BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

Second in a Series

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, THE WEEKEND EDITION MARCH 16-18, 2018) — Herbert Clark Hoover, as we saw in part one, came to the White House already equipped with a prodigious record of accomplishment in both business (a mining engineer and private-sector entrepreneur) and public service (heroic action in preventing continent-wide famine in Euope following the end of WWI and the ruinous Treaty of Versailles).

Republican Hoover succeeded Woodrow Wilson, assuming the presidency in 1929. Illness had reduced Wilson to a virtual non-entity, allowing — against Hoover’s prophetic advice — a disastrous treaty that turned reparation into retribution. That act of official revenge by the victorious powers set into motion two events in their own right as calamitous as the war itself: economic devastation of Germany and the rise of totalitarianism.

Though party-minded historical revisionists on the Democrat side succeeded in blaming Hoover for The Great Depression that technically began with the stock market crash in late October 1929, in point of fact his actions in his four years as president made it possible for Franklin Roosevelt to exploit economic travail for political purposes. This opportunism directed the nation not to recovery but discovery — the founding of an entirely new concept of the federal government that ran opposed to every conception of this country’s founding ideals, ones that Hoover believed in and upheld with a passion.

Hoover began his battle against worldwide depression immediately upon taking office. He:

— Established the Emergency Relief and Construction Act and the Reconstruction Finance Corp. (RFA). This was planned as a temporary infusion of $4 billion in federal money to be used for specific public works and infrastructure projects.  Roosevent turned it the RFA into the much more sweeping Civilian Construction Corps (CCC).

— Convinced Congress to release early payment of bonuses to WWI veterans.

— Helped restore confidence in the U.S. dollar through its backing by domestic and foreign gold.

— Established a one-year moratorium on repayment of draconian European war debts, helping to stabilize the continent’s economy and delaying by years revolution in Germany. Hitler’s ascendancy came after Roosevelt allowed the suspension of war debt repayment to expire.

— Established programs for bank relief, farm aid, labor reform, industrial revitalization,  federal aid to state and local government, cuts in government spending, and debt reduction.

In the ultimate irony, one that reveals the shrewdness of FDR’s scorched-earth politics, after demonizing Hoover for the Depression during the campaign,Roosevelt adopted nearly all of his predecessor’s programs. Raymond Moley, a key Roosevelt aide, wrote late that “When we burst into Washington, we found every essential idea of the New Deal anticipated” by Hoover. Another adviser called the RFC “the greatest recovery agency” of recovery from the Depression. The key difference between the two men was in scope.

Hoover believed in small government and personal freedom/responsibility. Roosevelt believed in government as cradle-to-grave Big Brother centered around a monarchal president. Hoover believed the Depression to be a product of post-WWI Europe. Roosevelt believed the Depression to be a domestic issue. Hoover had a “noble and self-defeating view that legislation should never be written in service of political agendas”(Kennth Whyte, Hoover, 2017, Knopf). Roosevelt — an elite Easterner with a far more charismatic mien than the plain, unadorned Midwesterner he succeeded — used policy to build the presidency along partisan lines, establishing an authoritarian office unrecognizable compared to American historical precedent, a shift that fit neatly into the rise of totalitarianism around the globe.

Roosevelt must be credited with important initiatives of his own, of course. They included the his imposition of an immediate, four-day bank holiday, passage of the Emergency Banking Act, the legalization of beer (dooming Prohibition), and creation of the Tennessee Valley authority. At the same time, however, he was the architect of a “vote-buying scheme” that echoed Tammany Hall, “funneling of relief funds to strategic Democratic districts … [and] playing Santa Claus with public money” (Whyte). Mpreover, Roosevelt’s pursuit of a nationalistic economic policy, as Whyte points out, contributed greatly to the cause of militarists in Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union leading almost inevitably to WWII.

After Hoover, America would never look back and never recover its founding ideals. The Dream had died.

This series continues on Monday.

Have a great weekend, everybody.

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“The habit of spending public money like drunken sailors for political purposes ensures the absolute corruption of government” — Sir Tiberius Fruitjuice.

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

The Usual Disclaimer.