The Great Depression, Part Eleven/B

Hoover had great difficulty holding his own party together. He never seemed to be a big admirer of Andrew Mellon, and he had frequent disagreements with him, but he nonetheless appointed Mellon as Treasury Secretary, and kept him in that position far too long to placate the pro-business, conservative wing of the Republican Party. Republicans had a large pro-business, “conservative wing,” that had been in the ascendancy during the Harding and Coolidge era, but also a large “progressive wing” that had suffered from diminished influence since Teddy Roosevelt left the White House. In those times, the entire country did NOT have electricity. Many progressives were pushing for government funded, generated and regulated electrical power for the many, particularly rural, areas where electric power was not yet available. They thought Hoover, the former Teddy Roosevelt supporter, was one of them; that is, a progressive on this issue, but it turned out that he opposed Federal development of electrical power, favoring private business in the matter, and the progressive wing of the Republican Party was very embittered over this. Of course, the pro business, anti-government wing wasn’t terribly enchanted with Hoover either, as he criticized Wall Street and eventually took the government into the private economy by offering government loans to help hard pressed financial businesses, plus, his administration ran huge deficits, for those times.* For staunch Republican partisans, Hoover was almost anathema, as he preferred cooperation with Democrats, and almost appeared to be non-partisan, rather than just bi-partisan. It really wasn’t until AFTER he left office that the Republican label was anchored to him, as many Democrats, not nearly as endeared to bi-partisan cooperation as Hoover, fixed Hoover, Republicans and Depression firmly together in the minds of the American public, although not without reason. Hoover, always seeming to go against public sentiment, helped their efforts by critiquing the New Deal and serving as the “anti-Roosevelt” (Franklin, that is) for a time.

Much later in his life, Hoover’s reputation began to recover, interestingly with some help from Democratic president, Harry Truman. The two became good friends over time, and Truman asked Hoover to serve as head of a commission to overhaul the Federal government. Later still, Dwight Eisenhower gave Hoover an assignment for the government. Some Democratic politicians gradually developed a “guilt complex” for their political jibes at the former president, and one story I recall, had President Lyndon Johnson making a change in plans to visit the ailing Hoover not long before the ex-president passed away, in spite of Secret Service objections to LBJ’s diversion from his schedule. For much of his life, Hoover acted as the spokesperson for “The Boys Clubs of America,” which in more recent times includes girls. By all accounts, the kids loved the old man, and it hearkens back to that ball field scene I mentioned earlier in this series when he was president. Hoover died at the ripe old age of 90, in the fall of 1964.

Now, a new president occupied the White House, and Franklin D. Roosevelt and his advisers benefited not only from seeing Hoover's failures over three and one half years, but also from some of Hoover's basic programs, which they would take over and expand to combat the Depression, and then call them their own.

* Far worse deficits would come under Franklin Roosevelt during the 1930s and even worse during World War Two. It is interesting that Roosevelt criticized Hoover for deficits, but then proceeded to run even larger amounts of red ink. Decades later, Ronald Reagan criticized Jimmy Carter for deficits, only to run deficits that made Carter's debts look like a surplus. While this is a bit of "hairsplitting," Roosevelt was a politician who saw things "at the moment," rather than always as ideological. While this doesn't excuse Roosevelt's inconsistencies, Reagan "claimed" to be a conservative who supposedly truly believed what he said.

WORD HISTORY:
Bow-This is the word which rhymes with "how," and which means "front section of a ship." In a sense, it is really the same word as English "bough," originally "shoulder, arm," but now meaning "branch or limb of a tree" (see "The Great Depression, Part 11/A for the history of "bough"). It goes back to Indo European "bhaghus," which meant "arm, elbow," which was derived from Indo European "bheugh," which meant, "to bend." This gave its Old Germanic offspring "boguz," which moved the meaning upwards on the arm to "shoulder, upper arm." This gave the Germanic dialects and languages a number of related words, all with the meaning "shoulder" (usually in reference to an animal, not a human), but later with the sense referring to "the front of a ship" (and in more modern times often to "the front of an airplane"). English borrowed the word meaning "front of a ship" in the 1300s, likely from Low German "boog" or Dutch "boeg" (or both) as there was much trade between these related people, with closely related languages (English, German, including Low German, and Dutch are all West Germanic languages).