Worst Presidents: Herbert Hoover (1929-1933)

February 16, 2007 RSS Feed Print

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Herbert Hoover, the 31st president, and Richard Nixon, the 37th, share the ninth spot for entirely different kinds of failings. And both had offsetting qualities and achievements that keep them off the 10-worst list of some major rankings.

Hoover, elected on the eve of the Great Depression, came to the office with the skills of a consummate technocrat and manager. The Iowa native and Stanford-educated engineer ran massive relief operations in Europe both during and after World War I. He was commerce secretary under Harding and Calvin Coolidge.

Once the Depression set in, he lowered taxes and started public works projects to create jobs, but he steadfastly resisted outright relief.

Hoover's rigid adherence to conservative principles may not have been his greatest problem. A poor communicator, he came across as mean-spirited and uncaring. The homeless dubbed their make-shift shanty towns Hoovervilles.

Perhaps his single greatest policy blunder was supporting and signing into law a a tariff act that fueled international trade wars and made the Depression even worse. But style points alone would have cost him the election against FDR.

For all his good qualities, it is fair to say that Hoover failed to rise to the greatest challenge of his time.

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Read minervx's comments on Hoover below. They are dead-on. Congratulations, minervx, you did your homework!
Hoover likely worsened economic conditions, but the economy was actually teetering on the day he entered office.
Under his predecessor Calvin Coolidge, per-capita disposable income for almost all Americans was decreasing, the ongoing farm depression continued and the construction boom ended.
Hoover is in the White House for only three months when businesses, reacting to dramatically lower consumer demand, slash production 20 percent.
None of this registers with giddy Wall Street investors during the 16-month. 40 percent stock price explosion of 1928-29 until October '29. Everyone then simultaneously pulls capital away from corporations, and Hoover's looking at a potential national crisis.
The next year, Hoover at first denounces the proposed record-high Smoot-Hawley Tariff, but then buckles under pressure from his own party and signs it. One result is that both imports and exports eventually fall off the table, by as much as two-thirds.
Contracting the money supply is another bonehead move; when there's less money in circulation, businesses have more trouble getting loans.
Things get absolutely scary. Banks fail in unheard-of numbers and unemployment rockets to 25 percent.
Hoover is an enigmatic figure. He's not evil; far from it. He actually enters office as a great humanitarian, yet he gets blamed for causing so much human misery.
I really think Coolidge is equally to blame, as he ignored repeated warnings that the '20s boom had gone bust and tough times were at hand.
Coolidge had this laissez-faire policy to markets that gave tacit approval to the wild, fantasy-based Wall Street ride during his final year in office. He firmly believed that government should pay no role in steadying an economy descending into hell. Most presidents since then have at least taken some steps to prevent such disasters.

creamnsugar of FL 11:31PM August 21, 2011

Historians are currently jumping on recent former President Bush as the worst of all time. I am not about to defend him, but find the biased logic of a largely left-leaning group of academics revealing.
While a number of previous presidents can be classified as failures, it is ludicrous to lump people like Buchanan and Hoover, or even Bush, with Obama. The reason should be obvious. No previous President has had the capacity to do as much social and economic damage as has been done because of Obama's policies and politics. He has mortgaged our great-grandchildren's future on a medical insurance plan which has been widely rejected as unworkable and socialistic. He has spent trillions of our dollars on failed bailout programs which have exacerbated, rather than corrected the recent economic downturn. Unemployment has worsened dramatically during his term of office. He has continued our foreign adventures and the economic and human damage they bring.
He is also a chameleon. As a U.S. Senator, he once railed against runaway deficit spending. Yet, as President, he has more than doubled the deficit he inherited. Churchill once opined that "Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." Whether or not Obama would ever admit to being a socialist, his approach to "fixing" our economic engine reveal his true political nature.

Thomas Jackson of CA 10:13AM July 22, 2011

yes your right the stock market crash is one of (for purposes of simplification) the main cause of the depression.
people often forget that cause and effect are seldom cause and effect more often it is cause, cause/effect, cause/effect, cause/effect .... effect.
the main reason for the crash dispite numerous dispicable buisness practices and on the margin stock purchasing. if you read your text books, were the tariffs. At the end of the world war hoover and predisesors passed numerous tariffs against european goods.
remembering that europe was in a depression at the time much deeper than our own, there struggling economies and inability for foreign revennu made it extremely difficult to repay debts witch in turn lead to the destablization of our and there currency and economy witch lead to the callapse witch lead to the great depression.
now last time a checked logic 101 if A => B and B => c then A=>C so yah he was a contributing factor in the down turn

john of MD 3:59AM April 26, 2011

Worst Presidents: Herbert Hoover (1929-1933)

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