Who said herbert hoover

Nobody demonstrates this better than Hoover. He was elected in with four hundred and forty-four electoral votes, carrying all but eight states—and it was the first time he had run for political office.

Four years later, he got fifty-nine electoral votes and carried just six states. What intervened between his two Presidential runs was the stock-market crash and the early years of the Great Depression.

Hoover was doomed to be remembered as the man who was too rigidly conservative to react adeptly to the Depression, as the hapless foil to the great Franklin Roosevelt, and as the politician who managed to turn a Republican country into a Democratic one. Even now, if you were a politician running for office, you would invoke Hoover only to compare your opponent to him.

An inaugural graduate of Stanford, where he studied mechanical engineering and geology, Hoover became a mining engineer at a time when that was as glamorous and potentially profitable a career as launching a tech startup would be for a Stanford graduate now.

Before he turned thirty, he was married and a father, running a large gold mine in Tientsin, China, and highly prosperous. Hoover seems to have been an almost brutally tough, obsessively hardworking manager; certainly charm was not the secret to his success.

He soon broke with his employers and struck out on his own, mainly as a financier of mining projects, rather than as a manager of them, and did very well for himself. The Hoovers moved to London and lived in a large town house.

That is, if one had the means to take part in its upper life. The servants were the best trained and the most loyal of any nationality. It was also the period in which a good deal of the familiar institutional architecture of the United States was created: big corporations and universities, the first government regulatory agencies, structured and licensed professions, charitable foundations, think tanks. Liberal intellectuals like Walter Lippmann and Herbert Croly saw the establishment of a class of trained, technocratic experts as essential to the future of democracy.

In business, efficiency experts like Frederick Winslow Taylor and Frank Gilbreth systematized the operations of industrial mass production, down to the physical movements of workers on an assembly line. Psychologists like Lewis Terman invented tests that could be used to sort the population en masse. Hoover was a creature of the engineering division of this milieu. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men.

Then it elevates the standard of living and adds to the comforts of life. Biographers usually become well acquainted with their subjects not just as public figures but also as people who lead ordinary daily lives in the company of their co-workers, friends, and family. Unless the subject is a monster, all that intimacy typically turns the biographer into a personal partisan. This did not happen with Whyte and Hoover. Biographers want psychological access, but Hoover, though the records he left behind are vast, has the quality of not being personally present in a life that, for a long while, produced one triumph after another.

All the evidence suggests that Hoover was genuinely devoted to what he construed as the public good, with the proviso that he wanted his devotion to be recognized. What gave him renown enough to make him a plausible Presidential candidate was his self-appointment as the manager of an international effort to get food into Belgium after it had fallen to the Germans during the First World War.

Whatever qualities had made Hoover successful as an operator of mines in remote areas also made him successful at delivering relief under emergency conditions. He borrowed money to buy food before he had succeeded in getting government assistance. We have provided methods and assurances that none suffer from hunger or cold amongst our people. We have instituted measures to assist our farmers and our homeowners.

We have created vast agencies for employment. All Quotes Add A Quote. Books by Herbert Hoover. Details if other :.

Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — American Individualism by Herbert Hoover. The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover 23 ratings. Fishing for Fun and to Wash Your Soul 21 ratings. The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover 17 ratings. Welcome back. Rauchway portrays Roosevelt, too, as farsighted from early in the campaign onward: Rejecting the fantasy of 19th-century individualism espoused by the Republican Party, he was committed instead to a vision that assigned government some responsibility for shaping economic life, and to quasi-Keynesian programs to achieve that vision.

Previous historians have generally taken a very different tack. More recent interpretations of the New Deal have focused on the conservative and pragmatic elements of the program—the limits of the welfare state it created and the ways that it enshrined rather than challenged corporate capitalism.

But overall, his Roosevelt is a liberal hero who consistently advocated an expansion of public programs both to ameliorate the immediate suffering of the Depression and to stabilize the economy over the long term. That is surely true, even if—as was often commented on at the time—the New Deal was not a clear-cut agenda that Roosevelt had ready-to-hand before he came into office.

Even Roosevelt sometimes seemed to retreat from what might appear now to be the most basic precepts of the New Deal. He threw the economy back into recession in when he tried to balance the federal budget. The federal jobs programs he created were conceived as emergency measures that would last only a few years, revealing his underlying ambivalence about a welfare state. Roosevelt and his advisers were pushed by events they did not control and by political actors representing a broad range of ideas —communists, socialists, and labor radicals, as well as the followers of Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, and Francis Townsend.

By the end of the s, many in Washington believed that the New Deal, whatever it was, had failed. Even the power and stability of the unions were truly secured only during the war.

To make the New Deal seem as though it was a program that Roosevelt had worked out well ahead of time is to simplify this history, and to cut against the sense of crisis and contingency that Winter War so powerfully evokes. This version of events also makes the New Deal appear somehow a project of Roosevelt alone, rather than a political response to the wave of protests against the economic inequality and poverty that swept up millions of Americans.

Today, liberal nostalgia for Roosevelt comes easily. The country is mired in crises lacking obvious resolutions; the move toward greater equality that began to unfold during the s has been largely undone. How much easier the situation would be if there were a standard-bearer in the Democratic Party, someone with an inspiring vision to move the country forward!