Experience. Spee. Host hello. The book is the crusade years 19331955 Herbert Hoovers lost memoir of the new deal era and its aftermath. The editor is george nash the most esteemed scholar of Herbert Hoover today. Herbert hoover, he served from 1929233 which means he was the president who saw the worst years of the depression. The Great Depression was so bad that a lot of our modern history is about assigning blame for it figuring out whose fault that depression was. Many people blame hoover down the decades increasinincreasin gly so. The 31st president in first president United States was ranked 37 out of 43 in a recent u. S. News poll. That magazine voted hoover he was known as the poor communicator who fueled. Wars have exacerbated the depression. Not only those on the left but also sometimes on the right assigned blame to herbert and we are here today to talk about that specifically and president who wears on and analysis, his own work which blames other people as well including his successor Franklin Roosevelt and his predecessor Calvin Coolidge. We want to welcome the viewers to this hoover revision. Dr. Nash is a frequent guest on this channel. Richard norton smith introduced him and interviewed him a few years ago for another book and this time we are going to give license to this crucial controversial depression subject we are going to break our hour into three parts. The first part is to remind ourselves who hoover was in the second part is to talk about the production of this tremendous book and its many pages and much editing in detail in the third part will be to talk about why it matters. What about the Great Depression and today cspan viewers and george welcome. Hoovers identity really begins in college and you have written a whole book about that. Where did hoover go to college and how did it affect him . Guest first of all he was born in 1874 in iowa as the son of lakers and the son of a blacksmith and he was orphaned before he was 10. He went out to live eventually with an uncle in oregon never had more than a middle School Education really. And then applied for entrance into newly formed Stanford University in the summer of 1891 he got admission was told to take additional tutoring with the help of which he passed most of his entrance exams so he was allowed to enter. He was literally the first at Stanford University in the fall of 81 getting his dormitory room of head of anyone else. That became in a deep sense his alma mater. You have to remember he was an orphan boy and was trying to make it in the world. He was only 17 when he entered college and he was rather shy. He became student body treasurer by the time he was out of college and stanford meant so much to him that about 25 years or so after that after world war i hoover literally dealt his own home on the stanford campus. Thats still there and its the official residence. Host dr. Nash what did he do with his education . He stuttered engineering, mining engineering. Guest his official major was geology and that became his career after he graduated in the class of 1895. After a year or two in the United States you got a break and was hired by a british mining Engineering Firm that was preeminent in the world at the time and he was sent as a gunman to australia. Before he left australia at the age of 23 he was already manager of one of the great goldmines in the Australian Gold rush. From there he got married to a stanford woman and also was a geology measure of possibly the first in a nice is to have that major. We cant be sure but she was a pioneer in her own right. Lou henry hoover. Eventually hoover use london as his base during his mining engineering career which took him up to world war i. He became successful at it then traveled all over the world to different places like irma China Australia and so forth and had a Great Success with that first career. Host we want to stop a minute and think about this. Imagine you have a son or daughter and he goes to college and studies that thing that the world needs most at that point, getting minerals out of the ground. A growing economy needs minerals especially when the world is on the Gold Standard and your child is the best city kid educated in that area studied with masters at stanford and also the most the best paid young men of his generation and certainly one of the most successful. He wasnt just any success. Guest you are quite right. He became the outstanding mining engineer of his time and he was recognized for that. He was earning in 1908 to 1914 in excess of 100,000 a year which was a lot of money in those preincome tax days but he did to stop there. By the time he was 40 he was a modest millionaire. Im not a midas or a rockefeller or mellow perhaps that he wanted to do more with his life and having done well in his profession he wanted to do something more creative perhaps give back and buy a chain of circumstances that led to his second career as a humanitarian. Host thats right and professor nash has written about this stage of his early life life. He moved first in wartime to getting americans back to the u. S. In world war i and then to a great rescue of the people of l. Jim and then to the food administrators. That was the beginning of american politics. Guest in the month of his 40th birthday. He always had the notion he would return to the United States and get into public life in some way probably by buying a newspaper. I think he thought he would come and newspaper owner any rate circumstances turned his life in a different direction and as you just pointed out helps american tourists stranded in europe get home and was asked to organize what was thought to be a temporary emergency Relief Mission to help the distressed people of belgium who had just been overrun by the german army. They didnt have enough food and that turned into something that was without precedent in the history of humanity feeding an entire occupying nation, several Million People over 9 Million People if you count the couple million in northern france that fell into that sphere. That made hoover and International Hero and the symbol of the new force in the world at that time american benevolence. Here was the new world coming to help the old in its tribulation. Huber was doing this not by conducting war but i dealing with the problem of war as a humanitarian. That made him an International Hero and made him an American Hero as well and he entered the administration when we entered the war and became food administrator. Now he is a World Authority on food and food relief. A new field humanitarian relief and accolade called the master of emergencies, the napoleon of adversity and at the end of the war he went back on wilsons instructions to organize relief to europe many countries over 20 countries receive Food Assistance that hoover orchestrated and facilitated and truly tens of millions of people were dependent on that relief. Host at that time he had the opportunity to form some opinions about the revolutions that were going on in europe where there was germany or russia. Tell us a little bit about russia because he had investments there and he saw what happened with the russian revolution. Hoover as an american traveled all over the world and he was a perceptive observer. He was constantly comparing the america he knew what these other social systems many of which were failing. As you mentioned there was great turmoil in the aftermath of world war i. Economists had taken over russian the bolshevik revolution in 1917 and hoover had basically pulled out of russia mining interests before the revolution. They lost a prospective fortune when economists came in and seized the minds and general chaos ensued. It was one of the great lessons he drew from that postwar experience. He saw it as the failure of command and control economies as we would say into use the word socialism bolshevism and so forth especially in russia and he saw this as a great failure but also as a great challenge philosophically to the american way. Which probably resulted in his saving more lives than any person who has ever lived. Thats a remarkable achievement. After that he returns to United States in 1919 and injured American Public life. Host thats right and we are going to move through his career very quickly just to brief the reader so we can get to the controversy. He was such a success that those parties vied for his affection. In the end he went republican. He was commerce secretary to president harding and president coolidge and didnt get along very well with president coolidge did he . Guest initially they did but it became increasingly attends relationship. Partly because hoover was much more aggressive in terms of wanting to do public works expenditures and so on that graded against trumans more fiscal conservatism so there were tensions with they were both Party Loyalists so coolidge did in doors hoover ultimately and 28 and went hoover ran for reelection so its a complicated story but you are right. It became a tense relationship underneath. Host thats right and coolidge is no longer president. Hoover was president and just as hoover becomes president within a year the stock market crashes so hoover is stuck with the albatross of the downturn and this is why theyre so much emphasis and so much focus. What did hoover do in the depression period in those first years as president . Lets point out the highlights. Guest hoover did not leave enlace fair. That was even before he was president so by the standards and the historic stanzas of the presidency he was an activist. What he tried to do was bring in leaders of industry and bankers and so forth to have acquired british approach that would hopefully stimulate recovery through Greater Public works spending and the like. There were phases to what hoover did. He did some things that he has been criticized for by conservatives by agreeing to the this smoothawley terra for example. Host there was a great tariff which he signed called smoothawley. Some of us have seen a little scene about it in Ferris Buellers day off and that tariff was a burden on business at a time when business could ill afford it. Guest hoover was reluctant to sign it that it had been pushed through. It was something that his party stood for historically. He did hope that in the law as written he could turn it to better advantage by setting up a Tariff Commission that would presumably be more impartial and perhaps lower as well as raise tariffs of the other of the hope that scientifically things would work out better. That probably was it for one minute. Host what about wages . Guest he and other leaders of industry have the view that wages should remain where they were. The argument being that this would create purchasing power for people who are struggling perhaps unemployed and so forth. That has been much debated. Host he was like henry ford though. Henry ford believes pay hyundai will buy back the car so its not keynesianism because keynes wasnt around in this way but its an idea that its very popular now. Consumer spending is good for the economy. Guest hoover was a protokeynesian in the sense that he believed in stimulating the economy through countercyclical expenditure on public works. Hoover was an engineer so he had an interest in that kind of thing. I think what happens to hoover as the depression deepens and people did note was the Great Depression on day one. They thought it was probably a cyclical event but when that pattern didnt hold in the depression deepened hoover found himself increasing pressure for greater expenditures and intervention in a common meme started to hold the line against that and became very much a fiscal conservative balance the budget say the Gold Standard in the last year or two of his life. That perceived rigidity on his part was part of the reason he was attacked supposedly forgot doing anything. He believes some policies might not have been all that effective. On the other hand he was valiantly struggling against a total status turn such as he saw coming in the new deal. Host there are so many cliches. Some people blame him for being too active and some peep all blame him for doing nothing laissezfaire and neither is entirely correct. This is why your writings about hoover are so important. Theres a thirdgrade measure that is often discussed which is they had an enormous tax increase in the later part of hoovers time. I often think and what do you think doctors nash that in todays terms to go for a high tax i believe in the 60 range from the 25 or 24 that they had when they started seems like a lot but he was operating in the Gold Standard world and in the Gold Standard world washington must balance the budget and even enforce and a recession on it by taking the gold away. What do you think about this tax increase and guest there was a consensus among economists and politicians at both parties in the that late 31 and early third two that the federal deficit was so gigantic that there had to be tax increases to balance the budget because as you say balancing the budget was perceived to be critical to recovery. The question was do you have a National Sales tax or miscellaneous tax or income tax . I think hoovers favorite was the manufacturers sales tax but eventually what happened was there was a whole bunch of taxes i have to ride out the consensus of the economic thinking at that time was that this was a wise idea. Its not something that hoover foisted upon the congress. There was consensus. The battle was do you soak the rich or do Something Else . So those were the parameterparameter s of the debate. Secondly if you look at the results of that tax increase even after the rates were raised, 90 of the American People did not pay any income tax. Im inclined to think whether it was a good idea or a bad idea it was not the catastrophic explanatory idea for the late phase of the depression that some on the right would say. So i tend to think that the tax increase while probably a mistake by our understanding of policy was not nearly as much of a mistake or in that context you might say what choice did they have . I think hoovers gotten too much criticism on that. Host you think of it in an emotional art. The stock market went down into the 40s from 381. The country is very angry so who had they chosen to blame . Its hoover. He is the most blamed president in a way and quickly to move on a little bit before we talk about the work of a biographer and editor, hoover is out in 33 out on his rear and unfortunately not included and goes back to california. You have said that he resented the u. S. Presidency because long after the presidency held the record in fact until jimmy carter surpassed him of more than three decades. Can you briefly tell us what he did in that postpresidency. Too . Guest you are exactly right, he was a pariah when he left office and hate it as much as any person in American History but he did not go quietly away. He did go out to california. He stayed out of sight for about a year and a half so it gave roosevelt the chance. He wanted to permit a genuine change of administration but hoover then became for reasons of temperament and partly because of his wanting to vindicate himself and partly because of the threat and merging the k that as an expresident. Maybe Theodore Roosevelt had inclinations along that line but hoover became really the leader of the opposition. He fought back. He wrote a book in 1934 which was kind of his return to the scene called the challenge to liberty and perhaps who will talk about that in a moment. He ended up becoming a figure as critic of the new deal. He actually really wanted to be president again and there is considerable evidence in 1940 he was angling for hoping for the republican nomination said he wanted to return to public life. He became i would say the intellectual leader of the Republican Party during the period from 1933 until eisenhower said administration and the return of the republicans to the presidency in 1953. Hoover became a man of faith wife because he saw himself as a progressive republican and historic liberal. He was battling against what he saw as a much greater status challenge from the left and that pushed them toward the right. All these years he is writing books and doing all sorts of philanthropic work. People forget that all for almost 30 years he was the chair of the boys club and made that into a major philanthropy for an urban voice and he did a huge amount of travel. So he was an extraordinarily activist expresident and that i think is something people tend to forget. Host this is a story that is not told especially the part about the Republican Party. We sort of forgot it if we ever knew it that he advised for example william f. Buckley. He was around when the conservative freemarket journal for freeman was created. He was a counselor to many conservatives or out of power republicans. They didnt always take his advice and he gave it often but he was there and that father figure is underappreciated in modern history as well. He had a phrase of regimentation. What did that mean . Guest that was his term for the new deal. It was a variant of a number of variants of what he called statism state control of the economy, state control of Society Socialism communism ism. It was the american variant w