Susan in NC’s Reviews > Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America, September 3, 1929–September 3, 1939 > Status Update

“…a worn and haggard Hoover…was told that on his last morning of office the banking system of the United States had stopped functioning. “We are at the end of our string,” said he. “There is nothing more we can do.”…For all Hoover’s asperities, his awkwardness, his political ineptitudes, he had been a resourceful and resolute soldier of a doomed order, and deserved no such personal humiliation.”

“The unhappy President believed that Roosevelt was irresponsibly ready to see the country go to pot in order to get the credit for rescuing it…Roosevelt felt that as a private citizen until March 4, he himself must not join in Presidential action; and also that it was unreasonable to expect him to tie himself to the policies of an unsympathetic and already discredited administration…”

“There were still ambiguities and contradictions in the program: how, for example, could a Federal government assume so many duties and obligations and simultaneously reduce expenses?…It was difficult to judge the real significance of a program which contained so many potential contradictions. But Roosevelt’s confidence was infectious, his smile was winning, and the times were on his side.”

“Not only were ideas boiling; the country was losing patience with adversity. That instinct of desperate men to rebel which was swelling the radical parties in a dozen Depression-hit countries and was gathering stormily behind Hitler in Germany was working in the United States also. It was anything but unified, it was as yet little organized…”

“ Events were moving fast in that summer of 1932, ideas were boiling, and counsels were divided. The Democratic candidate was astute: he had less to lose by facing two ways than by standing fast; by talking about candor than by exercising it.”

“The capitalist system had become so altered that it could not function in its accustomed ways, and the consequences of its failure to function had become too cruel to be borne by free men. Events were marching, and Herbert Hoover was to be among their victims, along with the traditional economic theories of which he was the obstinate and tragic spokesman.”

“…at a time of such widespread suffering no democratic government could seem to be aiding the financiers and seem to be simultaneously disregarding the plight of its humbler citizens…the days had passed when men who lost their jobs could take their working tools elsewhere and contrive an independent living, or cultivate a garden patch and thus keep body and soul together, or go West and begin again on the frontier.”

“In May and June, 1931, capital was fleeing both countries [Germany & Austria], foreign loans were being withdrawn, and a general collapse seemed imminent—a collapse which might cause the downfall of Germany’s democratic government. For that cloud on the German horizon which in 1929 had seemed no bigger than a man’s hand was now growing fast: Hitler’s Brown Shirts were becoming more and more powerful.”

“Not until November 13 did prices reach their bottom for 1929. The disaster which had taken place may be summed up in a single statistic. In a few short weeks it had blown into thin air thirty billion dollars—a sum almost as great as the entire cost to the United States of its participation in the World War, and nearly twice as great as the entire national debt.”