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The Riddle of Herbert HooverHow the hypercompetent technocrat failed.

By David GreenbergPosted Monday, Jan. 19, 2009, at 6:54 AM ET

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Where a smattering of Hoover revisionists have detected in his thinking a bold progressivism, Leuchtenburg finds "mild iconoclasm." He favored cajoling private institutions into cooperating with government to reach shared goals. By stressing the limits to his activism—his belief in the primacy of private undertakings, his preference for playing "the administrator rather than the executive," in journalist Anne O'Hare McCormick's useful distinction—Leuchtenburg succeeds in explaining the seeming riddle of how the manager par excellence failed so catastrophically during the Depression.

Fail he did. Contemptuous of Congress, Hoover passed little legislation of note. Hostile to popular politics—"I'll not kiss any babies," he said as he finally agreed to stump for president in 1928—he declined to mobilize public support for his agenda. He fumbled an opportunity provided by a blue-ribbon committee to end Prohibition and passed up a chance to nationalize the water-power potential at Muscle Shoals, Ala., as FDR would later do. Presidential leadership, it turned out, required more sensitivity to public sentiment than had Hoover's prior technocratic posts.

When the crash came, Hoover offered soothing rhetoric—"The fundamental business of the country … is on a sound and prosperous basis"—that in retrospect seems tone-deaf but at the time amounted to a reasonable attempt to rally the nation. Following his voluntarist philosophy, he got labor and business to agree to a program to prop up wages. He even promoted public works on a small scale.

Yet his obsession with restraint exposed his conservatism. "Prosperity," he intoned, "cannot be restored by raids upon the public Treasury." He spurned a huge relief effort for the growing ranks of the destitute, deeming reports of want exaggerated. "Nobody actually starved," Hoover said. The hospitals and morgues told a sadder tale. Not until a year after the crash did he set up an employment commission, which, Leuchtenburg seethes, "churned out press releases with pap topics such as urging people to 'spruce up' their homes." A mediocre speaker who shunned the bully pulpit, Hoover did little even to "talk up" the economy or public morale.

Hoover's boldest stroke, the creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corp. in 1932, was too little too late. Authorized to lend money to banks, insurance companies, and other firms, the RFC struck some observers at first as a happy volte-face for Hoover, with government now given a key role in the intended recovery. (Others wondered why bankers, but not the jobless, were now on the dole.) But Leuchtenburg maintains that Hoover enacted the RFC only when the civic-mindedness that he expected from financial and industrial leaders didn't materialize. "Only unwittingly—by revealing the inadequacy of his voluntaristic approach—was Hoover the progenitor of FDR's enlargement of federal authority."

The final straw came when the "bonus army" of impoverished veterans marched on Washington in the spring of 1932 to demand overdue benefits. Hoover deployed the Army, whose commander, Douglas MacArthur, exceeded his orders, not for the last time. The resulting mayhem, captured on newsreels, appalled the nation. Tanks decimated the squatters' encampments while bayonets and tear gas sent the ragtag protesters scurrying. "So all the misery and suffering had finally come to this," recorded one journalist, "soldiers marching with their guns against American citizens." Equally disgusted, though also selfishly pleased, was the Democratic presidential nominee. "Well," said Franklin Roosevelt, "this elects me."

In time, Roosevelt would forge a new role for government in the lives of America's citizens. In 1932, however, the "new deal" that he promised was vague even to him; the details, like the capital letters, would come later. Still, Roosevelt understood something Hoover didn't. As governor of New York, he urged the state legislature to furnish monetary relief "not as a matter of charity but as a matter of social duty" and as a means to "restore that close relationship with its people which is necessary to preserve our democratic form of government."

Hoover remained an unregenerate anti-New Dealer until his death in 1964, at age 90; he fumed in his final years that John F. Kennedy was espousing "socialism disguised as a welfare state." Yet Hoover at times showed glimmers of awareness that his failure had been a simple one—an inability to serve the people as the president should. "Democracy," he once grumbled to an aide, "is a harsh employer."

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David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers and author of three books of political history, has written the "History Lesson" column since 1998.

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