Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Understand: tired

A few data points
Larry J — (archived)

President Eisenhower sends the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, AK to enforce desegregation from the Brown v. Board of Education decision. President Kennedy (through his brother, the AG) orders wiretaps on Martin Luther King. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 would never have passed had it not been for the strong support of Republicans over the opposition of Democrats like Al Gore's father and Bill Clinton's mentor, Senator Fullbright. The Democrat dogma of Republicans being opposed to civil rights doesn't stand up to any kind of examination.

Back to the original question, what would've happened had Hoover been reelected in 1932? The popular mythology is that Hoover didn't want to do anything to end the Depression but that just isn't true. Hoover was a man who made is reputation on helping Europe recover from the ravages of WWI. He was hardly an uncaring man.

Herbert Hoover has been accused of being a do-nothing president who allowed the country to continue to slide into its worst depression ever. Some will grudgingly admit that Hoover did take some action, but that it was too little, too late. But the truth is far more complex. Hoover did intervene after the Stock Market crash, but the acts passed by Congress and signed by Hoover were the worst kind of intervention: they actually exacerbated the problem. The most famous of these interventions was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Raising tariffs was one of the worst things that could be done. Remember, both free market advocates and Keynesians agree that lowering prices would cure a depression, it's just that the Keynesians believe government intervention is necessary. A tariff does exactly the wrong thing by raising prices. Thus Smoot-Hawley was guaranteed to worsen any depression, not improve it. Other acts passed during Hoover's administration had similar effects of either raising prices or keeping them artificially high when they should have been dropping. Thus, it's not that Hoover was a do-nothing president, it's that he intervened in exactly the wrong way.

In the end, many economists believe that many of the policies enacted by FDR actually prolonged the Depression. So, had Hoover won in 1932, it's possible that he would've continued to make mistakes like signing the Smoot-Hawley Act, but it's also possible that he wouldn't have made some of the bigger blunders of the FDR Administration like wage and price controls and excessive regulation that made the Depression last so long.

To me, the really interesting question is what would've happened in the 1936 and 1940 elections had FDR lost in 1932. Would Republicans have won those elections, too? Would an isolationist have been president when WWII broke out? As much as I disagree with many of FDR's economic and social policies, I still believe he was the right man to be president when the war broke out.

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