Topic 5, Lesson 2: What is Hoover's legacy?

Topic 5, Lesson 2: What is Hoover's legacy?

The 1928 Election

• What were the results of the 1928 Presidential election?

  Candidates

  Parties

  Electoral College Votes

  Percentage of total votes

• How was Republican dominance greater than ever when Hoover got into the White House?

• What did a Republican 1928 campaign poster boast about? This shows the prosperity people felt at the time of Hoover’s inauguration.

• What ironic claim did Hoover make during his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination in 1928?

1928 Presidential Election Results:

Republicans - Herbert Hoover - 444 electoral college votes - 58.2% of total votes

Democrats - Al Smith - 87 electoral college votes - 40.8% of total votes

Republican dominance was stronger than ever at the time of the 1928 presidential election because the party held both the House and the Senate in Congress.

A Republican 1928 campaign poster boasted about “A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage”

In his acceptance speech for the Republican Party nomination in 1928, Herbert Hoover went as far as to claim: “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land”.

This is ironic given the Great Depression that is just around the corner.

Topic 5, Lesson 2: What is Hoover's legacy?

The Successes of Herbert Hoover

• What policies did Hoover, and the other Republican Presidents of the 1920s follow?

• Why was Hoover given the nickname “The Great Engineer”?

• How confident were the US public in Hoover’s ability as President upon his inauguration?

• Hoover followed the Republican policies:

  • Return to ‘Normalcy’

  • Limited government

  • Low taxation

  • Laissez-faire

  • Tariffs

  • Rugged Individualism

• When he was inaugurated in 1929, the rising stock market was taken as proof of the unstoppable prosperity and economic power of the United States.

• No-one foresaw a financial crisis around the corner

• But everyone was confident in Hoover’s ability to deal with a financial crash

• Hoover was known as ‘The Great Engineer’ because:

  • of his work organising emergency relief schemes during and after WW1

  • From 1921, he was an effective and well-respected Secretary of Commerce in the Harding administration

Topic 5, Lesson 2: What is Hoover's legacy?

The Failures of Herbert Hoover

• What were ‘Hoover Blankets’?

• What were ‘Hoover Shoes’?

• What were ‘Hoovervilles’?

• Why might some people argue that Hoover’s defeat in the 1932 presidential election had little to do with him?

By 1932, Hoover’s name had become a term of abuse. The terms coined from his name proved to be durable perceptions of Hoover because they lasted through the years of the New Deals and into Post-War years.

‘Hoover Blankets’ → newspapers homeless people covered themselves with

‘Hoover shoes’ → cardboard inserts in shoes to cover holes in the soles

‘Hoovervilles’ → shanty towns of the unemployed

In one sense, the defeat in the 1932 presidential election had little to do with Hoover. The problems of the world depression were such that every single democratic government that held power in was swept away by 1932.

Topic 5, Lesson 2: What is Hoover's legacy?

Hoover Historical Revisionism

• When did historians start readdressing the Presidency of Herbert Hoover?

• What influenced them to start doing this?

Hoover’s reputation was badly battered between 1930 and 1932.

For 50 years after that, there was a consensus that the New Deals of the 1930s had saved America from the consequences of Hoover’s mistaken policies.

Since the 1980s, historians have reassessed Hoover’s role. This is due to the influence of right-winged politicians in the 1980s such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. New interpretations were emerging whereby people assessed the effectiveness of government intervention in the economy.