Off Topic — HabitableZone

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Thanks 2.0
Robert — (archived)

I'm often impressed at the way stuff like that seems to flow smoothly from your brain to the page. Pure information, and it's helpful to the experiment.

I'm putting together from bits and pieces that you (generically) think that Hoover would eventually have solved the Great Depression, albeit by a different path than FDR. If so, and borrowing the alternate history plot device of "the timeline repairing itself", then Hoover probably would have enjoyed the same support as FDR, and might still have been in office at the start of the war. Or, at least, at the start of hostilities in Europe, stipulating that America might have held back or not joined in at all.

So we come to another important fork in the road. You don't think that Hoover would have been as effective a wartime President as FDR. Here we might stop and ponder whether individuals are as important to history as we like to think, enjoying heroic myths as much as we do. Might Hoover have gotten good advice to help him? Might good people have come forward, recognizing Hoover's deficits? Or, dredging up the darker history of the times and of American businesses profiting from trade with the combatants, might Hoover's pro-business outlook have led him to try and play both sides hoping for immediate profit and future advantage?

Back to you, Larry....

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