Status Updates From Hoover: An Extraordinary Li...

"Democracy is a harsh employer."

During Prohibition the volume of alcohol consumption grew, and attitudes towards liquor especially among women and young were notably looser than a decade earlier.

Lou Hoover sized Roosevelt up as a lightweight and an invalid.

Hoover was not alone in his belief that winter that the worst of the Depression was over. The Harvard Economic Society declared that the severest phase of the recession was over by March.

During and after the stock market crash, Hoover reassured Americans that the underlying U.S. economy was sturdy.

Hoover in set up his administration filled with scions of great American families, was insulating himself from the voice of the people.

Hoover's cabinet looked more like a business council than a political body and an elite one at that.

Hoover won 444 Electoral College votes and 58% of the Popular vote.

At 2:15 on Saturday April 7, 1927 Hoover read a brief statement that aired on a new "television apparatus". It was the first demonstration of AT&T's television technology.

Signs of improved quality of life were everywhere; annual incomes increased by 30% from 1922 to 1929; increasing numbers of workers kept a more leisurely 48 hour week.

Hoover the champion of equal opportunity thought it fair that the wealthy should accept a greater burden of taxation and he was comfortable using taxes to limit the political and social influence of wealth and to prevent the formation of large multi generational estates.

The Republican National Committee denounced him as a Democrat, while Democratic regulars continued to suspect him of being a closet Republican.

The man most Americans wanted to see as president was auto magnate Henry Ford.

The lawlessness of the 1920s United States was broader than Prohibition. Felony rates were rising, including nine thousand killings each year. This was 20x the rate in Great Britain.

The 1920s was a time of reactionary immigration restrictions. Mass deportations of suspected foreign radicals. All based on a pervasive hysteria about the spread of communism.

Socialism, insisted Hoover was a wasteland, whether in its milder form of state directed organization or in its more virulent strain Bolshevism.