Misperception is Reality: Understanding the Hoover/Roosevelt Policy Continuum - Coursework Example

? Misperception is Reality: Understanding the Hoover/Roosevelt Policy Continuum Herbert Hoover projects the stodgy, arch-Conservative image of a president whose inaction sacrificed America’s economic well-being. In recent times, historians and economists have reassessed the influence of Hoover’s progressive economic policies on the New Deal. This has led many to regard the Hoover and Roosevelt years as a policy “continuum” rather than a clash of ideologies. 1 Misperception is Reality: Understanding the Hoover/Roosevelt Policy Continuum It is, perhaps, human nature to see politics and political figures in terms of black and white. Most politicians are, by nature, polarizing characters who champion a cause, policy or social trend with passion and conviction. It’s tempting to categorize the people who make laws and run our government as “conservative,” or “liberal” because, among other things, doing so makes it easier to assign blame when policies go wrong – in spite of good intentions. Ill-conceived perceptions are often the result. Inaccurate notions become stronger over time until they acquire the gloss of truth. So it has been with the comparisons made between Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt and the policies enacted by both administrations in response to the Great Depression. The clash of laissez faire economic philosophy and government intervention, a debate which has dominated the American political scene in recent years, provides an interesting subtext to the study of pre- and post-Depression America. A reassessment of that era by economists and historians has revealed that the Hoover administration was far more dynamic than is generally assumed and indicates that Hoover and Roosevelt had much in common, ideological differences notwithstanding. It can be said that the New Deal inherited and extended programs initiated prior to 1932. Circumstances out of control History has painted Hoover as a conservative whose overtly conservative economic philosophy was aggravated conditions that led to the nation’s economic collapse. This perception has its roots in Hoover’s tenure as secretary of commerce in the 2 Coolidge administration: “In most historical accounts, Hoover as secretary of commerce became a backward extension of the highly negative images now associated with his presidency. He was the very embodiment of the illusions and complacencies that had led to economic and social disaster, a man…who had turned himself into a tool of entrenched greed and special privilege…” (Hawley, 1981, p. 4-5). During Hoover’s presidency, as the Depression worsened, massive encampments of dispossessed and homeless Americans became known as “Hoovervilles.” This was just the sort of political and public relations catastrophe that led to Roosevelt’s election in 1932. It also led to the conclusion that Wall Street “paladins” like Andrew Mellon had Hoover firmly in their pockets. And so Hoover’s image was firmly established in the collective public consciousness. A popular song from that era said Mellon had “pulled the whistle,” Hoover had “rung the bell,” Wall Street had given “the signal,” and the country had gone “to hell” (Hawley, 1981, p. 5). Indeed, circumstances had run wildly out of control by 1929 and the most spectacular economic collapse in American history proved Hoover’s undoing. But charges that Hoover never wavered from conservative economic dogma and cynically dismissed the needs of the country appear, in light of the facts, to be unfounded. Hoover’s presidency “in (its) efforts to halt the depression provided the rudiments of (Franklin) Roosevelt’s program” (Riggenbach, 2009, p. 147). As president, Hoover “recommended or approved a wide spectrum of recovery measures. The Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 established the principle of collective bargaining 3 as the law of the land. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation provided the model as well as one of the key instruments of most New Deal financing of domestic production and overseas economic expansion” (Riggenbach, 2009, p. 147). Hoover also instituted relief programs for farmers, shored up the banking industry and secured funding for one of the most ambitious public works programs in the nation’s history, a forerunner of the Works Progress Administration. A policy ‘continuum’ Yet in contrast to Hoover, Roosevelt’s administration is revered as progressive, even boldly experimental. The New Deal is, justifiably, considered a masterstroke that saved the country. However, many historians have concluded that Hoover-era economic policies set precedents without which implementation of the New Deal and the subsequent economic recovery may have been delayed. Some have gone so far as to assert that New Deal principles, which still inform and influence America’s social and economic predilections, owed much to the programs developed and enacted during the Hoover years. Historian Murray Rothbard claimed that “the Hoover-Roosevelt period was really a continuum, that most of the ‘innovations’ of the New Deal were in fact continuations or intensifications of Hoover’s solutions, or pseudo-solutions…” (Rothbard, 2000, p. xv). In Rothbard’s view (p. xv), Roosevelt was simply better at exploiting his image and spending taxpayer money and, so, history paints him as the nation’s savior. Indeed, the force of Roosevelt’s personality, his social panache and persuasiveness in 4 building political support should never be overlooked. But neither should his ability to recognize good policy, of synthesizing Hoover-era programs with his own. Rothbard went too far in attributing the spectacular success of the New Deal to Roosevelt’s charisma, but makes an important and much-overlooked point in connecting the economic innovations developed during both presidencies. The great journalist Walter Lippmann, while not necessarily agreeing with all of the actions taken during the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations, subscribed to the theory that overwhelming circumstance “rendered the federal government responsible for our economy” (Riccio, 1996, p. 102). Lippmann ascribed much of the contemporary and subsequent criticisms that have gained currency to prevalent political “fashion,” and the vagaries of economic trends. He asked if there existed “any other criterion available which is less likely to be the rationalization of our individual preferences? Is there any that more effectively discounts partisan bias? Or what conforms most closely to ordinary experience?” (Riccio, 1996, p. 102). Davis Houck (2001, p. 132) points out that, like Hoover, Roosevelt fervently believed that collective confidence was essential if the recovery was to be effected. Like Roosevelt, Hoover employed a kind of “rhetoric of recovery,” in which he used metaphors for war, health and sickness to illustrate the aims of his economic program (Houck, 2001, p. 132). In this, Hoover was ahead of his time in his use of language and imagery to instill public confidence, a skill which Roosevelt perfected. In terms of policy and message, Houck argues, the two men were more similar than different. “With the distance that more than 60 years provides, it is easy to side with the prevailing orthodoxy and conclude that Hoover and Roosevelt were very different when it came to economic policy. Precisely the opposite is true: save for 5 reciprocal trade, the two were remarkably similar” (Houck, 2001, p. 132). Social science and the ‘Hoover New Deal’ Economist Benjamin M. Anderson saw more than continuity when comparing Hoover and Roosevelt. Anderson, a leading Wall Street economist during the Hoover years, believed that the New Deal itself had been “founded” by the Hoover administration. Rothbard noted that Anderson, who had a “front-row seat” for the administration’s program development in 1929, referred to the great achievement of the Roosevelt presidency as “the Hoover New Deal” (Riggenbach, 2009, p. 148). As previously noted, one of Roosevelt’s greatest personal assets was his ability (and willingness) to blend the ideas of others with his own, having borrowed liberally and quite successfully from Hooverian economic initiatives. The severity of the Depression crisis simply required that all of the best concepts, past or present, be on the table. In fact, policies from the first New Deal (1933-34) bear a striking resemblance to Woodrow Wilson’s programs, “which were virtually indistinguishable from the Hamiltonian conservatism of Theodore Roosevelt” (Riggenbach, 2009, p. 156). This common thread continued through to the second New Deal, in which landmark legislation such as the National Labor Relations Act (1935), and the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) owed much to the National Recovery Act of 1933 (Riggenbach, 2009, p. 157). In 1933, Roosevelt extended the Hoover administration’s Reconstruction Finance 6 Corporation and its massive public works program. This was characteristic of Hoover’s departure from his stubbornly laissez faire pre-Depression stance and was designed to promote industrial recovery “from above” by restoring economic vitality (Reagan, 1999, p. 182). Similarly, New Deal relief for farmers had its foundations in Hoover’s Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929. These and other policies from this era were influenced by social science, a new field of study which sought to atomize the lives, needs and motivations of citizens in various walks of economic and social life. Hoover’s President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, an early policy “think tank,” provided the impetus for an important aspect of the New Deal: “Social science entered the New Deal in a much more political form as the new (social) experts sought to engage more actively in the political process itself” (Reagan, 1999, p. 80). Charles E. Merriam, a Republican academician who was integral to the theoretical development of the New Deal, always credited Herbert Hoover with “starting national planning, pointing to the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends as an important precedence” (Reagan, 1999, p. 80). From a social standpoint, Hoover’s aims were the same as Roosevelt’s: to end poverty and maximize America’s industrial and economic potential. In fact, Hoover considered himself something of a social engineer, keen to marshal all of the available intellectual resources at his disposal in devising a strategy that addressed specific social ills. He brought together leading theorists from the National Institute of Public Administration, the Social Science Research Council and independent social scientists (Pederson, 2006, p. 119-120), creating a pool of 7 advisers that became the Committee on Social Trends. Hoover’s enthusiasm for this intellectual approach to solving social problems is startlingly enlightened in comparison to his unfortunate insistence in the earlier stage of his administration that community volunteerism could stem the economic malaise: a conviction held by many at the time. In spite of this, Hoover acknowledged his mistakes and launched policy initiatives that established a legacy the Roosevelt administration drew on to create its own unprecedented experiment in social management. Social science writ large: the WPA An extension of Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) presents an excellent example of a New Deal program that focused government resources on specific and persistent social problems. The WPA was the New Deal’s keystone program (certainly its largest), a sweeping initiative that showed what government is capable of when the need is clearly felt and the political will is present. It employed millions of citizens in public works projects and launched programs that addressed everything from adult illiteracy to economic racial discrimination. The WPA represented not only an extension of an informed Hoover administration policy but the formalizing of social study itself and the “factoring in” of social dynamics at the policy formation level. The impact of the WPA and, by extension, of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, encouraged politicians to set great store in the study and analysis of social problems. Sociologist Harold Laswell wrote, “It is probable that the policy-science orientation in the United States will be directed towards providing the knowledge needed to improve the practice of democracy” 8 (Nathan, 2000, p. 15). The enthusiasm for this field of study arose from a belief that it could improve the nation’s social and economic well-being, a belief due in part to the success the WPA and other socially oriented New Deal policies produced in restarting the country’s economic engine. ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee’ It is remarkable that two such different individuals should have had so much in common when it came to solving America’s great economic crisis. To all outward appearances they were polar opposites. A contemporary news article observed that “when he (Roosevelt) is placed beside the sour and devious Hoover the contrast is almost startling” (Houck, 2001, p. 162). But it became difficult to tell them apart when compared on the basis of their economic policies. These similarities “caused some contemporary commentators to argue that the election was a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee” (Houck, 2001, p. 162). When it came to creating a “fall guy” for the Great Depression, the fickle political game of scapegoating thoroughly stained Herbert Hoover’s political legacy. Hoover’s influence on New Deal innovations was dismissed despite his espousal of progressive economic policies that were extraordinary for a Republican who came of political age in the business-first Coolidge administration. Rothbard’s summation of Hoover’s legacy, while skirting hyperbole, hits very near the mark: “If we define ‘New Deal’ as an antidepression program marked by extensive 9 governmental economic planning and intervention – including bolstering of wage rates and prices, expansion of credit, propping up of weak firms, and increased government spending (e.g. subsidies to unemployment and public works) – Herbert Clark Hoover must be considered the founder of the New Deal in America” (Rothbard, 2000, p. 186). 10 References Hawley, E.W. (1981). Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce: Studies in New Era Thought and Practice. Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press. Houck, D.W. (2001). Rhetoric as Currency: Hoover, Roosevelt and the Great Depression. New York, N.Y.: TAMU Press Nathan, R.P. (2000). Social Science in Government: The Role of Policy Researchers. Albany, N.Y.: The Rockefeller Institute Press. Pederson, W.D. (2006). Presidential Profiles: The FDR Years. New York, N.Y.: Infobase Publishing. Reagan, P.D. (1999). Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890-1943. Boston, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press Riccio, B.D. (1996). Walter Lippmann: Odyssey of a Liberal. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. Riggenbach, J. (2009). Why America is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism. Ludwig von Mises Institute. Rothbard, M.N. (2000). America’s Great Depression. Ludwig von Mises Institute. 11 Read More