recalling President Hoover

Rifling through Hoover’s papers, one sometimes has the strange feeling that the President looked upon the Depression as a public relations problem — that he believed the nightmare would go away if only the image of American business could be polished up and set in the right light.  Faith was an end in itself, “lack of business confidence” was a cardinal sin.  Hoover’s first reaction to the stump which followed the crash had been to treat it as a psychological phenomenom.  He himself had chosen the word “Depression” because it sounded less frightening than “panic” or “crisis”.  In December 1929 he declared that “conditions are fundamentally sound.”  Three months later he said the worst would be over in sixty days; at the end of May he predicted the economy would be back to normal in the autumn; in June the market broke sharply, yet he told a delegation which called to plead for a public works project “Gentlemen, you have come sixty days too late.  The Depression is over.”

Already his forecasts were being flung back at him by his critics, but in his December 2, 1930 message to Congress — a lame duck Republican Congress; the Democrats had just swept the off-year elections — he said that “the fundamental strength of the economy is unimpaired.”  At about the same time the International Apple Shippers Association, faced with a surplus of apples, decided to sell them on credit to jobless men for resale at a nickel each.  Overnight there were shivering apple sellers everywhere.  Asked about them, Hoover replied, “Many people have left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples.”  Reporters were caustic, and the President was stung.  By now he was beginning to show signs of the more ominous traits of embattled Presidents; as his secretary Thodore Joslin was to note in his memoirs, Hoover was beginning to regard some criticism “as unpatriotic.”  Nevertheless he persevered, pondering new ways of waging psychological warfare.  “What this country needs,” he told Chistopher Morley, “is a great poem.”  To Rudy Vallee he said in the spring of 1932, “If you can sing a song that would make people forget the Depression, I’ll give you a medal.”  Vallee didn’t get the medal.  Instead he sang [here].

[…] One source of embarassment to the Administration was the stretch of Pennsylvania Railroad track between Washington and New York.  It was lined with thousands of billboards.  Half were blank, which raised awkward questions in the minds of passengers until admirers of the President began renting them to spread the slogan “WASN’T THE DEPRESSION TERRIBLE?”  Agreeing that it had been, but that it was past, the International Association of Lions Clubs celebrated Business Confidence Week.

— William Manchester, Glory and the Dream Volume 1

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