Herbert Hoover
How can we ever fairly assess a President like Herbert Hoover? While there are plenty of pros and cons to this President, it is tricky to know of any one who would have thrived, or even survived to obtain a second term while first taking office in 1929. At the same time, there are few Presidential candidates in history who could have beaten Hoover, who had such an untarnished reputation for the 1929 election as well. In this episode of UnPresidented, we take a look at what happened in the American economy in the buildup to 1929 to make Hoover the perfect candidate to take over the Presidency following the decade of the Roaring 20s -- a time where industrialization and technological advancement were reaching all-time highs in the US up until that point.
We also explore how much Hoover can be blamed for the steepest collapse the US has ever seen (far worse than in 2008 and 2020). In being fair to Hoover’s severe limitations at the time to pull the country out of economic devastation, we recognize there are more interesting conversations to have about what causes an event like the Great Depression to happen in the first place, and also what Hoover could have actually done to ease the suffering of millions at home. Being well known as a humanitarian figure before stepping into a career in politics, why did Hoover struggle so much to use the power of the Federal Government to provide more safety nets to ease the suffering of millions? Was Hoover’s Presidency a necessary evil to globalize the world economy? In this episode, we shed light on how much our world has changed as a result of Hoover’s 4 years in office -- for better and for worse.
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