Barack Obama has been compared to almost every American President of the last hundred years--favorably to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan; and unfavorably to Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. I want to put another name in the hat: Herbert Hoover.
It might seem ludicrous, or unfair, to compare Obama to one of the most vilified presidents of the last century, but that’s because Hoover’s reputation is largely, or at least somewhat, undeserved--the product of Democratic attacks and Hoover’s own strident responses to these attacks.
To his contemporaries, Hoover had been the American most suited to be president. He had performed brilliantly as head of the American Relief Administration after World War I. In 1920, The New Republic and Franklin Delano Roosevelt urged him to run for president as a Democrat. Hoover chose not to run. Instead, he became perhaps the greatest of all commerce secretaries. He was responsible, among other things, for persuading industry to reduce overall costs by standardizing industrial parts and tools. Because of Hoover’s innovations, an auto mechanic could repair any American car.
Hoover was also not a conservative Republican like Calvin Coolidge, but a progressive who believed that capital and labor could work together with the encouragement of a beneficent government. In 1928, Hoover won the presidency in a landslide, and might have enjoyed success if the Great Depression had not intervened. Still, Hoover responded to the greatest economic crisis in the nation’s history. He funded what was then the largest peacetime public works expenditure. He signed a labor bill, the Norris-LaGuardia Act, that was the precursor of the Wagner Act. And he established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend money to ailing banks. “The Hoover administration,” biographer Joan Hoff Wilson wrote, “became the first in American history to use the power of the federal government to intervene directly in the economy in time of peace.”
Unlike other Republican conservatives, Hoover didn’t regard unemployment as a passing irregularity that time and patience would remove. In 1921, in the wake of an earlier sharp downturn, Hoover had convened a President’s Conference on Unemployment, which recommended public works as a response to unemployment. When he became president, he renamed it the President’s Committee on Recent Economic Changes. Its path breaking report, published at the end of his presidency, recognized the new problem of “technological unemployment.” Unlike his predecessor, Hoover also tried to do something about the international monetary system that was breaking down under the weight of unpaid loans and reparations from World War I.
But Hoover failed, finally, because he shared the same assumptions about deficit spending and government intervention as most other politicians and economists of his day. He was willing for government to do more to combat the business cycle, but he feared that enlarging the state would lead to Soviet-style socialism, and he thought that in the end the economy would right itself the way it had before. Hoover had the potential to be a very good president, but he was overwhelmed by the unprecedented challenges that he faced.
Obama, of course, is not making the same mistakes as Hoover or facing exactly the same situation. But Hoover’s example shows that a person who is highly qualified to be president and who boasts significant accomplishments in office can still fail because of the enormity of the challenges he faces. Obama could enjoy great success in getting legislation through Congress, including national health care insurance; he could take larger steps than any of his predecessors, including Franklin Roosevelt, to pull the United States out of a slump; but he could still fail and bring his party down with him.
I’ll describe Obama’s formidable challenges in foreign policy in a subsequent column. I want to concentrate here on the domestic and international economy. There are two features of the current downturn that make it different and more dangerous than previous post-World War II recessions. First, it combines a financial crash--and its effects on housing--with the deterioration of that part of private industry that produces tradable goods and services, from cars and machine tools to software and pharmaceuticals. Call this part of industry the productive core of the economy.
There are a lot of effective and uncomfortable arguments here, but it still seems very much like a retread of Kevin Baker's piece "Barack Hoover Obama" in the July Harper's. At some point the comparison becomes a bit tired and predictable.
There are a lot of effective and uncomfortable arguments here, but it still seems very much like a retread of Kevin Baker's piece "Barack Hoover Obama" in the July Harper's. At some point the comparison becomes a bit tired and predictable.
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