A President's Ordeal

THE MEMOIRS OF HERBERT HOOVER:

THE GREAT DEPRESSION (503 pp.)--Herbert Hoover--Macmillan ($5).

One dark Thursday in October 1929, the hottest bull market in U.S. history caught fire, and in a matter of weeks $30 billion in paper stock values went up in smoke. As brokers jumped from their penthouses and amateur stock gamblers went to the wall, the U.S. began the calamitous descent into the Great Depression, the nation's most all-embracing crisis since the Civil War. For the world-famed economist, engineer and humanitarian who had confidently forecast the abolition of poverty before assuming the presidency seven months earlier, it was a blow scarcely to be endured.

Overnight, Herbert Hoover was turned into a scapegoat for the economic sins of a whole generation. Charles Michelson, the Democrats' razor-tongued publicity genius, pilloried him before millions as a hapless homunculus responsible for all the nation's ills. Disgruntled citizens called the dear departed boom the Hoover boom. The depression, Democrats jeered, was the Hoover depression. The huddled shanties near the railroad tracks, where ragged men cooked garbage over old oil drums, were called Hoovervilles.

In this third and most important volume of his memoirs, telling of his ordeal, Hoover writes as a man in anguished earnest, a man whose pride of historical place has been irretrievably hurt. As Hoover sees it, he was far from being the helpless victim of uncontrollable economic forces. Though it may come as a surprise to many wounded veterans of the Great Depression, he insists that he knew just what to do, and was vigorously doing it when his opponents took power, threw away all his gains and prolonged the depression for seven more years.

Turning Away Panic. Hoover passes a stern judgment on Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, whose only formula, says Hoover, was: "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate." Hoover says that he rejected Mellon's advice, acted promptly after the crash, and was the first President ever to make full use of his powers to cushion a national economic shock. He promoted federal works projects and expanded the federal employment service. Calling in business leaders, he got their promise that capital expenditures would go on and that wages would not be cut. But they often were. Nevertheless, says Hoover, such "indirect relief" measures sufficed to provide a "comparatively mild . . . readjustment," and he assured the country that "we have passed the worst." (Says Hoover: "I did not say 'Prosperity is just around the corner.' ")

In 1931, new disaster threatened when the main European economic structure collapsed, and the convalescing U.S. economy was severely set back. Though confronted then with a hostile Congress and 7,000,000 families without breadwinners, Hoover feels that he met the challenge head on. He won a year's moratorium on war debts and reparations, shored up the gold standard, called a world economic conference, set up the Reconstruction Finance Corp., and launched reform of "our rotten banking system." Says he: "[These] great legislative and other measures . . . turned away panic and started us on the road to real recovery around July 1932."

Back to the Bottom. But the Democrats won the autumn elections and wrecked all his plans. ". . . The business world began to weigh the consequences. . . The price of commodities and securities immediately began to decline, and unemployment increased." To make matters worse, there was Roosevelt's "refusal to cooperate" during the four months' interval before his inaugural. F.D.R. accepted an invitation to the White House to discuss economic policies, but once there, declined to commit himself. Hoover was particularly distraught because Roosevelt seemed determined to discontinue the gold-standard policy. As a result, businessmen began shipping gold abroad. Later, bank runs started, spreading from Michigan to Ohio and finally to the whole nation. "The most senseless and easily prevented panic in all history," says Hoover, "[was caused by] fear of the incoming administration . . . A statement from Roosevelt . . . could probably have stopped the panic."

March 4 was the fateful day. The new President closed the banks and launched the 100-day "Roosevelt Revolution" with its rubber dollar, blue eagle, boondoggling and plowed-under pigs, not to mention the phrase: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." In spite of it all--or perhaps because of it all--the new President established an emotional rapport with the American people the effects of which are still plain on the land. But Hoover never swerved from his conviction that he had been right. "As a consequence of the New Deal devices," he says, "[recovery] never came to the U.S. under Roosevelt during peacetime . . . The primary cause of this failure was the New Deal attempt to collectivize the American system of life . . . That our administrative policies were right is amply evidenced by the fact that after the world turned toward recovery in July 1932, the twelve nations retaining their free economies, and pursuing our policies, fully recovered within two or three years to levels above the [U.S.] boom year of 1929." But in the U.S. the Great Depression roared on till war ended it.

Back to Sanity. As a rugged individualist, and proud of it, Hoover has been able to set down a relatively happy ending for his story. ". . . During the war," he says, "there came a revulsion in the public mind. A first real turning away from collectivism came with the Congressional election after the war (1946). Republicans with the aid of conservative Democrats repealed . . . some 70,000 New Deal and war rules, regulations and orders, which went far to restore the American system. It has since had some setbacks, but that the American system has survived at all is proof of its vitality."

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