The Fight That Just Wont Die: The Roosevelt vs Hoover Election Lives On

The discord that animated the US during the Great Depression lives on in the arguments of conservatives and liberal assessments of Roosevelt and Hoover as Richard Rapaport describes in Salon:

"Gore Vidal tells of an apocryphal pilgrimage each April 12, the anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt's death at Warm Springs, Ga. The trek, organized by the Dutchess County New York Republican Central Committee, supposedly wends its way up the old Albany Post Road from Poughkeepsie to Springwood, FDR's beloved Hyde Park home. According to Vidal, the mythic mission is meant to reassure twitchy Republicans that the 32nd president still rests in something approaching peace at the Hyde Park Presidential Library -- that he has not risen for some new 21st century "rendezvous with destiny."

Fable or not, Roosevelt's mythic resurrection is not just a wisp-of-the-political-wind. Today, perhaps more than any time in generations, the American right seems unable to rest easy until all vestiges of the social welfare programs associated with FDR's New Deal are dead and buried with him.

In '32 it was Roosevelt's "New Deal" that trumped Hoover's "New Day," beginning the unprecedented regime of social and economic interventionism that remains a critical national inflection point, one that Roosevelt partisans still believe saved the republic, and that Hooverites still violently attack as the beginning of the American welfare state.

In this clash, there remains a central enigma in what, with the possible exception of McCarthyism, remains America's most fiercely fought ideological conflict: Why was the uniquely capable Hoover so ill-equipped to meet America's worst economic crisis, while the seemingly out-of-his-depth Roosevelt managed to attack the Depression so effectively? Leave it to the Hooverites. Generation after generation, they have dedicated themselves to chipping away in an obsessive, decades-long campaign to discredit and overturn the "socialistic" theories and practice of the New Deal.

Throughout Roosevelt's never-to-be-equaled 12-year presidency and for over 60 years since, New Deal social welfare policies have rooted themselves in the American political briar patch. Yet, despite the popular acceptance of Social Security, Medicare and the panoply of today's New Deal-inspired social and economic programs, the Hooverite intellectual holding action has successfully fended off the final victory of Roosevelt's liberal vision over Hoover's free-market conservatism. Their ongoing counterattack is informed by the philosophies of Hoover, braced by the work of the institution bearing his name, and paid for by the free-market capitalists who still worship at Hoover's stately Stanford obelisk.

Today, 92 years after its founding, the Hoover Institution continues to venerate free enterprise, from which, according to the organization's mission statement, "springs initiative and ingenuity … in which the Federal Government should undertake no governmental, social or economic action except where local government, or the people, cannot undertake it for themselves." It is a sentiment widely disseminated in institution publications like the "Hoover Digest," a quarterly running stories with titles like "Permanent Tax Cuts: The Best Stimulus," "Why Detroit's Next Chapter Should Be Chapter 11" and other similarly oriented works by rightist public policy thinkers like Daniel Pipes, Victor Davis Hanson, Fouad Ajami and Niall Ferguson.

They and others under the Hoover Institution umbrella are today's intellectual sword-bearers in the Grand Duel between America's 31st and 32nd presidents, which survived Roosevelt's 1945 death and Hoover's 1964 passing. The Duel is a constant presence in the daily discourse of the modern era. In 2009, for example, the New York Times' Adam Cohen rebuked conservative talk show host Monica Crowley for her contention that the New Deal actually prolonged the Great Depression, an exemplar of popular, modern Hooverite doggerel. For his part, Cohen took this as a not so veiled assault on Obama economics -- a viewpoint, according to Cohen, that neither the Americans of the 1930s nor their modern-day heirs would buy. "They knew," wrote Cohen, "that FDR was on their side in a way that Herbert Hoover and his fellow free marketers hadn't been."

For today's liberals, the notion of FDR as a political Rip Van Winkle returning to the Hudson Valley in a political thunderclap is, to say the least, a better prospect than it was in 1982, the Roosevelt centenary. Back then, it was the second year of Ronald Reagan's presidency, a time when the five-decade idea of the New Deal seemed to be in general retreat. It was an era in which "Big Gubment" was the bull's-eye for a muscular new American conservatism. Supporters anticipated the happy irony of Reagan applying his own jaunty, even Rooseveltian, dash towards the task of terminating New Deal-inspired social programs, returning instead to those Hooverite principles of individual self-reliance. It was a time, according to the Roosevelt Library's Cynthia M. Koch, "that Franklin Roosevelt's legacy was very much contested," so much so, she concedes, "that it was even difficult to get a national FDR celebration underway."

That discontented winter of 1982, the Roosevelt/New Deal tide was clearly ebbing in Washington, where the funding for an FDR Tidal Basin monument was bottled up in Congressional committee. Things were not going well at Hyde Park, either. A week before FDR's 100th birthday, fire destroyed one of Springwood's upper floors. Flames scorched the facade, giving the place a look of neglect, if not ruin. In a similar vein, the ongoing debate over FDR's historic place was exemplified by talk about removing his leonine profile from the dime, and even, some Republican partisans muttered, replacing it with Reagan's. The latter was sadly symbolic, particularly considering the role the polio-stricken Roosevelt played in animating the March of Dimes.

Although FDR kept his head on the 10-cent piece, it wasn't without controversy, thanks in part to his legacy in the Joe McCarthy/HUAC Red Scare. While McCarthyism flourished through the late '40s and early '50s, pro-FDR biographers like William Leuchtenburg and James MacGregor Burns seemed obliged to excuse the deals he cut with Stalin at Tehran and Yalta, while assailing "fellow travelers" like Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White whom Roosevelt stood accused of harboring in his administration. In the radical 1960s, Roosevelt's legacy was disparaged for having established the West Coast internment camps for Japanese-Americans, attacked for not paying enough attention to Nazi genocide, declared politically incorrect for hiding his disability and even being, outlandishly, blamed for suppressing intelligence that could have prevented the Pearl Harbor attack.

Even Into the '00s and beyond, FDR biographers felt compelled to include references to Arthur Laffer's "Supply-Side Economics" and Milton Friedman's monetarist theories in an attempt to excuse Roosevelt's increasingly unfashionable Keynesian policies and New Deal social welfare programs in the face of the ascendant Hooverite economic arguments of the Reagan era. Consider, for example, the New York Times bestseller list clash the year before last between neoconservative Amity Shlaes' "The Forgotten Man," which the Nation described as "nothing less than an attempt to reclaim the history of the 1930s for the free market," and liberal Jonathan Alter's "The Defining Moment," unambiguously subtitled "FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope."

Even if that deal was light on specifics, Americans were growing to like the messenger. With a commanding lead going into the election, Roosevelt played it safe, embracing conventional thinking, calling, for example, for today's equally wrong-headed political ne plus ultra: a balanced budget. It didn't matter. "Vote for Roosevelt," one wag telegraphed Hoover, "make it unanimous!"

The '32 campaign was, above all else, about confidence and connection. Hoover, for all his intelligence and energy, seemed emotionally incapable of striking that right, reassuring note. It was, in fact, Hoover who first applied the then-voguish Freudian construction "depression" to the crisis, according to historian Robert McElvaine, because "it had a less ominous ring than the previously used descriptors, 'panic' and 'crisis.'

Hoover's failures were not for lack of effort. Despite popular conviction, he was no American Nero, fiddling inside the Oval Office while the country burned. Hoover funded public work and relief programs at then-unprecedented levels. He used the presidential "bully pulpit" as capably as anyone since FDR's late cousin, Theodore. Hoover jawboned businesses to prevent them from cutting workers' wages. He pushed through a moratorium on World War I-related German reparations. Hoover also encouraged the private sector to create its own self-help organizations, including the Federal Farm Bureau, National Business Survey Conference and National Credit Corporation.

Unfortunately, his good decisions were overmatched by the disastrous ones. In 1930, against the advice of leading economists, Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, effectively slaughtering international trade and devastating already distressed American agriculture and livestock production. Similarly debilitating was the 1932 Revenue Act, a tax-increase that led, disastrously, to a severe contraction of the money supply. By 1933, so little legal tender was in circulation that alternative "scrip" was circulated in many American towns and cities.

In the end, Hoover's belief in the power of volunteerism and reliance on the "wisdom of the market" simply didn't work. Roosevelt hammered home the point in his acceptance speech at the '32 Democratic convention in Chicago: "Our Republican leaders tell us economic laws -- sacred, inviolable, unchangeable -- cause panics which no one could prevent. But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings."

The American public would forgive Roosevelt for distancing himself from his predecessor. His infectious confidence was enough, with or without Hoover's assistance, to raise the pulse of a nearly moribund national economy. "The country needs, and unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation," Roosevelt told an electrified Minnesota college audience.

While FDR's declaration of a "Bank Holiday" on his second day in office may have stretched the bounds of presidential authority, he did not, as many supporters and newspaper editorialists urged, militarize the New Deal. With a belief in the market, and an uncanny feel for the fundamentally optimistic American soul, FDR was the best, and quite possibly the last, great hope for American capitalist democracy even if conservatives continued to mistake him for Hugh Johnson's American "MUSCLEINNY." Yet even a free-marketeer like Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard extols Roosevelt's decision to govern constitutionally as "an extraordinary accomplishment that held together both America's economic and political center even when alternative models across the Atlantic appeared to be working better."

If FDR was no Augustus to Theodore's Julius, was he, in the celebrated phrase of the day, "a traitor to his class?" Such was the droll insinuation of Peter Arno's September 1936 New Yorker cartoon published with Roosevelt on the brink of a reelection landslide. In the cartoon, a trio of Arno's primped, DAR dowagers gleefully urges a group of their friends to join them for a bit of sport: "Let's go down to the Trans-Lux," one says, "and hiss Roosevelt!"

Today, Roosevelt still draws the enmity of the "rich-right," and would be the first to stir the stormy critical waters he loved to dare, as he did in the speech he gave at Madison Square Garden immediately prior to the '36 election. In that oration, Roosevelt gleefully gouged "the old enemies of peace; business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, and war profiteering." "Never before," Roosevelt called out in his famously jovial sing-song cadence, "in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me," he thundered about the ruling class, "and I welcome their hatred!"

Indeed, in 1937, as a reenergized economy seemed to be edging out of the Depression, another downturn hit, plunging America back into economic crisis. There are those economists like Berkeley's John McArthur, whose "Making Markets Work" argues that "the new downturn turned severe because an overly-optimistic Administration pulled the plug on New Deal programs at the same time it raised taxes." Shlaes doesn't buy it, believing that by 1938, "there was a new sense of permanence about the Depression." The case could equally be made that today's tenuous recovery is similarly in danger due to a Republican Party short-circuiting the current recovery by killing job-producing programs before they can be fully effective.

Slowing down the New Deal in 1938, which Roosevelt felt forced to do, meant that full employment would not be reached until the wartime year 1942. Yet the Republican attempt to strangle the New Deal in no way mitigated the ultimate effect of Roosevelt's programs, which MacArthur argues was "nothing less than a revision of the American social compact." Despite current rightist outcries to the contrary, out of the New Deal came general consensus that unregulated capitalism could never again be allowed to run rampant as it had in 1929, and that it was the government's responsibility to provide a safety net to citizens in distress.

There was another epochal effect of the New Deal, which was the rescue of a generation from the despair of the "Hoovervilles" -- breadlines and sharecropper hovels. These were the Depression-era youth employed in the Civilian Conservation Corp, Farm Security Administration, Public Works Administration, and other of the New Deal "alphabet soup" of work programs. In all of them, young men and women could work and learn, as well as send vitally needed wages home. Ignored, this generation could easily have been shock troops in a rising that would have ended American democracy. Instead, they were the millions prepped to serve their nation in a World War in defense of freedom and democracy. The Roosevelt Library's Koch believes strongly that "it is a false dichotomy to separate the New Deal from World War II." Rather, she says, "victory in the War was the culmination of New Deal principles applied on a worldwide stage."

Only with Roosevelt's April 1945 death came some measure of absolution for Hoover, this in the wildly unlikely guise of the new president, Harry S. Truman. Within months of taking office, Truman invited Hoover to the White House to discuss a subject about which the ex-president was still master --feeding the starving in the backwash of war. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship between the two men. Truman then asked Hoover to apply his expertise to reorganizing American government. Over the next dozen years, Hoover chaired various so-called "Hoover Commissions" working to streamline elements of government. He even came up with the heretical, tongue-in-cheek notion of granting baseball batters an additional strike, designed, Hoover suggested, "to get more men on base."

Into the 1960s, Hoover burnished his image as America's "elder statesman." He was an early booster of a young Southern Californian lawyer and Navy vet, Richard Nixon; Hoover sponsored Nixon as a member of Northern California's celebrated Bohemian Grove encampment. Before his death in 1964, Hoover shared his simple, salty strategy for surviving the Grand Duel with FDR and the New Deal: "I outlived the bastards!"

The Roosevelt/Hoover Grand Duel continues to be fought at fascinating times and places. There was the August 2007 appearance by Amity Shlaes in Ellsworth, Maine, to discuss "The Forgotten Man" at a forum sponsored by a local newspaper, the Ellsworth American. Vacationing at his nearby summer home, Frank Roosevelt felt compelled to attend. At the end of Shlaes' presentation, Roosevelt stood, introduced himself, and spoke in defense of his grandfather's legacy. He professed disappointment at what he called "the selective anecdotes of a few people hurt by the New Deal" that, in his view, form the backbone of Shlaes' narrative. As Roosevelt explained to the audience, "it was simply unfair to the millions of people for whom the New Deal was literally a gift from heaven." Not that you are likely to be able to convince the latest generation of Hooverites, for whom, seemingly, even the ghost of the man is an existential threat requiring those yearly graveside visits to assure that, however restive his soul, the great man still resides in his crypt in the garden at Hyde Park.