Support for Hoover
Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression. By Harris Gaylord Warren. (O.U.P., 50s.)
.TODAY: Mr. Hbover is the elder statesman of the United States (his friend and admirer, Mr. Truman, is not yet regarded as old enough to qualify). He has rendered great services in recent years and could have rendered more if Congress had been more willing to tackle some of the fine old abuses that pay politicians so well. Yet when Mr. Hoover left office in 1933, no president since Buchanan seemed more condemned, more isolated, more conspicuously a failure. Mr. Hoover had, of course, friends and admirers even in 1933; many, many millions of Americans had voted for him in 1932, but for the majority of Americans he was condemned as the man who, taking office in the height of the great boom, left it with the American economy on the edge of total collapse and the faith of the average American in the American way of life less firm than it had ever been in American history.
In this brightly and sometimes brilliantly written book, Professor Warren has undertaken to narrate and assess the Hoover years. This has already been done a good many times and re- cently, with great force and learning, by Pro- fessor Arthur Schlesinger, jr. It might seem that there was no place for another book on the four depressing years from 1929 to 1933. But Pro- fessor Harris shows that this is a hasty judgment by producing a book that does clarify many points. And its object is not to show the back- ground of the New Deal, to treat the Hoover administration as the mere curtain-raiser for the deliverance, but to ask and answer the question of why so able a man as Mr. Hoover had so little success in the White House.
Of Mr. Hoover's ability, there can be little doubt. From every standard of organisational ability and straight intellectual power, he was superior to his successor. He was in many ways an egghead and a scholar. He was fond, perhaps too fond, of getting a sound academic report on a problem before tackling it and he mastered the relevant papers with the same thoroughness as he had translated Agricola's De Re Metallica. He had displayed his abilities all over the world, in Australia, China, England, Belgium. He was, in and after the First World War, second only to Woodrow Wilson as an American who was a world figure. Yet he failed. Whether he failed because his ideas and executive decisions were inadequate does not at this stage matter. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and the end of the Hoover era was the end of more than that. Americans were never to know the old confidence again and American business has never recovered the prestige that it once owned and was convinced it deserved. Perhaps the first thing to say and one that Professor Warren does not stress enough is that the depression of 1929 ruined every demo- cratic politician who had to deal with it. It ruined them in different ways : Ramsay MacDonald, Pierre Laval, Heinrich Bruening, Richard Ben- nett all paid in painful ways for being there when the storm broke.
What was special in Hoover's position? As Professor Warren shows, he suffered from not being all adequate politician. It is unrealistic to represent him as being outside or above politics. But he had none of the spontaneous delight in and mastery of politics that made FDR's career pos- sible and made him a more successful President than his predecessor. This affected Mr. Hoover especially adversely, since the tradition of the Republican Party was hostile to effective presi- dential leadership. The ideal of the politicos was Coolidge (if it was not Harding). So, again and again, Mr. Hoover got only tepid support from his party. Then all the sins of the party were loaded on Mr. Hoover's shoulders. It was he who had to dedicate the Harding memorial at Marion, Ohio (at once known as 'the Teapot Dome'). It was his flatulent vice-president, the ex-jockey and ex-Indian, Charlie Curtis, who talked of recovery as being 'around the corner,' but this imbecility was at once attributed to the President and it provided cartoonists with endless possibilities. Mr. Hoover had to use or put up with dumb- bells like Simeon Fess, of Ohio, the silliest senator that great state has produced in this century (and I have not forgotten Mr. Bricker). And the Demo- cratic opposition was often malicious and unfair.
And yet, and yet. It is true that many of the most successful devices of the New Deal (and many of their operators) date from the Hoover administration, like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. But not only were most of these devices late and so less effective, they were often reluctantly accepted by the President under Con- gressional and exterior pressure. Mr. Hoover was and is a man of deep principle; unfortunately, his principles were irrelevant to the America of 1931 when the real debacle set in. The capitalist world with its Kreugers and Insults did not get or de- serve much respect. Not only did the big business- men, heroes a year or two before, often turn out to be crooks, but even the honest men among them, a majority, were visibly at a total loss. (As an example of their political folly, we are reminded that there was a serious business- inspired move to get Coolidge to run again in 1932.) Mr. Hoover has hinted that he was con- scious of the failure of the politico-economic ruling class, but he was inseparably tied to it. No one worked harder or with more public spirit than did he, but that was not enough. Even now, the most ardent defenders of pure free enterprise naturally shy off from recalling, much less ex- plaining, those years and Mr. Hoover still does not seem to know what hit him and his country.
Professor Warren obviously sympathises with Mr. Hoover more than he does with his open or covert enemies, but equally plainly he does not think that the American people can be blamed for demanding a 'new deal' even if they had na idea of what the new deal was to be, apart from booze and a balanced budget. (They got the booze.) Here we have, well and objectively told, the grim story of the descent from 'two chickens in every pot' to 'brother, can you spare a dime.'
D. W. BROGAN
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