RUTHFULLY YOURS

REVIEWS OF TWO BOOKS ON HERBERT HOOVER BY AMITY SHLAES

Posted By Ruth King on November 20th, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/herbert-hoover-was-wrong-1479508055

Amity Shlaes reviews two new books about the former president and argues that the New Deal was simply a more intense, less constitutional version of Hoover’s policies—and both failed to yield recovery.

Imagine a U.S. president who could personally stare down spear-wielding warriors seeking to penetrate an undermanned Western compound in a remote city. A president who could map the mineral resources of Russia and organize the feeding of whole states or even countries following a disaster. A president who could match John Quincy Adams in his familiarity with the streets of London, Alexander Hamilton in mastery of finance, Dwight Eisenhower in administrative experience and Ronald Reagan in keen appreciation of the evils of communism.

The U.S. did once elect such a president—Herbert Hoover. Voters chose him in a landslide in 1928, and when the Crash of 1929 hit, Main Street sighed with relief at its own good fortune. The Great Engineer, as Hoover was known, could be counted on to engineer them out of trouble.

Yet when the crash came, the Great Engineer failed. Hoover did not reverse the crash or prevent the years of Depression that followed. By the end of his first and only term, public esteem for Hoover had plummeted so far that the incumbent could not take even his home state, California, in the 1932 election. Soon a caricature of the 31st president began to take hold: that of an unimaginative, credentialed elitist who had permitted a catastrophe so great that it would take four terms for a kind and collectivist president, Franklin Roosevelt, to counter him. The caricature has only hardened down the decades. In 1948, Arthur Schlesinger Sr. found voters ranking Hoover 20th out of 33 presidents. In a 2015 poll he appeared near the bottom, 38th out of 44.

Any Hoover upgrade must start with his career, which rocketed skyward at a velocity warranting a Harvard Business School case study. The classic early adapter, Hoover while still in his teens placed a bet that studies in a little-known start-up college in “Polo Alta,” as one newspaper spelled it, might yield more than attendance at an established university. The knowledge Hoover garnered from his Stanford engineering professors helped to win him a position directing Australian mines. From Australia the youthful “doctor of sick mines” (he grew a beard and ’stache to look older) moved on to China, where he dug a harbor and surveyed and reorganized China’s mineral resources. It was in Tientsin that Hoover and his able wife, Lou, fended off an assault of rebellious warriors—the Boxers of the Boxer Rebellion.

In his early 30s found Hoover ensconced in a posh London neighborhood as an investment banker, from which perch he roamed as far as Russia: The vein of coal ore on the Irtysh River in Siberia impressed him deeply but the czars did not: “Some day the country would blow up,” Hoover rightly predicted. If this Hoover were alive today, he would be giving TED talks.

By his 40s compassion moved Hoover to enter yet another realm of endeavor: humanitarian aid. In World War I, Britain blockaded Belgium, and German occupiers left Belgians to starve. “Hoover’s heart was rent,” notes Mr. Jeansonne. So the Great Engineer pulled together the Commission for Relief in Belgium, which went around British lines and supplied food to tens of thousands. The maneuver infuriated Winston Churchill, who felt that, by feeding Belgium, Hoover was freeing the occupiers’ resources for war. A few years later, Hoover managed another heroic rescue, feeding Lenin’s famine-cursed Russia via a congressionally authorized operation so large that it was known as “The Big Show in Bololand.” Hoover was a nation unto himself: Hoover men crossed international borders and pulled rank with border guards, traveling on special passports.

Revisionists also point to Hoover’s actions in Washington as commerce secretary, starting in 1921. “Taking a large view of what had been a modest office,” writes Mr. Jeansonne insightfully, “Hoover was soon an octopus at the center of government, his tentacles probing into every nook.” After the 1920 recession, for example, the proto-Keynesian pushed for a heretofore unheard-of national policy: federal pressure on private business to sustain high wages. In the young field of radio, Mr. Jeansonne notes, Hoover played not only engineer but nanny, envisioning federal oversight to make the splendid new medium a kind of multi-channel PBS.

Hoover took an even larger view of his next office, the presidency itself. When the market crashed in September, the tentacles began to wave. No longer theory, Hoover’s high-wage plan saw implementation: He hauled corporate executives to Washington to inform them personally of his opposition to lower wages, effectively establishing minimum-wage rates. No less a figure than the governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, warned that unless the U.S. allowed wages to drop naturally, it “would probably come to the dole next winter.” Nothing doing, responded Henry Stimson for the Great Engineer. High wages, he said, would support “our humanitarian standard.”

It was up to business, Hoover insisted, to demonstrate that its behavior in the crisis would be “a far cry from the arbitrary and dog-eat-dog attitude of the business world of some thirty or forty years ago.” As Mr. Jeansonne notes, Hoover “became the first chief executive to pit the government against the economic cycle.” The president sought to stimulate the economy through deficit-building infrastructure projects. He constructed an elaborate liquidity apparatus to pump money into the economy by issuing bonds: the Reconstruction Finance Corp. When prices and production continued to fall, Hoover raged and pouted: “The trouble with capitalism is capitalists,” he told the journalist Mark Sullivan. “They’re too damn greedy.” Not surprisingly, Mr. Rappleye represents Hoover as a “facts-driven progressive,” more pre-Roosevelt than anti-Roosevelt. His great flaw, in Mr. Rappleye’s view, was a Nixonian darkness. The man featured “distinctly antidemocratic tendencies, his penchant for secrecy and his fearful, even paranoid view of those who might disagree with him.”

Temperament aside, both Messrs. Jeansonne and Rappleye spotlight commonalities between Hoover and his successor, not least the progressive devotion to expertise. Roosevelt adviser and Brains Trust member Raymond Moley observed that, in fact, the basis of the New Deal had been laid by Hoover: “Except for the expertness, the information and the plans at the lower levels of the Hoover Administration, the crisis [of the Depression] could never have been surmounted.” What jars is the authors’ assumption that by associating Hoover with Roosevelt, they rehabilitate Hoover. After all, the New Deal, a more intense, less constitutional version of Hoover policy, also failed to yield recovery—for seven more years.

There is plenty of evidence that neither in the 1920s nor the 1930s did the U.S. economy require an octopus expert or even a Great Engineer. Yet Hoover’s urgent need to show off his knowledge by mounting rescue operations—whether of the food-aid or stock-market variety—overwhelmed his common sense. (We all know this person.) Radio preacher Aimee Semple McPherson gave voice to the frustration of many when she bridled at Hoover’s plan for radio regulation: “You cannot expect the Almighty to abide by your wave length nonsense.” The criticism from the minimalist Calvin Coolidge was almost as frank: “That man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad.”

It could be argued that, when Hoover’s orders emanated from the Commerce Department, they didn’t matter too much. Come the presidency and the Depression, however, his policies did real damage. The price of business’s accession to Hoover’s demand of high wages were heavy layoffs and even worse unemployment, just as Montagu Norman had predicted. Hoover, who knew better, focused on developing the Hoover version of the tariff system rather than blocking it. He therefore signed into law a heavy new tariff, Smoot-Hawley, which stymied international trade. So much did Hoover abhor federal deficits that he raised the tax rate to 63% from 24%. The rates shut down the very entrepreneurs who might have pulled the economy to recovery.

Both of these biographical accounts are strong—well-written and well-researched—yet the reader may find himself longing for less of an effort to revive Hoover’s reputation and more at giving a fair assessment to his attempts to “rescue” the economy.” (A thorough quantification of the cost of the Hoover-Roosevelt “Doctrine of High Wages,” as it was commonly known, would certainly be useful today to any White House transition team.) The truth is that expertise wows voters but comes at a cost: the ambition and vanity of an official genius in the White House. “Democracy is a harsh employer,” as Hoover himself once noted. Especially for experts.

—Miss Shlaes, a biographer of Calvin Coolidge, is presidential scholar at the King’s College in New York.

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