Promising to bring continued peace and prosperity to the nation, he carried 40 states and defeated Democratic candidate Alfred E. Smith , the governor of New York , by a record margin of electoral votes. On October 24, —only seven months after Hoover took office—a precipitous drop in the value of the U. Banks and businesses failed across the country.
Nationwide unemployment rates rose from 3 percent in to 23 percent in Millions of Americans lost their jobs, homes and savings. Many people were forced to wait in bread lines for food and to live in squalid shantytowns known derisively as Hoovervilles. Hoover undertook various measures designed to stimulate the economy, and a few of the programs he introduced became key components of later relief efforts.
He believed in a limited role for government and worried that excessive federal intervention posed a threat to capitalism and individualism. He felt that assistance should be handled on a local, voluntary basis. Accordingly, Hoover vetoed several bills that would have provided direct relief to struggling Americans. By the time of the presidential election, Hoover had become a deeply unpopular—even reviled—figure across much of the country.
Carrying only six states, he was soundly defeated by Democratic candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt , the governor of New York, who promised to enact a slate of progressive reforms and economic relief programs that he described as a New Deal for the American people. He wrote articles and books outlining his conservative political views and warning about the dangers of investing too much power in the federal government.
Hoover returned to public service in the s, serving on commissions aimed at increasing government efficiency for presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower By the time Hoover died at age 90 on October 20, , in New York City , assessments of his legacy had grown more favorable. Start your free trial today. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present.
Lou Hoover was an American first lady and the wife of Herbert Hoover, the 31st president of the United States. As a child, Lou developed an interest in nature and the outdoors, a passion she would follow to Stanford University, where she became one of the Hoover was the first president born west of the Mississippi River.
Herbert Clark Hoover was born on August 10, , in a two-room, whitewashed cottage built by his father in West Branch, Iowa, a small prairie town of just people. Small town and rural banks got almost nothing. Furthermore, at this time, confidence in financial institutions was not the primary concern of most Americans.
They needed food and jobs. Many had no money to put into the banks, no matter how confident they were that the banks were safe. This was the Emergency Relief and Construction Act. This program failed to deliver the kind of help needed, however, as Hoover severely limited the types of projects it could fund to those that were ultimately self-paying such as toll bridges and public housing and those that required skilled workers.
While well intended, these programs maintained the status quo, and there was still no direct federal relief to the individuals who so desperately needed it.
Their anger stemmed instead from what appeared to be a willful refusal to help regular citizens with direct aid that might allow them to recover from the crisis. Hoover became one of the least popular presidents in history. Desperation and frustration often create emotional responses, and the Great Depression was no exception.
Throughout —, companies trying to stay afloat sharply cut worker wages, and, in response, workers protested in increasingly bitter strikes. As the Depression unfolded, over 80 percent of automotive workers lost their jobs. Even the typically prosperous Ford Motor Company laid off two-thirds of its workforce. In , a major strike at the Ford Motor Company factory near Detroit resulted in over sixty injuries and four deaths.
At the Dearborn city limits, local police launched tear gas at the roughly three thousand protestors, who responded by throwing stones and clods of dirt. When they finally reached the gates of the plant, protestors faced more police and firemen, as well as private security guards. As the firemen turned hoses onto the protestors, the police and security guards opened fire.
In addition to those killed and injured, police arrested fifty protestors. One week later, sixty thousand mourners attended the public funerals of the four victims of what many protesters labeled police brutality. The event set the tone for worsening labor relations in the U.
Farmers also organized and protested, often violently. The most notable example was the Farm Holiday Association. Although they never comprised a majority of farmers in any of these states, their public actions drew press attention nationwide. To achieve their goals, the group called for farm holidays , during which farmers would neither sell their produce nor purchase any other goods until the government met their demands.
However, the greatest strength of the association came from the unexpected and seldom-planned actions of its members, which included barricading roads into markets, attacking nonmember farmers, and destroying their produce. Some members even raided small town stores, destroying produce on the shelves. Once they won the auction, the association returned the land to the original owner. In Iowa, farmers threatened to hang a local judge if he signed any more farm foreclosures. At least one death occurred as a direct result of these protests before they waned following the election of Franklin Roosevelt.
In this protest, approximately fifteen thousand World War I veterans marched on Washington to demand early payment of their veteran bonuses, which were not due to be paid until The group camped out in vacant federal buildings and set up camps in Anacostia Flats near the Capitol building. In the spring of , World War I veterans marched on Washington and set up camps in Anacostia Flats, remaining there for weeks. Many veterans remained in the city in protest for nearly two months, although the U.
Senate officially rejected their request in July. By the middle of that month, Hoover wanted them gone. The hardships of the Great Depression threw family life into disarray. Both marriage and birth rates declined in the decade after the crash. The most vulnerable members of society—children, women, minorities, and the working class—struggled the most. Parents often sent children out to beg for food at restaurants and stores to save themselves from the disgrace of begging.
Many children dropped out of school, and even fewer went to college. Childhood, as it had existed in the prosperous twenties, was over.
And yet, for many children living in rural areas where the affluence of the previous decade was not fully developed, the Depression was not viewed as a great challenge. School continued. Play was simple and enjoyed. Families adapted by growing more in gardens, canning, and preserving, wasting little food if any. Home-sewn clothing became the norm as the decade progressed, as did creative methods of shoe repair with cardboard soles. By one estimate, as many as , children moved about the country as vagrants due to familial disintegration.
Some wives and mothers sought employment to make ends meet, an undertaking that was often met with strong resistance from husbands and potential employers. Many men derided and criticized women who worked, feeling that jobs should go to unemployed men.
Some campaigned to keep companies from hiring married women, and an increasing number of school districts expanded the long-held practice of banning the hiring of married female teachers.
Despite the pushback, women entered the workforce in increasing numbers, from ten million at the start of the Depression to nearly thirteen million by the end of the s. This increase took place in spite of the twenty-six states that passed a variety of laws to prohibit the employment of married women.
Others took jobs as maids and housecleaners, working for those fortunate few who had maintained their wealth. Unsurprisingly, African American men and women experienced unemployment, and the grinding poverty that followed, at double and triple the rates of their white counterparts.
By , unemployment among African Americans reached near 50 percent. In rural areas, where large numbers of African Americans continued to live despite the Great Migration of —, depression-era life represented an intensified version of the poverty that they traditionally experienced. Subsistence farming allowed many African Americans who lost either their land or jobs working for white landholders to survive, but their hardships increased.
Life for African Americans in urban settings was equally trying, with blacks and working-class whites living in close proximity and competing for scarce jobs and resources. Life for all rural Americans was difficult.
Farmers largely did not experience the widespread prosperity of the s. Although continued advancements in farming techniques and agricultural machinery led to increased agricultural production, decreasing demand particularly in the previous markets created by World War I steadily drove down commodity prices. As a result, farmers could barely pay the debt they owed on machinery and land mortgages, and even then could do so only as a result of generous lines of credit from banks.
While factory workers may have lost their jobs and savings in the crash, many farmers also lost their homes, due to the thousands of farm foreclosures sought by desperate bankers. Between and , nearly , family farms disappeared through foreclosure or bankruptcy. Even for those who managed to keep their farms, there was little market for their crops.
Unemployed workers had less money to spend on food, and when they did purchase goods, the market excess had driven prices so low that farmers could barely piece together a living. This concept gained greater attention beginning in the Progressive Era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when early social reformers sought to improve the quality of life for all Americans by addressing the poverty that was becoming more prevalent, particularly in emerging urban areas.
However, the sheer volume of Americans who fell into this group meant that charitable assistance could not begin to reach them all. The country had no mechanism or system in place to help so many; however, Hoover remained adamant that such relief should rest in the hands of private agencies, not with the federal government.
Unable to receive aid from the government, Americans thus turned to private charities; churches, synagogues, and other religious organizations; and state aid. But these organizations were not prepared to deal with the scope of the problem.
Private aid organizations showed declining assets as well during the Depression, with fewer Americans possessing the ability to donate to such charities. Likewise, state governments were particularly ill-equipped. Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first to institute a Department of Welfare in New York in City governments had equally little to offer. In Detroit, allowances fell to fifteen cents a day per person, and eventually ran out completely.
In most cases, relief was only in the form of food and fuel; organizations provided nothing in the way of rent, shelter, medical care, clothing, or other necessities. During this time, local community groups, such as police and teachers, worked to help the neediest. New York City police, for example, began contributing 1 percent of their salaries to start a food fund that was geared to help those found starving on the streets.
Chicago teachers did the same, feeding some eleven thousand students out of their own pockets in , despite the fact that many of them had not been paid a salary in months. These noble efforts, however, failed to fully address the level of desperation that the American public was facing. President Hoover was unprepared for the scope of the depression crisis, and his limited response did not begin to help the millions of Americans in need.
The steps he took were very much in keeping with his philosophy of limited government, a philosophy that many had shared with him until the upheavals of the Great Depression made it clear that a more direct government response was required. The steps Hoover did ultimately take were too little, too late. He created programs for putting people back to work and helping beleaguered local and state charities with aid. But the programs were small in scale and highly specific as to who could benefit, and they only touched a small percentage of those in need.
As the situation worsened, the public grew increasingly unhappy with Hoover. He left office with one of the lowest approval ratings of any president in history. In the immediate aftermath of Black Tuesday, Hoover sought to reassure Americans that all was well. Reading his words after the fact, it is easy to find fault. Yet Hoover was neither intentionally blind nor unsympathetic. He simply held fast to a belief system that did not change as the realities of the Great Depression set in.
Hoover believed strongly in the ethos of American individualism: that hard work brought its own rewards. His life story testified to that belief. Hoover was born into poverty, made his way through college at Stanford University, and eventually made his fortune as an engineer.
This experience, as well as his extensive travels in China and throughout Europe, shaped his fundamental conviction that the very existence of American civilization depended upon the moral fiber of its citizens, as evidenced by their ability to overcome all hardships through individual effort and resolve.
The idea of government handouts to Americans was repellant to him. Whereas Europeans might need assistance, such as his hunger relief work in Belgium during and after World War I, he believed the American character to be different. Likewise, Hoover was not completely unaware of the potential harm that wild stock speculation might create if left unchecked.
As secretary of commerce, Hoover often warned President Coolidge of the dangers that such speculation engendered. In the weeks before his inauguration, he offered many interviews to newspapers and magazines, urging Americans to curtail their rampant stock investments, and even encouraged the Federal Reserve to raise the discount rate to make it more costly for local banks to lend money to potential speculators.
However, fearful of creating a panic, Hoover never issued a stern warning to discourage Americans from such investments. Neither Hoover, nor any other politician of that day, ever gave serious thought to outright government regulation of the stock market. This was even true in his personal choices, as Hoover often lamented poor stock advice he had once offered to a friend. When the stock nose-dived, Hoover bought the shares from his friend to assuage his guilt, vowing never again to advise anyone on matters of investment.
He immediately summoned a conference of leading industrialists to meet in Washington, DC, urging them to maintain their current wages while America rode out this brief economic panic. The crash, he assured business leaders, was not part of a greater downturn; they had nothing to worry about.
Similar meetings with utility companies and railroad executives elicited promises for billions of dollars in new construction projects, while labor leaders agreed to withhold demands for wage increases and workers continued to labor.
However, these modest steps were not enough. By late , when it became clear that the economy would not improve on its own, Hoover recognized the need for some government intervention. Hoover also strongly urged people of means to donate funds to help the poor, and he himself gave significant private donations to worthy causes. But these private efforts could not alleviate the widespread effects of poverty. Congress pushed for a more direct government response to the hardship.
Hoover stood fast in his refusal to provide food, resisting any element of direct relief. But Hoover opposed the bill, stating that it ruined the balance of power between states and the federal government, and in February , it was defeated by fourteen votes.
His personal sympathy for those in need was boundless. Hoover was one of only two presidents to reject his salary for the office he held. As conditions worsened, however, Hoover eventually relaxed his opposition to federal relief and formed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation RFC in , in part because it was an election year and Hoover hoped to keep his office.
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