Xinyu Tan’s Reviews > Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 > Status Update

At this moment Hoover stood on the shore of a political and ideological Rubicon...Sometimes lumped together as Hoover's second program against the Depression, these measures would eventually help to revolutionize the American financial world. They would also lay the groundwork for a broader restructuring of government's role in many other sectors of American life, a restructuring known as the New Deal.

the Allies had once more than once offered to relax their demands on Germany, but only if their own obligations to the US could be forgiven...Iron-toothed insistence on full payment of the debts thus became not only a financial issue but a political and a psychological issue as well, a totem of disgust with corrupt Europe,...and of provincial America's determination to be suckered by silky international financiers.

The hugger-mugger of partisan politics continued to offend him. He remained a manager, not a politician. Perhaps the long adjournment of Congress even struck him as an opportunity to take charge of the antidepression battle without being pestered by nattering, grandstanding legislators. The virulence of Democratic antagonism, a sorely beset Hoover complained in his memoirs, "no man could measure or conciliate."

At this late date in March 1931, nearly a year and a half after the stock market crash, they still had no coherent analysis of what was happening and no agreed plan of action.

In the last analysis, Hoover's earliest responses to the economic crisis revealed as much about the boundaries of available intelligence and inherited institutions in Depression-era America as they did about the alleged narrowness of his beliefs.

Hoover himself appreciated these arguments [against the Hawley-Smoot Tariff] but possessed neither the political power to stop the congressional steamroller nor the political will to veto the final legislation...In this direct confrontation with a contrary-minded Congress, Hoover had failed the first great test of his capacity for political leadership.

Throughout the decade of 1920s, [Hoover] had promoted trade associations with the purpose of stabilizing prices, protecting employment, and rationalizing production in various industrial sectors, all through enlightened, voluntary cooperation among businessmen, with government's encouragement.

To a degree uncommon among presidents, Hoover was a reflective man of a scholarly bent, even something of a political philosopher. Ironically, the very care with which he had crafted his guiding principles, and the firmness of his commitment to them, would in time count his major liabilities as a leader. So would his habits of solitude, formed early in life and reinforced by cruel experience.