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?
Furthermore, consider a more specific application of this comparison: The clamor was vociferous and provocative; letters-to-the-editor, syndicated columns, even bumper stickers made up the plethora of formal and informal responses to the administration's handling of several issues, most notably the Iraq War.
As the nation slowly recovered from the 9/11 tragedy and the troubling years that followed, people questioned the prudence of the invasion up to the 2008 election, which evidenced the exacerbated frustrations with President Bush.
It was on this wave of upheaval that Barack Obama-touting his voting against the invasion as a senator and campaigning to end the war-rode to victory in the presidential election.
However, now that Obama has taken over as commander-in-chief, his promise to end the occupation seems to have become nothing more than giving the nation an opportunity to clear its conscience by renaming the war on terror the "Overseas Contingency Operation" and setting a date for the withdrawal - August 2012.
And that's assuming the date doesn't get pushed back in the three years in between now and then. Why then, did we bury the strong sentiment that plagued the Bush Administration on Jan. 20?
The president, who based so much of his personal appeal on his dedication to policy over politics, conveniently set the deadline for ending the war for just three months before the 2012 election, in which he will be seeking his reelection. Coincidence? Ha. He is indeed a politician, after all. The nation needs to maintain a level head and approach all policies with a prudent distrust, or else risk falling victim to political amnesia and losing many of the agendas it supported at the polls last November.
There are those who will say this is simply stirring the pot and undercutting the president without enough time or actions to judge him on; there always are.
And indeed, stirring the pot is exactly the intent of this commentary - it has been shown that this is necessary for a desired public policy to be enacted.
In regard to the latter accusation, this historical context does not imply that we have gone 0-3 in our perceptions; it is still early in the young president's tenure. However, political columns in protest of a government action always fall into two categories: warnings and petitions.
Unfortunately, for those who advocate waiting to pressure the President on issues, choosing the latter is to be choosing too late.