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Fans of the 31st President Find Hate for Hoover Greatly Depressing WASHINGTON -- Bashing Herbert Hoover is in vogue again, and that upsets Glen Jeansonne.Mr. Jeansonne, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is part of a small cadre of academics who've taken on the task of restoring the reputation of the nation's much-maligned 31st president.When Mr. Jeansonne was in high school, "they wanted to get through Hoover as quickly as possible in order to get to the New Deal," the historian recalls. As a graduate student, he was told not to write a paper on Hoover's presidency "because nothing happened." When Mr. Jeansonne was researching a book on the Hoover administration last winter, he says he was often the only person in the reading room of the Hoover presidential library in West Branch, Iowa.Hoover is "the most misunderstood and the most underappreciated president," Mr. Jeansonne says.That's got a lot to do with the fact that Hoover's term coincided with the Crash of 1929. Many Americans blame him for the Great Depression that followed, believing that he put ideological loyalty to the free market ahead of trying to help people suffering from the downturn. As a result, disparaging references to Hoover are a negative economic indicator, tending to rise whenever markets falter and economies stumble.Accusations of Hooverism featured in this year's presidential race. Republican candidate Sen. John McCain repeatedly criticized the tax plans of his Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, by contending in a stump speech: "The last president to raise taxes and restrict trade in a bad economy as Sen. Obama proposes was Herbert Hoover. That didn't turn out too well."-snip-
Five Myths About the Great Depression Herbert Hoover was no proponent of laissez-faire.The current financial crisis has revived powerful misconceptions about the Great Depression. Those who misinterpret the past are all too likely to repeat the exact same mistakes that made the Great Depression so deep and devastating.Here are five interrelated and durable myths about the 1929-39 Depression:- Herbert Hoover, elected president in 1928, was a doctrinaire, laissez-faire, look-the-other way Republican who clung to the idea that markets were basically self-correcting. The truth is more illuminating. Far from a free-market idealist, Hoover was an ardent believer in government intervention to support incomes and employment. This is critical to understanding the origins of the Great Depression. Franklin Roosevelt didn't reverse course upon moving into the White House in 1933; he went further down the path that Hoover had blazed over the previous four years. That was the path to disaster.Hoover, a one-time business whiz and a would-be all-purpose social problem-solver in the Lee Iacocca mold, was a bowling ball looking for pins to scatter. He was a government activist fixated on the idea of running the country as an energetic CEO might run a giant corporation. It was Hoover, not Roosevelt, who initiated the practice of piling up big deficits to support huge public-works projects. After declining or holding steady through most of the 1920s, federal spending soared between 1929 and 1932 -- increasing by more than 50%, the biggest increase in federal spending ever recorded during peacetime.Public projects undertaken by Hoover included the San Francisco Bay Bridge, the Los Angeles Aqueduct, and Hoover Dam. The Republican president won plaudits from the American Federation of Labor for his industrial policy, which included jawboning business leaders to refrain from cutting wages as the economy fell. Referring to counteracting the business cycle and propping up wages, Hoover said: "No president before has ever believed that there was a government responsibility in such cases . . . we had to pioneer a new field." Though he did not coin the phrase, Hoover championed many of the basic ideas -- such as central planning and control of the economy -- that came to be known as the New Deal.- The stock market crash in October 1929 precipitated the Great Depression. What the crash mainly precipitated was a raft of wrongheaded policies that did major damage to the economy -- beginning with the disastrous retreat into protectionism marked by the passage of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which passed the House in May 1929 and the Senate in March 1930, and was signed into law by Hoover in June 1930. As prices fell, Smoot-Hawley doubled the effective tariff duties on a wide range of manufactures and agricultural products. It triggered the beggar-thy-neighbor policies of countervailing tariffs that caused the international economy to collapse. Some have argued that the increasing likelihood that the Smoot-Hawley tariff would pass was a major contributing factor to the stock-market collapse in the fall of 1929.-snip-
