economists and historians exist for each of those views.

In a second guise, the Great Depression has the simplicity of moral drama, a contest between virtue and vice led by heroes and villains. The American presidents of the period, Herbert Hoover, a Republican, and Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, pursued lines of policy that are hard at this distance to tell apart. They were nevertheless soon lodged in people’s minds as champions of opposing “philosophies” whose colors were pure and clear: Hoover for executive restraint and voluntarism, Roosevelt for expansive government and an interventionist state. Out of that contest, as it came to be imagined, rival camps formed in American politics. They sounded as hostile in tone and as angry with each other as Southerners and Northerners after the Civil War. They exist to this day, called in a local twist of language, “conservative” and “liberal,” though those terms disguise hidden likenesses as well as patent differences.

Hoover and Roosevelt were both liberals in the large sense: believers in social progress, as well as in the legal coinage of civic respect—personal rights and private property. Each hoped to restabilize American capitalism on defendable terms for business and labor. Each improvised pragmatically in response to an unprecedented economic conjuncture. Both, as tellingly, contributed to a transformation in economic structure. The change was most obvious in the growth of scale and responsibilities for the federal government. That growth in turn reflected a deeper change that, though less measurable, was quite as real. Hoover and Roosevelt presided over a massive upward shift in expectations of government.

The Hoover-Roosevelt legend obscured their likenesses. Roosevelt’s supporters vilified Hoover for doing nothing in frozen panic as slump deepened. They revered Roosevelt as a savior whose New Deal rescued a nation from despair. On Hoover’s side, those execrations and celebrations were reversed: Roosevelt destroyed confidence by stirring up frightened voters against business, led the nation from virtues of work and thrift, and by frivolous, ignorant meddling made the slump worse. Hoover’s personal unpopularity in 1932 magnified Roosevelt’s mandate. Bitter in defeat and abandoned by Republicans, Hoover blamed his obloquy on the “economic hurricane.” His standing fell as Roosevelt’s rose. So did the prestige of the ideas each was taken to stand for. American success in war here played a significant part by shedding a backward glow on the New Deal. Had Roosevelt left at the end of his second term in early 1941, his standing would have been more disputed. Partisans looked up to him as a defender of working men and women. Detractors saw in him an irresponsible class warrior.

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