Hoovervilles. Economic ruins. Laissez-faire. The Great Depression. The national public has the tendency to lop these ideas and events onto the damaged legacy of President Herbert Hoover.
A republican who ran in place of incumbent republican President Calvin Coolidge, Hoover's one term is often characterized by loose regulation and a firm commitment to the free market, a staple of the party since it won the 1920 election, advocating a "return to normalcy." However, many forget Hoover's response to the inconceivable challenges that befell him so quickly after his inauguration.
After two years of keeping to his traditional ideas, Hoover morphed into a politician normally associated with liberalism. Catalyzed by the persistence of the Great Depression, Hoover yielded to pressure for federal relief funds and public works along with signing the Norris-La Guardia Act, which provided support for organized labor.
Still, Hoover took loads of criticism from opponent Franklin Roosevelt in the 1932 election for failure to act to help the nation recover. Roosevelt complemented this attack with ambiguous optimistic rhetoric, with a rare account of the details of his plan.
Despite Hoover's prudent warning that Roosevelt would pervade the nation's long-standing economic sense, Roosevelt would go on to win the election and continue to expand Hoover's projects. The difference, though, lay in the fact that Hoover considered relief to be temporary emergency measures, whereas Roosevelt intended for them to be permanent - and succeeded in doing so.
Over the next seven years, Roosevelt would implement his New Deal, recklessly augmenting government spending and putting more people on government payrolls. Unfortunately, the nation's historical perception has duped itself here, as well. Though unemployment never fell below 14 percent, Roosevelt is credited with fixing the Depression. However, a second look shows that the nation's economy began showing permanent and significant improvement around 1939 to 1941.
What changed? World War II.
In preparing to counter Adolf Hitler, whose invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939 officially started the second Great War, the Allied Powers required more products and lacked the labor force (with men joining the military) to produce those goods.
As with World War I, the United States met the increase in demand and firms employed more workers in order to achieve the higher equilibrium production level, thus restoring the nation's economy.
Still, we adore FDR in spite of bucking economic logic, attempting to usurp the Supreme Court with additional justices, and putting Japanese citizens in internment camps, and violating habeas corpus a la W. Bush (turns out even the consummate liberal can be tempted).
In Roosevelt's subsequent election bids, he continually warned against favoring the Republican ticket, inciting the memory of the Hoover Administration and the beginning of the Depression.
Unfortunately, he did nothing differently, and the nation continued to suffer until external factors - sadly in the shape of a global war - created new markets and expanded existing ones.
So how does this compare to the present day? Employing an optimistic and energetic image of itself while arousing disdain toward the incumbent president, the Democratic Party took control of the White House and both houses of Congress, including a 59-41 margin in the Senate.
The nation has faced and is facing troubling times, and the previous administration, which was decidedly conservative compared with the openly liberal stance of the new one, yielded more and more to liberal policies in its final months.
So when was that, 1933 or 2009?
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How did this article get on here? While the cats are away the CT conservative mice will play, I suppose. Who is Scott to hold a politician to their word? Obama said he was going to fix things so things will be fixed-period. All questions do is get in the way of productive change.
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Kudos, Scott. It took many years of listening to my father rant about the New Deal and the steady decline toward our current state of government control in almost every area of our lives before I actually started reading up on it. Frightening.
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Sean, that's absolutely hilarious! good satire. Yes, questioning the gov't is always BAD. matter of fact, why don't we do away with elections-- all they are is disruptive of democracy. just out of curiosity, did you ever question Pres. Bush? (for the record, I'm not a conservative, either. As i said during the Bush era and still today, the patriot act makes me sick).
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I'm not into politics, I'd characterize myself as a conservative but I don't like how people sort themselves into political parties. I remember back in the day I liked nominee Bush's message of "US should not be in the business of nation building." Holy Jesus look how that one turned out! And his promotion of home ownership was a big thing I had a problem with. I had no idea it was going to turn out the way it did, but I remember his talking up home ownership whereas I thought that if people couldn't afford a house then they shouldn't get one. I like how you used the name "publius", I was going to write in my previous post how all policy editorials should be published anonymously since the "D" and "R" next to somebody's name have more to do with support than the actual substance. I am currently reading the Federalist Papers for my bathroom time literature so that is why I was thinking about it.
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Doesn't Bush's contradiction between campaign and presidency just prove the point of the article? I don't see what any of that has to do with questioning the president-- except that we have to hold politicians to what they promise, otherwise they won't keep their promises.
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Get real. Your juvenile economic analysis is cute at best, dangerously ignorant at worst.
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Concerned Reader, please educate us on this "dangerously ignorant" economic analysis you refer to. While you're at it, please explain how further increasing the national debt is going to fix the debt problem in this country. As I see it, individuals took on more debt than they could ever repay. Banks did the same, packaging up these bad loans and pretending they were worth more than they are. Now along comes the Fed, piling on the national debt at unprecedented levels to bail out the banks and individuals who took on too much debt. Why should I expect the Fed's results to differ? Is it because they're bigger? Is it because they can print money at will? That's a fallacy, you know. Sooner or later (as individuals have been learning) you have to pay the piper.
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Well written article. The only I would say is that a good candidate has no choice but to promise things that he or she may not be able to completely come through with. So I don't think its that big of a deal that Obama is calling for our "residual force" in Iraq to stay a bit longer than originally stated. However, you are right that we absolutely must keep the pressure generally on our leaders in order to hold them accountable and avoid the political amnesia you speak of.
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It is a myth that spending for world war 2 ended the great depression. The depression ended because of dramatically loosened economic policy, rapid technological advancement and education. And my personal theory is that the introduction of women to nontraditional roles in the labor force helped as well. But the author is right. The new deal was stupid and Obama is very stupid. At least FDR has the excuse that modern macroeconomics hadn't been developed yet. I hate Barack Obama and everyone who supports him.
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Correction- dramatically loosened MONETARY policy, not "economic" policy as I wrote in my last post.
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