Herbert Hoover: The Crusade Years: 1933-1955: Herbert Hoover’s Lost Memoir of the New Deal Era and Its Aftermath. George H. Nash, ed. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2013.
Originally published in The New Criterion. Volume 33, No. 1, September 2014.
Vilified and ridiculed throughout the second half of his long life—he died in 1964 at the age of ninety—Herbert Hoover was a great and good man. Statesmen often find themselves required to kill, earning their reputations in part by fighting and winning wars. Hoover’s statesmanship consisted first of all in saving lives, literally by the millions. His biographer and editor George Nash estimates that the relief efforts Hoover managed between 1914 and 1923 fed 83 million people in twenty war-ravaged countries. With that sense of the apt historical allusion we no longer have, Europeans of Hoover’s day called him “The Napoleon of Mercy.” During his one, ill-starred term as president, when the Great Depression for which he was blamed left Americans hungry, he again organized food supplies that sustained lives. And although Franklin Roosevelt refused to allow him to reprise these efforts during World War II—”I’m not going to resurrect old Herbie,” he told an aide—Harry Truman put the seventy-two-year-old Hoover back to work, sending him on a thirty-eight-country, five-continent fact-finding mission to determine the extend of the war’s ravages. He urged Truman not to implement the Morgenthau Plan to “pastoralize” Germany, preferring the much wiser and humane Marshall Plan. If to save one life is to save a world, no one knows how many worlds Hoover saved.
Greatness as a man, however, even greatness as a statesman, does not necessarily translate into greatness as a politician. In 1932 Hoover found himself pilloried and defeated by Roosevelt, the master of American politics in that generation, indeed of that century. Hoover devoted much of the remainder of his life not only to defending his economic policies but also, much more importantly, to warning his countrymen against the massive governmental centralization New Deal liberals enacted. The publications he issued during this struggle including eight volumes’ worth of speeches, a three-volume memoir recounting his life through his presidency, a four-volume history of American relief efforts after the world wars, and two volumes unpublished during his lifetime. Of these two, the first is Freedom Betrayed, in which Hoover argues (against Roosevelt and Churchill) for the continuation of the Washington-Monroe policy of American nonintervention in foreign wars and non-entanglement in Old World alliance structures. This amounts to a much more intelligent (if still dubious) version of Charles Lindbergh’s “America First” stance, thankfully with none of Lindbergh’s inane and poisonous hostility toward Jews. Hoover had effectively completed this manuscript at the time of his death, but for reasons best known to themselves his heirs allowed it to remain in the archives of the Hoover Institution until 2013, when Mr. Nash brought it to publication.
The Crusade Years addresses the effects of what he calls the New Deal’s “false liberalism” on the American regime itself, and indeed on any regime in which its tenets are enacted. The book scarcely amounts to a memoir in the usual sense; in his almost perfunctory accounts of his love of family, fly fishing, motor trips, and annual vacations with old school chums in the thirty-odd pages he devotes to such matters we meet a thoroughly public man, not a self-reflective one. Indeed, it’s hard to call this a book at all; obviously unready for publication as such, never completed, it consists in large measure of materials published before. But Nash has served readers well, as what we do have has great value: Hoover’s selection of his most telling speeches against the New Deal regime with narratives connecting and commenting upon them, along with incisive, often devastating assessments of his contemporaries—from the sinister Hitler, whom he met during a 1938 tour of Europeans capitals, to the smarmy poseur Wendell Willkie, the failed Bill Clinton of his day. Throughout, Hoover unrelentingly lays out his case to the fellow citizens who had rejected him.
They rejected him in favor of a new iteration of Progressivism, and since Hoover is often considered a bridging figure between the old republicanism and the new, between what’s now called conservatism (exemplified in Hoover’s lifetime by men like Cleveland and Coolidge) and the liberalism of Wilson and Roosevelt, it’s important to mark the differences between himself and FDR, as he understood them.
American Progressivism had several dimensions, none unique to itself but distinctive in their combination. On the (as it were) ontological level, Progressives rejected the permanent “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” as the sources of right or justice, instead endorsing putative laws of history, of economic and political development. In a word, they replaced Locke with Hegel. Theirs was a democratized Hegelianism, one adapted to American social conditions. Instead of Hegel’s constitutional monarch, we got a president reconceived as a democratic opinion leader, the voice of ‘History’s’ cutting edge; instead of corporations formally represented in parliament, we would see corporations around Congress—interest groups with hired lobbyists seeking to influence votes.
Morally, Progressives emphasized not so much the self-rule and civic courage esteemed by the American Founders as compassion, giving the central government a plethora of churchlike functions, first and foremost being tax-funded charity to the poor It was Bismarck, alert to the socialist threat, who called upon the Christians of Germany to support the welfare state on exactly those grounds.
Politically, Progressives found institutional accommodation to their historical determinism in what Woodrow Wilson called “the Elastic Constitution”—now more often “the Living Constitution.” Under this dispensation, the Constitution no longer means what it actually says; it rather must be interpreted to accommodate the ever-developing Zeitgeist. What gives Progressivism the backbone, the sinew, and the nervous system needed to enforce this rather broad political spiritualism is bureaucracy, justified by the sentiment of compassion but guided by what Wilson called, in his first and pioneering 1887 article, “The Science of Administration.” Universities were to be transformed accordingly, educating the professional classes need to staff the bureaucracy, or to negotiate with it on behalf of clients. Tending toward democratic socialism in economics but with obvious tendencies toward political oligarchy or ‘meritocracy,’ the new Europeanized American state would extract its revenues from capitalist corporations and direct them to whatever good projects opinion leaders envisioned, whether they be public works, welfare programs, education subsidies, the conservation of natural resources, or any of a number of other ‘policy areas,’ which have tended to proliferate as the decades slide by.
Internationally, Progressivism went in several more or less incompatible directions, from the march-of-empire militarism of Albert Beveridge to the pacifism of Jane Addams to what eventually became its dominant motif: liberal internationalism—that is, the institution of worldwide organizations intended to promote the Progressive ideals. These have included the League of Nations and the United Nations, but also the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and literally dozens of others. Hoover suspected that such institutions would weaken American self-government, empowering bureaucratic elites. Hating war, he consistently opposed American military actions overseas and distrusted NATO. He regarded such arrangements principally as the global component of the New Deal template.
Most fundamentally, Hoover rejects the historicist claim that there are no fixed principles except laws of change and development. such principles as gravitation, the existence of God, and “the ceaseless struggle of mankind to be free…have always been and ever will be true.” If so, the principles of moral and political right contradict the Hegelian notion that “the rights of man came from the state”—i.e., from the latest instantiation of History’s dialectic. “The world is in the grip of a death struggle between the philosophy of Christ”—positing a personal, Holy Spirit separate from God’s creation, including human beings endowed with “free will”—”and that of Hegel and Marx.” Hegel posits an impersonal, Absolute Spirit immanent in all being; Marx posits a universe consisting exclusively of matter in dialectical motion—including human beings, whose societies develop according to the iron laws of class struggle. These twin determinisms deny human liberty, thereby obscuring human self-understanding and leaving us vulnerable to the blandishments of tyrants.
“To embody human liberty in workable government, America was born,” said Hoover in American Ideals Versus the New Deal. The state cannot “create and sustain a system of morals”; only religion can do that because only a religion founded upon the Creator-God gives human beings the ontological space for the freedom genuine moral choices require. Statism negates the very social progress Progressives desire not because they violate the claims of rational choice theory—Hoover is no libertarian—but because “the only impulse to social progress is the spark of altruism in the individual human being.” Insofar as government can practice the charity or compassion commended by the Bible, “it is solely because [charity] rises from that spark in the hearts of the people”: “At best, charity by government must be formal, statistical, and mechanistic.”
Having read his Tocqueville, Hoover finds the “essence of our self-government” in the cooperation of citizens “outside of political government”: “The fabric of American life is woven around our tens of thousands of voluntary associations.” To absorb these activities in bureaucracies will destroy American’s distinctive way of life, but more, it will kill the joy of that life—the joy of striving, of proving one’s own worth, of championing justice where you are. “These are the battles which create the national fiber of self-reliance and self-respect. That is what made America. If you concentrate all adventure in the government it does not leave much joy in the governed.” The New Dealers’ rhetoric of class hatred—denunciations of “economic royalists” and the like—acts as moral poison because it corrodes this spirit of association, replacing American self-government with rule by “collegiate oligarchs” who find their joy in running social experiments on the rest of us. “A gigantic shift of government from the function of umpire to the function of directing, dictating, and competing in our economic life,” reduces “every plan in life” to “a bet on Washington,” a bet on what the collegiate oligarchs will think of next, consistent with their liberalism sans liberty.
Hoover maintains that the several relief programs his administration initiated differed from the New Deal in exactly that way. They formed “an emergency operation, not a social experiment” and remained “within the confines of the Constitution of the United States” because they operated through local and state boards staffed by volunteers. Some of the funds came from Washington but “complete decentralization” and therefore self-government prevailed throughout; no professional, permanent bureaucracy was envisioned or established. As a result, he observes, unemployment began to decrease by the summer of 1932—too late to save his administration but a promising start. The effort faltered, he argues, as a result of FDR’s election itself, which caused a bank run and financial panic, leading to a continuation of the Depression in America at a time when mot of Europe was pulling out of it. (Unimpressively, the notorious Smoot-Hawley tariff, signed by Hoover and frequently blamed for worsening the Depression, goes entirely unmentioned; he stubbornly admits no errors.) Agreeing with Progressives that the Industrial Revolution spawned corporations that challenged Americans’ self-government, Hoover attempted to stay within constitutional bounds, as had previous efforts to curb corporate-oligarchic excess: the Interstate Commerce Commission established in 1887 and the Anti-Trust Act of 1890. While Europeans responded to industrialism with “a maze of state-favored trade restraints, combinations, trusts and cartels”—now called crony capitalism—leading to the economic stagnation that made fascism and communism tempting, the United States retained self-government and the innovative dynamism that come with it. That dynamism alone can reverse a depression.
If all this seems uncannily contemporary, it is. At the time of Hoover’s death, Roosevelt’s protégé, Lyndon Johnson, readied a vast extension of the New Deal. But the Great Society, as Johnson called it, floundered in exactly the ways Hoover expected such efforts always would: abroad, in southeast Asia, and at home, when a new generation on the Left demanded, of all things, ‘participatory democracy’ and raged against the bureaucratization of our political life. At the same time, political conservatism began to gather strength, with Governor Ronald Reagan honing Hoover-like criticisms of New Deal statism while rejecting the Old Right’s suspicion of military strength. Today, New Deal liberals have taken to calling themselves progressiis, again, and their struggle against the self-government advocates called the ‘Tea Party’ reprises the same kind of domestic debate, even as ‘neoconservatism’ versus ‘neo-isolationism’ reprises it in foreign policy. So the question, ‘Roosevelt or Hoover?’ remains current. FDR’s assumed relegation of Hoover to history’s dustbin failed because, contra Progressivism, history has not dustbin—only perennial principles and questions that return to challenge every generation.
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