# Herbert Hoover: Recent Historians' Appraisals (Part II)

Recent Historians' Appraisals of Herbert Hoover's Domestic Policies

**URL:** <https://www.libertarianism.org/essays/herbert-hoover-recent-historians-appraisals-part-ii>

**By** Frank Mintz

**Published:** July 1, 1971

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“Roosevelt appeared amenable to change and compromise, while Hoover betrayed a very dogmatic attitude.”

(The author stresses that, except where indicated, the opinions expressed in this article are those of the historians cited — who, in many cases, are on the Left.)

## IV

Perhaps Paul Glad’s article on “Progressives and the Business Culture of the 1920’s” (1966) (1) served as the best introduction to the studies of the third group of historians. At any rate, Glad claimed that, far from whithering in the 1920’s, Progressivist ideas lived on — especially in some of the pronouncements and policies of business leaders. Indeed, prominent businessmen supported many of the signal legislative enactments of Progressivism in the years preceding World War I.

Herbert Hoover emerged after the war as the leading commercial appropriator of Progressive doctrine; and hence, for no less a Progressive than William Allen White, “Hoover symbolized the ultimate triumph of the progressive cause.” White saw no inconsistency in this view because he believed Hoover’s philosophy of business prosperity would achieve the elevation of the common man that Progressivism claimed to champion.

Twelve years before Glad’s paper, R. L. Watson compared Hoover and Theodore Roosevelt, the progressive candidate for President in 1912. (2) He found Hoover and Roosevelt “were not far apart in their middle of the road position in the (Republican) party and in many of their basic ideas.” Like Roosevelt, Hoover considered that his strongest support came from the party mainstream, and the two men also agreed on the need for tariffs, collective bargaining, conservation measures, and limited regulation of business.

Watson regarded President Hoover’s important legislation, e.g. the Agricultural Marketing Act (1929), the creation of the National Institution of Health (1930), and the R.F.C. (1932), as continuing Roosevelt’s “cautious Progressivism.” He believed, however, that Hoover and Roosevelt differed in the rigidity with which they held their views on on policy. Roosevelt appeared amenable to change and compromise, while Hoover betrayed a very dogmatic attitude.

New Left historian William A. Williams’s _The Contours of American History_ (1961) contained an unusual section, “The Central Role of Herbert Hoover in the Maturation of an Industrial Gentry,” which firmly linked Hoover with an influential strand of Progressivism. Basing his analysis on on private correspondence, Williams depicted Hoover as the leader of a sophisticated group of corporate Progressives and the epitome of the “liberal” businessman — “the keystone in the arch that leads from Mark Hanna and Herbert Croly to such later figures as Nelson Rockefeller and Adolph Berle.” (3) Hence, it came as no surprise that one of the co-founders of _The New Republic_ was — Herbert Hoover.

According to Williams, these Progressive businessmen had several fundamental aims, including the promulgation of a new social philosophy which could defend private property in an age of social unrest and the maintenance of a common front against “narrow-minded” capitalists who resisted all forms of government regulation. Hoover contributed to these goals by analyzing the structure of the American economy and offering suggestions to help the “system” function more effectively. Williams explained how Hoover saw the economy as a composite of “three basic functional and syndicalist elements: capital...labor, and the public at large, represented institutionally by government.”

The economy moved forward when the units cooperated. Within industry, for instance, businessmen and farmer-entrepreneurs formed trade associations; similarly, labourers banded together

in unions. Together capital and labour collaborated by means of collective bargaining; and ultimately the government — popularly elected but administered by the industrial “gentry” — coordinated the entire economy.

Williams believed that Hoover grasped the — necessary — difficulties of employing government to balance the social order. If, for example, capitalists gained mastery over the drift of governmental legislation, fascism resulted; in contrast, labour union domination of the State led to socialism. Expansion of government at the hands of career-minded officials heralded bureaucratic tyranny. And “finally...Hoover saw the danger of a ‘syndicalist nation on a gigantic scale’ in which power was...exercised by a relatively few leaders of each functional bloc formed and operating as an oligarchy.” The state, in short, needed just enough power to regulate and coordinate; but too much power spelled the end of liberty.

Williams also placed emphasis on Hoover’s interest in reducing America’s domestic economic “surplus” through the penetration of foreign markets by peaceful, rather than by militaristic, means. Both Williams and another scholar Joseph Brandes (_Herbert Hoover and Economic Diplomacy_, 1962), believed Hoover’s policies as Commerce Secretary, e.g. the sponsoring of the American export trade and assistance for foreign loans, fully reflected this enlightened mercantilism.

As a fighter against the Great Depression, President Hoover utilized all the rudiments of the New Deal; but Williams testified that Hoover drew back from using the government to create a national syndicalism — only Franklin Roosevelt could perform that task. Instead Hoover employed every anti-depression tool “the Progressives ever owned,” from moral suasion and “wheedling” to direct Federal intervention. (4)

In the Summer, 1963, issue of _Yale Review_ Carl Degler joined the group of historians who found Hoover’s principles “distinctly and publicly progressive.” (5) Degler noted Hoover’s early advocacy of collective bargaining for the railroads, his firm repudiation of laissez-faire in _American Individualism_, and his sponsorship of the contra-cyclical public works plan (1920) as examples of Progressive thinking. In addition, he found Hoover to have had a sophisticated plan for curing the Depression. This program involved bolstering public confidence and inaugurating public works.

But Degler depicted Hoover as an activist within a “rigid” ideological mould. This ideology restricted Federal intervention in certain key respects: first, as much as possible, the Federal government had to avoid giving direct relief to the unemployed; then, it needed to maintain balanced budgets; finally, the central government could not directly own productive facilities which would compete with private enterprise (though it might develop them initially). The latter consideration prompted Hoover to veto proposals for a Federal power plant at Muscle Shoals.

Did this ideology, as Schlesinger and Hofstadter charged, cause Hoover to contradict the popular will? Degler claimed that, “surprising as it may seem today the country was with Hoover” in agreeing that relief be a private or local matter. Further, most Americans regardless of political philosophy believed in balanced budgets. Thus, Nance Garner, Democratic Speaker of the House, made an impassioned plea for higher taxes to balance the budget in 1932. Not ideology but poor politics — failure to communicate with the public, inability to compromise — made Hoover unpopular.

Degler concluded that Hoover had much in common with Franklin Roosevelt, an effective politician whose New Deal was actually no more successful than Hoover’s program in combatting economic distress. Both men admired Woodrow Wilson, participated in the government planning of the Great War, and later advocated controls over big business. Even their Depression strategies made common cause of fighting demoralization: Hoover, just as much as Roosevelt, could have said: “ ‘All we have to fear is fear itself.’ ”

Perhaps the most radically revisionist interpretation of Herbert Hoover’s ideas and policies came from Murray N. Rothbard, a libertarian economic historian who wrote about Hoover in the early and mid sixties. In his article “Herbert Clark Hoover: A Reconsideration” (1966), Rothbard complained: “Rightwingers have been honored to refer to Hoover as ‘the Chief.’ It is high time to redress the balance.” (6)

Rothbard found Hoover’s proclivities “statist” from very early on. Speaking in Transvaal in 1904, the young Hoover argued that high wages lead to lower costs: “thus Hoover had adopted the egregious fallacy that wage rates are determined by the good or ill-will of the employer rather than by the competitive market” (which makes higher wages the _effect_ of high productivity and lower costs). Later, Hoover’s _Principles of Mining_ (1909) denounced laissez-faire, praised unionism and, in “neo-Marxist” fashion, repudiated the free-market tenet that labour services are a commodity. One quickly gathered from Rothbard that Hoover’s endorsement of Theodore Roosevelt sprang from deep commitment, not passing fancy.

By no means did Rothbard try to make a leftist of Hoover. The latter, like the leading corporate Progressives of the era, endorsed something akin to State monopoly capitalism or “neo-mercantilism”. This creed envisioned a “reign of co-operating monopolies, each raising prices and restricting production under the aegis of the central government.” (7) And Hoover’s career seemed like nothing less than a determined effort to inaugurate the new kingdom.

Rothbard charged Hoover’s war-time Food Administration with imposing the strictest control of any of the World War agencies. He argued that its policies of fixing _minimum_ prices on agricultural goods promoted cartelization since they forbade smaller producers from increasing their total sales by lowering prices. Hoover also pushed for standardized parts, and this policy eliminated many small specialty businesses.

What of Hoover’s achievements in the Commerce Department? Unlike the vast majority of historians, whether conservative or liberal, Rothbard remained highly critical of Hoover’s role there. He complained that, by fostering trade associations and “rules of standardized practice,” the Commerce Secretary continued his war policy of frustrating smaller firms and encouraging cartels. And, surprisingly, Hoover’s interest in public works amounted to presumably nothing less than an effort to subsidize contractors.

Rothbard saw all of Hoover’s other activities in a similar light. Hence the Hoover-sponsored Radio Act of 1927 “imposed socialism” on the radio industry by nationalizing the airwaves and licensing stations. His support of Prohibition as “noble in motive” “(glorified) the State and its sacrosanct laws over the freedom of the individual.” (8) Finally, Hoover pushed for another cartel — organized labour: he assiduously cultivated close ties with the A.F. of L. leadership, successfully pressed for the eight-hour day in the steel industry, and brought compulsory unionism to the to the railways by approving the Railway Labour Act of 1926.

So, the man who became President in 1928 had a modern liberal record, his voluntaryism being “a ragged cloak of traditional rhetoric covering his willingness to greatly expand. . . the Federal government.” In addition Hoover had accepted the New Economics of the twenties, which proposed “high wages” as the antidote for recessions. What remained? Hoover only needed to apply his philosophy to the economic downturn of 1929.

Employing “Austrian” laissez-faire economics, (9) Rothbard explored the roots of the Great Depression and discussed the effects of Hoover’s anti-recession policy in _America’s Great Depression_ (1963). Rothbard found the source of the Depression in the monetary program of the Coolidge administration. Rather than pursue a “hard money” laissez-faire course in the twenties, the Federal Reserve System — the United States Central Bank — allowed credit to expand dangerously. The newly-created money percolated into the capital goods industries and allowed them to expand. The voluntary preferences of consumers dictated otherwise: in reality they did not wish to supply savings for such intensive capital expansion but, rather, had actually decided to patronize firms catering more to their desire for immediate consumption. (10)

By 1929, the Federal Reserve authorities became alarmed at their own conduct and decided to contract credit. A recession soon followed, and President Hoover rushed to the scene with his purported remedies.

While a strict laissez-faire policy supposedly allowed recession to run its course swiftly, Rothbard held that the President’s policies severely hampered recovery. The record-high Hawley-Smoot tariff, which Hoover signed in 1929, deprived American agriculture and industry of foreign exchange. The practice of keeping up wages through voluntary agreements left quantities of labour unsold; or, in laymen’s terms, it put a great many people out of work. Meanwhile, the Federal Farm Board’s purchase of surplus wheat raised prices, and this encouraged still more surplus production which ultimately sold at a loss. And while true laissez-faire depression-strategy called for balanced budgets through _reduced expenditures_, Hoover increased government activities and tried to balance the budget with the highest peace-time taxes in American history.

Rothbard found only small differences between Hoover and the New Dealers, and concluded that Hoover “used every modern economic ‘tool’, every device of ‘progressive’ and ‘enlightened’ economics, every facet of government planning to combat the depression.” (11) And the result? Hoover transformed a recession into the Great Depression, the worst economic crisis America had ever experienced.

## V

Biographies of Herbert Hoover usually added little to the interpretations furnished by the three basic schools discussed above. Most biographies issued during the thirties scarcely concealed their purely partisan hatred of the thrity-first President. On the other hand, recent biographers — mostly journalists or close personal friends of Hoover — offered something closer to hagiography. (1)

Almost fifteen years ago, however, Harold Wolfe gave a little-known account, _Herbert Hoover: Public Servant and Leader of the Loyal Opposition_ (1956), which was remarkably free from the partisanship that has continued to plague Hoover’s political career. Nonetheless, his observations were still of interest: in writing of Hoover’s World War I Food Administration, for instance, he described the policy of fixing minimum prices as a device to stimulate production, not (as Rothbard claimed) a conspiratorial scheme to conceal monopolistic practices. Of Hoover and the Commerce Department, he stated: “(Hoover) favored far more governmental leadership in planning for the future than did most economic leaders of the 1920’s.” Wolfe also sought restraint in both praise and blame when interpreting Hoover’s response to the Great Depression. He thought Hoover ahead of his time

in seeking some governmental intervention to stem financial panics, but voiced subdued criticism of Hoover’s approach to relief.

Wolfe described Hoover’s role after his defeat in 1932 as an attempt to keep the Republican Party anti-New Deal in its philosophy, lest it become a pale reflection of Roosevelt’s program. During the late thirties Hoover also turned into a critic of the Administration’s interventionist foreign policy; apparently, he believed that meddling in foreign affairs strengthened the powers of the central government at home. After World War II, Hoover presided over several commissions seeking economy in government, and these posts brought him into close contact with what had come to be termed the “conservative” wing of the Republican Party.

Wolfe closed his biography with the hope that Hoover might regain the prestige lost during the Depression years: he could do this by becoming more non-partisan. And Wolfe already saw the former President moving in that direction.

If Wolfe seemed like a neutralist, Eugene Lyons exemplified the stand taken by the pro-Hoover camp of journalists and admirers. Lyons wrote prodigiously on his mentor, completing his most recent study, _Herbert Hoover: A Biography_, in 1964. (3) In this volume, Hoover emerged as an “old-style” liberal — neither a New Dealer nor a classical liberal, but something approaching a moderate Progressive. According to Lyons, Hoover acknowledged a widening role for government, but “where his path diverged more and more from those official liberals who in time obtained a monopoly of the designation was in his abhorrence of excessive government, distrust of bureaucratic agencies, distrust of bureaucratic agencies, and insistence on decentralizing political authority.” (4)

Lyons invariably judged Hoover’s domestic policies to be superlatively suited to America’s needs, for their skillful mixture of voluntaryism and and government action maintained American traditions of individual initiative as they coped with the challenges of an industrial era. Lyons praised Hoover’s activities in the Food Administration and Commerce Department, and he further defended Hoover’s Depression-strategy at some length and argued that the Democrats — by undermining the President’s legislation and destroying confidence — prolonged the economic tragedy. If Hoover had one flaw, it was the inability to be a politician, i.e., to play interest groups off against each other; but in Lyons’s eyes this fault became a virtue.

The biography went on to characterize Hoover’s subsequent criticisms of Roosevelt’s New Deal as a defense of individual liberty in an era of rising totalitarianism. Hoover did not mean to attack all New Deal programs. Primarily his concern sprang from the fear that temporary, emergency measures might become permanent, bureaucratic fixtures.

Finally, while not strictly biographical, an article by Donald J. Lisio (_Wisconsin Magazine of History_, Autumn, 1967) (5) threw some light on an incident that clouded Hoover’s stay at the White House and which certainly contributed to his unpopularity: the expulsion of the “Bonus Marchers” from Washington. Though the rout of the “Bonus Expeditionary Force” — unemployed veterans seeking immediate payment of a pension — won Hoover initial praise in some editorials, it earned him merciless hostility in other quarters.

After studying Hoover’s later memoires, Lisio absolved him from guilt in the Bonus episode. Lisio claimed that Hoover’s instructions to the Army provided only for the evacuation of the marchers to quarters away from the business district. Lisio put most of the blame on General Douglas MacArthur for subverting these orders and, instead, driving the B.E.F. out of Washington altogether.

When Hoover learned what had happened, he first considered taking some steps to publicly disavow responsibility for the expulsion. But, after consultations, MacArthur and War Secretary Patrick Hurley convinced Hoover that the Bonus Marchers were dangerous insurrectionists who had to be driven from Washington, and that the President would get favourable publicity if he were linked to the affair. Hoover then made a _volte face_ and publicly defended the expulsion as a necessary move. Commenting on this, Lisio observed: “by listening to Hurley and MacArthur. . . by accepting the Red Plot thesis. . . Hoover revealed a distressing lack of political sensitivity.” He considered the subsequent slander Hoover was to endure to be part of a personal tragedy.

## VI

It seemed clear that the moderate and more advanced groups of Hoover revisionists accumulated enough solid evidence to establish a fundamental truth about the man: he never advocated laissez-faire at any time during his political career. The efforts of Hofstadter and others to make Hoover into a classical liberal seemed fraught with contradictions. How, after all, did the sincere laissez-faire program of free trade and strict non-intervention suddenly become compatible with Hoover’s continuous advocacy of tariffs, subsidized industries, nationalized airwaves, or a “Federal Farm Board”? Obviously the first group of historians failed to make their case.

Disagreement over the extent to which Hoover pushed for a “mixed” economy created the gulf between the second and third schools treated here. In large measure, such disagreement stemmed from the divergent economic theories employed by these scholars. To illustrate, Albert Romasco depicted Hoover’s 1929 attempt to prop up wages and production as an important departure in the right direction, but he considered it doomed to failure because of

the “quasi-voluntaryist” implementation. Meanwhile, Murray Rothbard, the libertarian economist, held the same policy to be a crucial interference into the free-market process. And he saw it creating a serious logjam in the economy, rendering millions unemployed.

Some gaps still remained in the discussion of Herbert Hoover’s approach to domestic policy. For example, although many historians illustrated Hoover’s ties with Progressivism, they did not show how he _consciously_ related himself to that movement. Thus William Appleman Williams found Hoover to be a bright leader of corporate Progressives, but he did not disclose how Hoover described himself.

Finally, the crucial question of motivation remained unsolved. What really induced Hoover to favour more increased governmental involvement in the economy? Williams and Rothbard offered two plausible answers. Williams viewed Hoover as a man who sincerely sought to maintain the capitalist corporate economy by proposing certain suggestions for “reform”. Rothbard, in contrast, attempted a sort of muckraking expose of Hoover’s activities and saw Hoover and his corporate and union associates explicitly using the government to enrich themselves at the expense of the public. Herbert Hoover — “well-intentioned” collectivist or an overt statist conspirator: future historians must decide.

## Footnotes

### Section IV

(1) See Paul W. Gladd, “Progressives and the Business Culture of the 1920’s”, _The Journal of American History_, 53 (June, 1966), 75-89; quote: 87.

(2) See Richard L. Watson Jr., “Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover”, _The South Atlantic Quarterly_, 53 (January, 1954), 109-129; quote: 109-110.

(3) William A. Williams, _The Contours of American History_ (first edition, New York, 1961), (Chicago, 1966), 426. Additional quotes: 427, 428, 438.

(4) _Ibid._, see also 425, 427-429, 429-430, 438. (Unfortunately, Williams did not specify just where Hoover made these comments on the American economy.)

(5) Carl Degler, “The Ordeal of Herbert Hoover”, _Yale Review_, 52 (Summer, 1963), 564. (Degler thus reversed his earlier views on Hoover, expressed in _Out of the Past_, 1959). Additional quotes: 570, 583. Also see: 571, 583.

(6) Murray N. Rothbard, “Herbert Clark Hoover: A Reconsideration”, _The New Individualist Review_, 4 (Winter, 1966), 3; other quote: 5.

(7) Rothbard, “The Hoover Myth”, _Studies on the Left_, 6 (July/August, 1966), 74. Additional quote, 72, — see p. 17 just before discussion of _America’s Great Depression_.

(8) Rothbard, “H.C.H.: A Recon.”, 9. See also 7, 7-8, and _Studies on Left_ art., 74-75.

(9) Two Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and his pupil F. A. Hayek developed this theory in the first three decades of the twentieth century. For more particulars on Austrian economics, which pinpoints the origins of the business cycle in fractional and central reserve banking, see von Mises’s _Human Action_ (1949), especially chapters 18-20.

(10) Austrian economics identifies interest as ultimately a demand for time, i.e., a demand for present consumption. If interest rates are artificially lowered, capitalists mistakenly assume that consumers have a lower time preference rate than they really do — that they will allocate more savings for future over present goods, when in fact they have made no cumulative decisions to do so. Therefore, entrepreneurs will undertake capital intensive projects which eventually prove untenable.

(11) Rothbard, _America’s Great Depression_ (Princeton, 1963), 295.

### Section V

(1) See David Hinshaw, _Herbert Hoover_ (New York, 1949); Dorothy H. McGee, _Herbert Hoover_ (New York, 1963); Carol Green Wilson, _Herbert Hoover: Challenge for Today_ (New York, 1968).

(2) Harold Wolfe, _Herbert Hoover: Public Servant and Leader of the Loyal Opposition_, (New York, 1956), 7. Additional quote: 91.

(3) See also, Eugent Lyons, _Herbert Hoover: Our Unknown Ex-President_ (1948); _The Herbert Hoover Story_ (Washington, 1959).

(4) Lyons, _Herbert Hoover: A Biography_ (New York, 1964), 158. See also, chaps. 14, 15, 17-26, 28.

(5) See Donald J. Lisio, “A Blunder becomes Catastrophe: Hoover, the Legion, and the Bonus Army”, _Wisconsin Magazine of History_, 51 (Autumn, 1967), 37-50; quote: 50.

_Frank Mintz was the editor of The Rational Individualist and holds a B.A. in history from the University of Maryland._