How Herbert Hoover Restored His Reputation
By: Ryan Fan
Tags: Leadership, Politics, Media, History, Marketing

How Herbert Hoover Restored His Reputation

After being blamed for the Great Depression and having his image destroyed

Herbert Hoover in 1928 — From the Library of Congress, Public Domain

“I outlived the bastards” — Herbert Hoover, when asked about how he handled people who blamed him for the Great Depression.

When I was in high school, I saw Herbert Hoover as an incompetent villain. After all, he held office during one of the worst catastrophes of our nation’s history — the Great Depression. He is usually ranked in the bottom third of Presidents by historians and political scientists. Nicholas Lemann of The New Yorker wrote that Hoover was remembered as the following:

“The man who was too rigidly conservative to react adeptly to the Depression, as the hapless foil to the great Franklin Roosevelt, and as the politician who managed to turn a Republican country into a Democratic one.”

Hoover’s background

U.S. Food Administration Poster — Public Domain

In my AP U.S. History class, however, I would remember what my history teacher always said about Herbert Hoover — he was “the man.” When Herbert Hoover came to office, everyone loved him. Of course, once he left office, everyone hated him. However, my teacher would say that Hoover was “the man” about 10 different times during his lesson, letting us know that he came across a stroke of terrible luck more so than being incompetent.

Before becoming President, Hoover was an engineer, administrator, and humanitarian. During the Boxer Rebellion in China, Hoover directed the building of barricades and rescued many Chinese children. As he turned 40, Germany declared war on France in World War I, and Hoover turned to the difficult task of feeding Belgium, which had been invaded by the German army.

Once the United States entered the war, Woodrow Wilson appointed Hoover as the head of Food Administration. Hoover was able to cut consumption of food overseas and avoid rationing at home while keeping Allied forces fed. When the Soviet Union suffered from famine in 1921, Hoover helped keep millions of people fed as the head of the American Relief Administration and member of the Supreme Economic Council.

Hoover was the humanitarian President, which made him so popular when he entered office. Only during FDR’s presidency would approval ratings be introduced by Gallup, so Herbert Hoover didn’t have an approval rating when he entered office.

“After all, he had fed Belgium, run the U.S. Food Administration for Woodrow Wilson, revolutionized the Department of Commerce, and ministered to victims of the Mississippi River flood. More realistic than Wilson, more respectable than Warren Harding, more imaginative than Calvin Coolidge, Hoover appeared an ideal candidate. Few Americans asked whether the Great Engineer had a political temperament,” wrote Richard Norton Smith and Timothy Walch in the National Archives.

Hoover would win the 1928 Presidential election overwhelmingly — winning 444 electoral votes over Democrat Al Smith’s 87.

It was my history teacher then who told us that Hoover defied his critics by outliving them. Since people forgot about the Great Depression and all of Hoover’s missteps in office, he regained his popularity throughout the later stages of his life.

In the 1970s, Hoover’s reputation began to recover

Herbert Hoover’s official White House portrait by Elmer Wesley Greene — Public Domain

According to David E. Hamilton at UVA’s Miller Center, people started to recognize in the 1970s that Hoover’s embrace of voluntarism, faith in social enterprise, and encouragement of cooperation among segments of business leaders in America was not heartless — it was actually progressive for its time. We have to remember that the dichotomies of Republican and Democrat were drastically different in the late 1920s and 1930s than they were today, and Herbert Hoover was “the man” who would be the next great progressive president.

Hoover is now the President uniquely associated with voluntarism, a heavily derided concept because many believe that without sufficient government intervention, reform cannot be made.

Even during the Great Depression, Hoover still believed in voluntarism and business cooperation, but he was willing to budge much more so than high school history textbooks say. He led government assistance efforts such as the President’s Emergency Committee on Employment and the National Credit Corporation. He bent over to lobby state and local governments, as well as Congress, to use public works spending, and abandoned his own voluntarism philosophy in doing so.

“Finally, many historians, with the benefit of hindsight, argue that Hoover in reality could have done little to solve the Depression. They correctly assert that American entry into World War II — and not Roosevelt’s New Deal — lifted the United States out of its economic doldrums,” Hamilton said.

Still, Hoover did not authorize large-scale relief programs like Roosevelt did and was still cautious to use a large amount of government spending to stimulate the economy. He just seemed out of touch at the time and didn’t realize how serious the Great Depression was, and his philosophies and beliefs weren’t going to restore an economy that needed much more than a band-aid.

Hoover was also not a great politician

Herbert Hoover’s Inauguration — Public Domain

Hamilton notes that Hoover’s leadership reputation as President was suffering even before the New York Stock Exchange crashed. He was unable to handle debates on agricultural and tariff policies, and once the Depression rolled around, infighting between Hoover and Congress was at an all-time high. Roosevelt proved to be much better able to get Congress on his side and build a Democratic coalition.

But Roosevelt and Democrats at the time would not have been able to control the Presidency and Congress had the perception of Hoover as a scapegoat not been so low at the time. Hoover was and forever will be linked to the Depression, and as a shy and humble person, he often insisted on keeping his good deeds out of the public eye.

According to Smith and Walch at the National Archives:

“Only in politics is this a character flaw, yet it prevented those around Hoover from portraying him as a compassionate leader, or warding off portrayals of him as a cold, uncaring figure responsible for nearly everything that was going wrong in the American economy.”

While Hoover entered office with great expectations, no President disappointed more than him. Hoover had warned Coolidge in 1925 that speculation was getting out of hand, but Coolidge saw no reason for alarm. During Hoover’s time when he entered office, no politician was going to regulate Wall Street either.

What few people know is that Hoover was one of only two Presidents, besides JFK, to give away his salary. He donated every year to aid the victims of the Depression and raised $500,000 for a White House Conference on Child Health and Welfare.

Of course, managerial government had its limits. It wasn’t going to solve the emergency of the Great Depression. He tried to use the same philosophy that fed and saved Europe during World War I and flood victims in Mississippi to the Great Depression, without success.

“To most Americans, the President was a remote, grim-faced man in a blue, double-breasted suit… Hoover’s hands shook as he lit one cigar after another. His hair turned white, and he lost twenty-five pounds. Holding office at such a time, said Hoover, was akin to being a repairman behind a dike,” wrote Smith and Walch.

Hoover’s defeat

Hoover with Franklin D. Roosevelt on March 4, 1933 — Public Domain

After Hoover was defeated by Roosevelt, Hoover said that “democracy is a harsh employer.”

His reputation was ruined. His career in public service was over. Hoover was forced into purgatory and obscurity, and he was blamed for causing the Great Depression or not doing anything to fight it. Even after he was defeated, Hoover wanted to help Roosevelt, then the President-elect. Hoover sent him a letter proposing a joint letter to avoid a banking crisis.

Roosevelt wouldn’t answer his letter for eleven days. And he wasn’t even President yet.

In essence, he was the scapegoat for millions of Americans and easily hated caricature, even though there was not much that was really in his control.

However, Hoover would continue to do good work in his purgatory

Hoover would not leave the public spotlight. He would write numerous books and give speeches, raising tens of millions of dollars to his causes, like Stanford University. In 1936, he would join the board of the Boys’ Club of America, which would later be renamed and repurposed as the Boys & Girls Club of America and be elected as the chairman.

Raised as an Iowa orphan, he had fed millions of children before he helped organize the American Child Health Association. He would work for the chairman of the Boys’ Club Within a couple of years, Hoover started hundreds of Boys’ Clubs in America for orphans.

Roosevelt would die in 1945. When Harry Truman entered office, Hoover was the only living President. Truman invited him to the White House, and especially wanted to talk to him about the European food crisis. The two of them, at opposite sides of the political spectrum, would build a highly unlikely friendship.

Truman would dispatch Hoover, then 71, to go to 38 countries to beg for enough food to help feed victims of World War II and stop mass starvation in Europe. At home, Hoover would tell his countrymen not to consume so much food, referring to how World War II victims could be compared to a concentration camp.

”We do not want the American flag flying over nationwide Buchenwalds,” he said.

Regardless, Hoover was successful in feeding people. As an instrumental part of the Marshall Plan, “the greatest voluntary transfer of resources from one country to another known in history,” kept Western Europe afloat during a time of famine, economic depression, and turbulence. $12 billion, $129 billion today, would be transferred over to Western Europe.

The years that cemented his legacy

A plaque in Poznań honoring Herbert Hoover — From MOs810 on Wikipedia Commons

Truman was so appreciative of Hoover’s efforts that he reworked and renamed the Boulder Dam, constructed by the Roosevelt administration. It would be called the Hoover Dam, mostly because Herbert Hoover started the Hoover Commission, which saw an effort to do more with less, and Truman, after winning unlikely re-election in 1948, approved most of Hoover’s recommendations. Hoover would tell Truman in 1962 that “Yours has been a friendship which has reached deeper into my life than you know.”

Hoover would commission a second Hoover Commission to scale back on big government in 1952, but Eisenhower wouldn’t be as receptive to his ideas as Truman.

However, close to the end of his life, when asked about how he overcame the poor publicity that came with the New Deal, he said that “I outlived the bastards.” He would compare the repairing of his image to baseball’s four strikes, where he developed a more cynical view of shifting tides in public opinion, and said that “the crowd only gets worked up when somebody is on second base.”

“With his unending series of books, articles, speeches, and other public appearances, Hoover reinvented the ex-presidency,” Smith and Walch wrote.