Fit for the Presidency? by Seymour Morris

Author:Seymour Morris [Morris Jr., Seymour]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO010000 Biography & Autobiography / Political
ISBN: 9781612348872
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2016-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

1928

Promising “a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage,” Herbert Hoover won by a landslide. Upon taking office he pursued his foremost priority and met with Federal Reserve officials to authorize measures to curb speculation and clamp down on easy money. As president he followed up on his 1925 letter to the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, wherein he had warned that the Federal Reserve’s loose-money policies would bring “inevitable collapse.”39 There would be no economic collapse on his watch as president. Unemployment at the time was just 3 percent.

Eight months into his presidency Hoover ran into a tsunami known as the Crash. For a while it looked like the worse was over. Andrew Mellon said there was nothing to worry about; John Maynard Keynes predicted there would be no more crashes; Bernard Baruch announced that the financial storm had passed. When President Hoover received a delegation requesting a public works program to help speed the recovery, he told them, “Gentlemen, you have come sixty days too late. The depression is over.”40

Yet every time the stock market rebounded, it promptly sank back to a new low. This happened five times. There were actually two depressions during Hoover’s term. The first was the result of overspeculation during the previous years. The second—hitting just as Hoover’s efforts were beginning to show results—occurred in 1931, when the fiscal and financial structure of Europe started to collapse and Britain and eighteen other countries went off the gold standard. What had started out as a U.S. depression had now become an international depression. Unemployment soared, banks closed, and Hoover started making incredible statements like “Many people have left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples.”41

No president ever worked as hard as Hoover: sixteen-hour days, seven days a week. He called conferences of business leaders and got them to keep paying good wages. He called conferences of state and local politicians and got them to refrain from waging strikes. He tried to get the governors to back a plan for a $3 billion reserve fund, only to be rejected. (The governors called the plan “socialistic.”)42 He initiated what under FDR became the Glass-Steagall Act to clean up Wall Street; he also signed the Hawley-Smoot bill to protect American businessmen against European competition. He spent more money on public works than all his predecessors combined. He lowered taxes, then he raised them; he got an increase in the Fed discount rate; he balanced the budget, then he ran a deficit. There was hardly anything he didn’t do. When the 1932 presidential campaign came around, FDR accused Hoover of presiding over “the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history,” and FDR’s running mate, John Nance Garner, declared that Hoover was “leading the country down the path to socialism.”43

What the Democrats conveniently ignored, of course, was the magnitude of the obstacles Hoover faced. The worse the economy got, the harder Hoover worked, to the point that he sometimes got only three hours of sleep a night.

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