Herbert Hoover

When Herbert Hoover moved into the White House on March 4, 1929, Americans couldn't be happier. Left, right, and in the middle, the US population had grown a shared affection for their secretary of commerce. Hoover grew up in poverty, losing both his parents by the age of 9 and having to leave his home state of Iowa for his uncle's home in Oregon. As a member of the first class to attend Stanford University, Hoover studied geology and then traveled the globe leading mining projects. In the process, he set up several of his own mining firms and managed to break his shell of scarcity. He became a millionaire. He went on to help foreigners escape China during the Boxing Rebellion when xenophobic conservatives began targeting ex-pats. During WW1, he helped Americans flee a wartorn Europe and provided Belgians with the resources they needed to survive a German invasion. When America joined the war in 1917, he chaired the US Food Administration that provided food to soldiers fighting in Europe and then directed relief efforts meant to give food, medicine, money, and vaccines to those living in the immediate aftermath of WW1 and all its carnage. From there, he was secretary of commerce under the hugely-popular Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. And now he was president of the United States. Utopia seemed to be on the horizon.

Also during WW1, many European farmers temporarily left their farms in order to fight in the war. This created an enormous gap in crop production that American farmers managed to fill. The aforementioned US Food Administration and American Relief Administration (Hoover's project to help Europe rebuild from WW1) also required additional agricultural activity within the US to sustain. Almost immediately after WW1 ended, then-President Woodrow Wilson also prohibited the federal government from providing further loans to Europe, constricting that continent's buying power and so locking many crops in the US economy, rather than international markets. These factors resulted in a gigantic glut of crops and meats that caused agricultural products to become far less expensive. This was very good at first, but eventually, those products became too cheap and so it grew hard for farmers to sustain themselves. The agriculture sector seemed to be on the brink of collapse.

But as farmers suffered in silence, the rest of the economy danced in delight. Harding and Coolidge - alongside their Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover - occupied the White House during the Roaring 20s. Companies were doing incredibly well and so were their shareholders as well. Because of how profitable stocks became, Americans began desiring stocks of their own. But since the average corporation was making so much money, their stocks were inaccessible pricey, even with the economic boom. So, people began borrowing money in order to purchase these stocks, using a portion of their new income to liquidate the resulting debt. This appeared sustainable at first. However, since the economy was doing this well, companies started to produce more items than they could ever realistically sell. So, they had to divert resources away from economic contributions and toward destroying and managing this overproduction issue.

In August of 1929, the Federal Reserve, realizing how dangerous buying on margin (as the practice of using borrowed money to buy stocks was labeled) was, decided to discourage it by raising interest rates. The adjustment was minor, increasing interest rates from 5% to literally just 6%. However, it still backfired immensely. Practically all stock activity by this point was composed of buying on margin. And now that interest rates were increased, people didn't want to borrow money as much and so stopped buying stocks as often. This, coupled with the aforementioned overproduction issues, caused stock prices to start declining for the first time in years on September 4, 1929. This fact terrified stockholders. With stock values declining, they as stockholders would make less money and so would have a harder time terminating their debts. For this reason, Americans started rescinding their stock purchases en masse. This only caused stock prices to further decrease, with the rate of decline becoming much more rapid on October 24, 1929.

On October 29, 1929, the stock market officially crashed. The Roaring 20s had suddenly combusted and the flames of the Great Depression had just been lit. Slowly, the flames burned away at America's prosperity. News of the stock market crash caused fear to rush out of solely the stocks community and to the whole of the US. Americans worried that the stock market crash was a sign of things to come and that their banks would soon go under. At the time, that meant that any money deposited into those banks was permanently lost. So, throughout November and December 1929, Americans flocked to their banks in massive numbers, demanding that they receive all of their deposits in cash. If the bank in question went belly-up, the logic went, the depositor would still have their money. However, because of this practice (known as bank runs), these banks actually did run out of money and so actually did collapse. By 1930, the entirety of the banking industry had fallen apart. Bankers and bank employees were destitute without employment and people could no longer safely store their money. Bank runs had made the economic situation infinitely worse.

Hoover, during this whole affair, did very little to nip the oncoming crisis. Of course, Hoover could have never prevented economic hardship. The stock market crash had already set some level of financial distress in stone. But if he gave aid to the struggling banks or even just explained why bank runs were such an awful idea, he could have halted or reduced bank runs, which would mean no Great Depression. Instead, we would have the Recession of 1929. To be fair, the popular depiction of Hoover doing nothing to mitigate the Great Depression is a myth. For instance, at the end of 1929, he held a meeting with various important American businessmen calling on them to resist the urge to fire employees during the nascent recession/depression. Although, by simply doing this and taking no other actions to quell the economic issues, he may have simply been feeding the fear that fueled bank runs. "Why shouldn't we go on bank runs when even President Hoover admits severe economic crisis is inevitable?"

Other elements of Hoover's response to the Great Depression were more respectable. For instance, he encouraged states to work with private charities in order to help those impacted by the crisis. He even called for new public works projects so as to boost employment, an idea that would become a pillar of the New Deal, which actually did end the Great Depression. While Hoover's failure to enact or enforce these ideas deserves scorn, he also deserves credit for inventing and promoting them. In 1931, Hoover even convinced a group of banks to come together and establish the National Credit Corporation. The NCC was a private charity that used money from a $500,000,000 vault to help struggling banks. Unfortunately, the NCC failed due to its leaders not wanting to give up money amidst a depression, let alone the Great Depression. But Hoover, on January 22, 1932, established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in the place of the NCC. The RFC and NCC served the same purpose, but the latter was a government agency and so was way more effective.

Sadly, despite the success of the RFC, Hoover could never shed the viewpoint that got him and his reputation in this mess in the first place: If I, Herbert Hoover, could arise from poverty, why can't others do the same? Like Harding and Coolidge, Hoover wanted minimal government intervention in the economy, even when it became a necessity. Because of this, Hoover's response to the Great Depression consists of little else than what was mentioned in the last paragraph. What was left of his reaction was pathetic and catastrophic. Hoover raised taxes across the board, which only worsened the economy. One tax he signed proved to be especially damaging: The Smoot-Hawley Tariff.

Farmers, still feeling the effects of overproduction during WW1, demanded that Coolidge and Hoover sign a new tariff to shield them from European competition. Coolidge declined, but Hoover's campaign partially rested on the promise that he'd fulfill the farmers' wishes. By the date of his inauguration, that desire for a tariff expanded, stretching outside rural America and into the cities and suburbs as well. Coupled with the need to protect domestic production amidst the Great Depression, Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff on June 17, 1930. Harding had already raised tariff rates to 40%. Hoover's tariff doubled down on these increases, raising the tariff rate to a shocking 60%. Even as a protectionist myself, I think that is absurd. Other countries thought the same. Throughout the summer of 1930, the rest of the world enacted their own tariffs against the US in retaliation against the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, killing off world trade and intensifying the Great Depression.

I actually don't rate Hoover as poorly as many historians do. This is because, outside of his dismal, counterproductive efforts to address the Great Depression, Hoover actually wasn't that bad of a president. In fact, he accomplished many great things. In terms of domestic policy, he established the Federal Farm Board on June 15, 1929. This was an attempt - a last-minute attempt, as it turned out - to alleviate the farming crisis by giving loans to struggling farmers. Hoover also commissioned the now-famous Hoover Dam and added 2,000,000 acres of land to conservation. During his tenure, Hoover also set up numerous White House commissions tasked with studying social issues like health issues among American children and corruption in the judicial branch.

Regarding foreign policy, Hoover reduced US imperialism in Latin America by initiating the Good Neighbor Policy. He even convinced Britain and Japan to reduce the size of their militaries. On September 18, 1931, the Japanese government detonated an explosion near a railroad in China owned by a Japanese corporation. This event, known as the Mukden Incident, was used by Tokyo to invade Manchuria (the northeastern quadrant of China) later that same day. On February 27, 1932, Manchuria was fully annexed by Japan and declared a puppet state known as Manchukuo. Japan even dragged Puyi, the final Chinese king who was deposed back in 1912, out of retirement in order to lead the fake buffer state. Hoover strongly opposed the Japanese invasion and tried to broker a peace deal, though he failed in that pursuit.

Back to domestic policy, Hoover increased spending on indigenous affairs. In the process, he dramatically improved life for Native Americans. Hoover also commissioned the construction of numerous new prisons, allowing him to better space out the inmates and so largely resolve overcrowding in America's jails. Outside his poor response to the Great Depression, though, Hoover had other flaws in terms of domestic policy. This mainly comes in the form of the Permanent Reapportionment Act of 1929. As more and more Americans moved to the cities, rural areas began to fear that their voice in the House of Representatives would be drowned out by urban voices. So, Hoover signed a bill that kept the House of Representatives permanently as it was following the 1920 census. This is a terrible idea. By preventing more-populated districts from being broken up, you force Congressmen to speak for larger and larger amounts of people, which is very hard. It is easier - if still hard - to speak for 100,000 people than it is to speak for 780,000.

Something that Hoover gets too much criticism for is his handling of the Bonus Army. In 1924, over Coolidge's veto, Congress passed a pension for WW1 veterans due to be paid out in full in 1945. However, in the spring of 1932, a collection of WW1 veterans known as the Bonus Army began protesting in the streets of Washington DC demanding that they receive the entirety of their pensions immediately so as to help them weather the Great Depression. In June, the House of Representatives wrote and approved a bill that would have met the protestors' demands, but it was shot down in the Senate. This caused the Bonus Army to riot, a fact that caused Hoover to call in troops on July 28, 1932. Hoover is blamed for the decision of these forces to use tear gas, but he never approved of such a move and was disgusted by the news that tear gas was used. Hoover even dedicated an additional $100,000 dollars to veterans' pensions in August 1932!

Had Herbert Hoover been elected after the Great Depression, he would rank much higher on my list. Even in our world, Hoover supported conservation, furthered international peace, reduced imperialism, helped struggling farmers, investigated many social ills, created the Hoover Dam, fought for Native Americans, and resolved overcrowding in prisons. Had his soul not been consumed by bank runs and trade wars, he would have been able to accomplish even more. Aided by his decades as a genius organizer and humanitarian, Hoover could have been one of the greatest presidents America ever knew. But that, apparently, was not meant to be.