…I think, was Herbert Hoover.
The mythology about him is truly amazing. As Glenn says, he was the Barack Obama of his day. Except, of course, he actually had accomplishments in the real world before he became president and, as an engineer, at least understood basic math.
Did Hoover release his long-form birth certificate in a timely fashion?
The Obama of his day? That’s grossly unfair. Hoover won his fortune through inventive and successful mining engineering. He was a true humanitarian, and an extraordinarily effective manager in food aid to Europe during and after the First World War, and in flood relief in the South. He was an effective Secretary of Commerce. In short, he was a talented and successful man before he became President, with a packed and impressive CV. Next to Hoover, Obama is a grade-school student council president.
I don’t know that we can even fault his handling of the Depression, considering that he was being undercut by the Fed anyway. In any event, it seems absurd to blame him for failing to end the Depression in three years (1930-33) when FDR failed to end it for another 7 or 8 (1933-40 or 41).
It is certainly true, however, that Hoover was no Coolidge, as Coolidge himself agreed.
My dad campaigned for Hoover. My mom’s cousin married one of FDR’s children. You think I’d be torn, but Hoover was better than FDR any day, even though Hoover tried a soak the rich tax policy which cratered the economy. FDR doubled-down on Hoover policies, just as Obama doubled-down on some of the mistaken Bush policies.
Hoover took bad economic advice once, and followed it. FDR bathed in a sea of idiocy, with alternating wage and price freezes and other grabastic asinine idiocy, drinking deep from the fountain of fiscal insanity until events overseas distracted him. Most of the world recovered from the Great Depression faster than we did. One of the most in-depth academic analyses of the reason for that concluded it was FDR’s misguided policies, which badly deepened and lengthened it.
Two years ago I did a comparison of Hoover and Obama’s responses to an economic downturn, an across-the-board tax increase with special emphasis on soaking the rich. This was combined with a reliance on “experts” in both cases. Just as Hoover and the Republicans were blamed for generations, so too will Obama and the Democrats.
But I have to nod my hat to Hoover for chosing Senate Majorithy Leader Charles Curtis as his Vice President. His existence has flumoxed many a liberal (none of whom, in my experience, have ever even imagined such a person), since he was only half as white as Obama and only spoke English as his third language. It throws their whole racist Republican genocidal Indian killer worldview all topsy turvey. How did the Republicans choose a Kaw as their Senate Majority Leader and Vice President thirty of forty years before the Civil Rights Movement (which was opposed by Democrats, the only American political party devoted to perpetual race-based human slavery)?
It’s worth examining how FDR would be remembered had he not been re-elected in 1940.
If we need a president that is good at math, I think James Garfield would be best.
After all be did an independent proof of the Pythagorean theorem.
This was combined with a reliance on “experts” in both cases. Just as Hoover and the Republicans were blamed for generations, so too will Obama and the Democrats.
They say that journalism is the first draft of history. Likewise, most academic historians are at least as left wing as the press. Given that, it seems unlikely that history will hold Obama accountable for his economic stupidity. Conservative historians and economists will likely tell a more accurate story but those that controll the textbooks control the future.
Amity Shlaes’s excellent The Forgotten Man has quite a bit of information on Hoover and his policies, which were very much opposite of what popular myth would tell you.
I think that Carl makes very good points about a Hoover/Obama comparison in their pre-White-House years. Hoover may genuinely have been one of the “most intelligent” people to ever hold the Presidency (sound familiar?). But Hoover lacked the wisdom of his predecessor and did not understand what he (Hoover) did and did not know, and what government can and cannot effect. Obama, similar to Hoover and like all so-called liberals, recognizes few if any limits on the proper powers of government, all in the name of “fixing” the current crisis. This is exactly what Hayek warned against.
I’m inclined to nominate Mr. Nixon as the “most misunderstood” president of the United States rather than Mr. Hoover.
Stephen Ambrose’s wonderful Nixon is a must-read for anyone interested in getting beneath the popular-press image of Nixon as some kind of evil paranoiac schemer obsessed with punishing his enemies at all costs. For instance, I did not know that Nixon was possessed of a coruscating and penetrating intellect; that he was amazingly well-read in history and philosophy; and that his memory was astonishing and extraordinary.
I’ll readily admit Hoover is misunderstood. However, I’m not sure he outranks Nixon in that unfortunate category.
but… but… Archie Bunker (the meatheads of the 70’s idea of a conservative) told us we needed a man like Hoover again???
Back then right meant reactionary buffoon. They still haven’t changed their tune yet, have they? They ridicule Sarah Palin for stating the truth in quirky ways. They’re smart and she’s dumb even though she’s right and they’re wrong. I noticed it first with the ‘Bush Doctrine’ (where Palin answered the poorly put question correctly TWICE based on possible interpretations of the question) and my confirmational bias has been in high gear repeatedly since.
Someone around here once pointed me to the blog of “Mencius Moldbug.”
Mr. Moldbug was commenting on the preposterous nature of an 80 percent reduction in CO2 emissions, likening it to “a policy that is inflicted upon a society after losing a disasterous war.”
I did some digging, and followed some links regarding the “Morgenthau Plan”, thinking that the Morgenthau Plan was some Plan B of what to do with the WW-II defeated Germans, but in our beneficence, America had started out with the Marshall Plan instead.
Following some links, I happened upon the Wikipedia entry on the Morgenthau Plan, and bless their black-little-conventional-liberal-wisdom-Wikipedia-hearts, the Wikipedia article indicates that the Morgenthau Plan of deindustrializing post WW-II German very much was being carried out and implemented in the 1946-47 time frame, the caloric intake of the average adult German was at levels that got folks hanged after being sentencing at Nurenburg, the death rate statistics were showing signs that by 1947 that Germany was on the verge of mass starvation, and the whole thing was not a simple consequence of wartime devastation but rather the effect of deliberate policies crafted in Washington, D.C..
So the post-Roosevelt Adminstration was essentially running on auto-pilot, poised to starve the German people, not so much in retaliation for the war crime of starving the camp inmates but in a kind of naive, utopian de-industrialization scheme that would have done justice to Pol Pot many years hence.
And who “called them out” on the pages of the Chicago Tribune? None other than Herbert Hoover.
By 1948, the policy was reversed, largely by cashiering the people conducting it who would not back down, Marshall Plan aid averted mass starvation, which wouldn’t have been cool with Communism on the march, Ludvig Erhard did his thing, unleashing the “German economic miracle.”
That the FDR people in the Truman Adminstration had to back down in response to moral criticism from Herbert Hoover of all people is not anything I learned in school, and it is to the credit of Mencius Moldbug along with anonymous Wikipedia contributers to make this known.