Hoover through history
From “The Winning Side”, 1963, Ralph Toledano. Page 62-63. Found here.
A good deal of rose-colored historical misrepresentation obscures the condition of the nation in those months between
the conventions and the first Roosevelt Inaugural. “There is very good statistical evidence which goes to prove,” Walter
Lippmann has written, “that the world depression reached its lowest point in the mid-summer of 1932.” And again: “His-
torians will see that President Hoover . . . had hold of the essence of the matter in the spring of 1932 when [he] arrested
the depression.” Yet the Democrats had made such a howling joke of Hoover’s theme, “Prosperity is just around the cor-
ner/’ that the public became convinced the depression was here to stay. This, in itself, helped to wipe out the economic
gains discernible in the spring and summer of 1932.
President Hoover was powerless to act. Since 1931, a Democratic House and a Senate dominated by a coalition of hostile
Liberal Republicans and whooping Democrats refused to go along with his efforts to hasten recovery. After the election,
Jloover might have been able to continue the upward swing. But business and public confidence drained away in the in-
action imposed by the President-elect. All of Hoover’s efforts to bring about some joint action in those months were re-
buffed by Roosevelt. According to Raymond Moley, who at the time was very close to him, “Roosevelt felt Hoover capa-
ble of acting without his concurrence, and that until noon of March 4th it was Hoover’s baby.” This was smart politics
but hardly responsible behavior.
The curious figure of Herbert Hoover.
A non partisan figure who was not wholly categorized into either faction of the Republican Party, and had enmity from all. A prominent Democratic strategist had in 1920 suggested that the only way to win the election was with a Hoover / Roosevelt ticket — a mixture of the idea of an Engineer at the top, a Roosevelt at the bottom, and the electoral math of California plus New York.
And so in 1932, the election campaigning between the two figures occasionally wound its way to confusion. Hoover charged Roosevelt with emerging socialism while defending his government expenses as unprecedented in times of economic crisis historically, while Roosevelt charged Hoover with neglect and unconcern at the same time he charged him with government extravagence.
Congress, despite what Toledano says, was pretty well supportive in passing Hoover’s policies, even as the Democrats bludgeo0ned him politically — if we are to believe this book. But Toledano is contradictory with his Hoover apologetics. Congress stopped him from doing anything, he got things well in hand by 1932…
By 1936, Hoover had transformed from his 1928 visage as a not wholly compatible with his party to the Tragic Hero derided unfairly, and indeed on to the definition of Conservative Old-Guard Republicanism. He “Kept the Faith” It is an interesting transformation, though it should be said Hoover changed right alongside it. By the 1950s, he proved to be the key figure that a young William Buckley ended up turning to after hitting a number of early dead ends in funding his National Review project, and his Institute transformed itself.
But it interesting with Ralph Taledano in this book, hawking the presidential ambitions of Goldwater against the incumbent Kennedy and moving through an at one time all too familiar litany of what the Republican Powerbrokers hampered the party with — Willkie and Dewey, tossing Taft aside for Eisenhower — another non partisan figure, and compromising an otherwise sound Nixon with the doctrines of Rockefellar — Today, I can spot figures to the Right of this Goldwater Conservatism pegging Hoover with Hoover originating the New Deal, and drawing strong continuities between Hoover’s “New Era” and Roosevelt’s “New Deal“. It is curious to note that Toledano celebrates William McKinley in this book, and more to the point his political manager Mark Hanna who you’re dutiful to mention in discussing McKinley along the lines of Bush and Rove — in a similar point to Kevin Phillip’s short biography of McKinley setting him up as a proto-Progressive receiving none of the credit that Theodore Roosevelt got for the same political makeup — driving home the complimentary quote from La Follette. And here we have Toldano point out that McKinley came to the attention of Hanna when he defended a striking union… the message here from a Goldwater Republican in 1963… who needed to defend his preferred political line from a degree of accepted liberalism.