Hoover, FDR, and The Great Depression

1
Hoover, FDR, and The Great Depression
2
Hoovers Personal Life

• Herbert Hoover was born in West Branch, Iowa in
  1874.
  
• He was a member of the inaugural class at
  Stanford University where he studied geology.
  
• Hoovers wife, the former Lou Henry, was athletic
  and brilliant. She was the first woman to
  graduate from Stanford and met Herbert in the
  geology lab.
• Lou Hoover spoke five languages, assisted her
  husband in his geology and engineering work,
  often translating his articles and books.
  
• She was a world traveler and often assisted her
  husband in the cultural necessities for
  international business.

3
Hoovers Mining Career

• Herbert made a specialty of turning around
  struggling operations with organization and
  technology
  
• His wife helped translate his work and bridge the
  cultural gaps in foreign nations. Their work made
  them wealthy.
  
• They were forced to flee China for a time during
  the Boxer Rebellion, an insurrection aimed at
  purging the nation of western influence.
  
• While in London, at the outbreak of the First
  World War, the Hoovers organized an impromptu
  organization to evacuate expatriated and
  vacationing Americans from Europe.

4
Belgium

• During WWI, Germany invaded Belgium on the way
  France.
  
• Britain and France placed a blockade on the
  Central Powers which kept them from importing
  food.
  
• Germany no longer had enough food for its own
  population, let alone occupied countries such as
  Belgium.
  
• Hoover, living in London, organized his entire
  mining firm as a relief operation for Belgium.
  
• Hoover negotiated with the Allied nations to
  allow the relief ships through the blockade and
  negotiated with the Germans to not attack the
  ships with submarines.

5
Hooverizing

• Woodrow Wilson placed Hoover in charge of
  agricultural production for the American war
  effort.
  
• Hoover was immediately successful.
• In addition to rationalizing the American
  production system, Hoover convinced Americans
  that it was patriotic to go without in war time.
  
• Cutting back became known as Hooverizing,
  rationing was one way that World War I affected
  people on the home front.
  
• Seeking to manage domestic consumption in order
  to feed the U.S. Army and to assist Allied armies
  and civilians., the U.S. Food Administration
  declared Food Will Win the War.

6
They will be fed!

• Following the war, Hoover turned the United
  States Food Administration into a relief
  organization for the devastated populations,
  including the defeated Central Powers, in Europe.
  
• American aid fed two million people per day in
  Poland alone.
  
• When a critic accused Hoover of helping the
  Bolsheviks by providing food aid to the Soviet
  Union, Hoover responded in the following speech,
  Twenty million people are starving. Whatever
  their politics, they will be fed.

7
Secretary of Commerce

• With Hoover was invited to serve in the cabinet
  as Secretary of Commerce of Republican President
  Warren G. Harding.
  
• While many members of the Harding cabinet were
  implicated in controversies and scandals, Hoover
  remained unscathed and, thus, retained his post
  under Calvin Coolidge.
• By the 1920s the American economy was
  transformed, industry and commerce, rather than
  agriculture, now provided the backbone of the
  American economy.
• As Commerce Secretary, Hoover was in the middle
  of the economic transformation, leading to the
  impression, that Herbert Hoover was everywhere.

8
Al Smith runs for President

• Democratic nominee Al Smith was the first
  non-Protestant to be nominated for President by a
  major political party.
  
• Many Americans were highly suspicious of
  Catholics in high office, primarily because of
  their fealty to the Pope.
  
• The nomination of Smith also represented a shift
  of control in the Democratic Party away from
  rural, Protestant, agrarians, such as William
  Jennings Bryan, to urban interests.

9
Hoover Becomes President

• Hoover, who was freed to run for the presidency
  when Calvin Coolidge declined to seek reelection,
  easily dispatched with Smith, who even failed to
  carry his home state of New York.
• The nation was at peace, was prosperous, and
  Herbert Hoover had an impeccable resume. Few
  Americans had much cause to seek change.

10
Hoover and the Great Depression

• On October 29, 1929, the Stock Market crashed,
  bringing the post-war decade of unrivaled
  prosperity, largely fed by the emergence of the
  consumer economy, to an abrupt end.
• While the causes of the Depression were primarily
  rooted in the structure of the American economy,
  Hoover, following conservative economic thinking,
  believed that economic matters were best left to
  the markets to sort out and, as a result, favored
  a minimal governmental response, largely centered
  on trickle down theory, to the growing crisis.

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Dissatisfaction with Hoovers Response

• In 1932, Edward Angly published a small book
  called "Oh Yeah?" skewering the Hoover
  administration for overly optimistic view of the
  economy.
• Herbert Hoover was a great a great product of and
  great believer in rugged individualism.
  
• To Hoover, charity was a matter for local
  governments and churches.
  
• Many Americans resented what they saw as an
  insufficient governmental response to the
  economic crisis, and, as president, Hoover bore
  the brunt of their animosity.
• Hooverizing, a term embraced by Americans
  during the war to mean economizing, came to be a
  bitter synonym for poverty.

12
The Bonus March

• In June 1932, a group of 15-20,000 impoverished
  First World War veterans marched on Washington to
  demand the immediate payment of an enlistment
  bonus not due to them until 1945.
• On June 15, the House approved a bill that would
  grant the veterans early payment but, under a
  threatened veto by Hoover, the bill failed in the
  Senate.
• On 28 July 1932, Army Chief of Staff Douglas
  McArthur ordered Major George S. Patton to remove
  the protestors from the Mall.
  
• Patton quickly drove the protestors from
  Washington. McArthur then ordered Patton to
  pursue the marchers into Virginia and destroy
  their encampment.
• In the resulting conflict, scores were injured
  and one child was killed.

13
Roosevelt Becomes President

• Hoovers often tepid response to the Great
  Depression likely cost him any chance of
  reelection in 1932.
  
• As it was, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the
  charismatic and confident former Governor of New
  York, appeared to be far more energetic and
  capable than Hoover.
• Roosevelts First Inaugural Address was hailed as
  a landmark in American oration.
  
• Roosevelt quickly set upon a course of active
  engagement with the Depression that changed
  Americans relationship with government.

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• Multimedia Citations
• Slide 2 http//www.ecommcode2.com/hoover/research
  /photos/1930-63.html
  
• Slide 3 http//www.ecommcode2.com/hoover/research
  /photos/images/1900-8.gif Add Another File
  
• Slide 4 http//hoover.archives.gov/exhibits/colle
  ctions/flour20sacks/images/1941-A68A.jpg
  
• Slide 5 http//www.ecommcode.com/hoover/hooveronl
  ine/hoover_bio/archive/food/conserve.htm
  
• Slide 6 http//www.ecommcode2.com/hoover/research
  /photos/images/1921-11.gif
  
• Slide 7 Joan Hoff Wilson, "Herbert Hoover
  Forgotten Progressive." Waveland Press, 1975.
  
• Slide 8 http//discovery.coe.uh.edu/history/hisd/
  alance/Al_Smith_1928.jpg
  
• Slide 9 http//teachpol.tcnj.edu/amer_pol_hist/fi
  /00000154.jpg
  
• Slide 11 http//www.ecommcode2.com/hoover/researc
  h/photos/images/1932-97.gif
  
• Slide 12 http//www.ecommcode2.com/hoover/researc
  h/photos/images/1932-96.gif
  
• Slide 13 http//teachpol.tcnj.edu/Amer_pol_hist/f
  i/0000015c.jpg