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.\u00c2\u00a0 Faith was an end in itself, “lack of business confidence” was a cardinal sin.\u00c2\u00a0 Hoover’s first reaction to the stump which followed the crash had been to treat it as a psychological phenomenom.\u00c2\u00a0 He himself had chosen the word “Depression” because it sounded less frightening than “panic” or “crisis”.\u00c2\u00a0 In December 1929 he declared that “conditions are fundamentally sound.”\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 The Depression is over.”<\/p>\n
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.”\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Overnight there were shivering apple sellers everywhere.\u00c2\u00a0 Asked about them, Hoover replied, “Many people have left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples.”\u00c2\u00a0 Reporters were caustic, and the President was stung.\u00c2\u00a0 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.”\u00c2\u00a0 Nevertheless he persevered, pondering new ways of waging psychological warfare.\u00c2\u00a0 “What this country needs,” he told Chistopher Morley, “is a great poem.”\u00c2\u00a0 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.”\u00c2\u00a0 Vallee didn’t get the medal.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead he sang [here<\/a>].<\/p>\n […] One source of embarassment to the Administration was the stretch of Pennsylvania Railroad track between Washington and New York.\u00c2\u00a0 It was lined with thousands of billboards.\u00c2\u00a0 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?”\u00c2\u00a0 Agreeing that it had been, but that it was past, the International Association of Lions Clubs celebrated Business Confidence Week.<\/p>\n — William Manchester, Glory and the Dream Volume 1<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Faith was an end in itself, “lack […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-regurgitates-forward"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3904"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3907,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3904\/revisions\/3907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}