RECONSIDERING FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT:
While we’re wondering, we can only wonder why neither Hoover nor FDR called to mind something of fairly recent memory, namely President Warren Harding’s refusal to leap to governmental quick—and/or possibly permanent—fixes in the face of the post-Great War economic doldrums, doldrums that might well have qualified as a panic. For that matter, one can only wonder what a re-elected Calvin Coolidge might not have done in 1929 had he, in fact, chosen to run in 1928.
By the way, that would be the same Calvin Coolidge who referred to his secretary of commerce as the “boy wonder,” and he was not complimenting him. We can conclude that because Coolidge was known to complain that the aforementioned wonder boy had kept trying to give him advice, “all of it bad.” Who might that cabinet secretary have been but one Herbert Hoover.
That would be the same Herbert Hoover whose misfortune it was to accomplish in 1928 what he had refused to attempt in 1920, namely, run for and win the presidency. During the lead-up to that presidential campaign, leaders of both parties had made serious overtures to the orphaned boy from Iowa who had amassed a small fortune as a mining engineer before serving admirably in the Wilson administration. But Hoover spurned them all.
[Roosevelt biographer David] Beito wastes little time on the eventual Hoover presidency, aside from joining candidate Roosevelt in criticizing this Republican’s penchant for turning to governmental solutions to deal with the panic that might have been. He notes that Hoover spent more on public works than the nine previous presidents combined. A few pages later he quotes from a Roosevelt campaign speech that accused Hoover of presiding over the “greatest spending administration in peace time in all our history.”
Related:
🚨 Thomas Sowell debunks the Great Depression’s most entrenched myth
“There’s this narrative out there that the reason we had mass unemployment in the 1930s was because the market failed. It so happens that for the 12 months following the stock market crash, we never hit double… pic.twitter.com/qo1nbq1P3N
— Thomas Sowell Daily (@DailySowell) April 16, 2026
Tweet continues, “Unemployment peaked at 9 percent two months after the crash and started going down. The unemployment rate was down to 6.3 percent when the federal government figured it had to intervene. And that’s when the downward movement reversed and we never saw 6.3 percent again for the next decade. It’s clear as crystal that the disaster came after federal intervention.”
