The President
The ATLANTIC MONTHLY
MARCH 1932
VOLUME 149
‘ LEADERSHIP is a quality of the individual.... It is one of the most profound and important of exact psychological truths that man in the mass does not think, but only feels. . . . Popular desires are no criteria to the real need; they [sic] can be determined only by deliberative consideration, by education, by constructive leadership.’ — HERBERT HOOVER
IN the course of the year 1922, Mr. Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce in the Harding Cabinet, paused to set down on paper his political and personal philosophy. Behind him at that time stretched a strange and extraordinarily successful career; before him hovered even more brilliant possibilities. The little book which resulted was shaped out of the experience of that singular past; it must have been tinged as well (since it was intended for publication) by thoughts for the future. Thus it was doubly interesting, for it indicated not only what Mr. Hoover was, but what he wished people to think him to be as well. Mr. Hoover, in short, had reason to hope that he might one day be elected to the Presidency of the United States, and he was issuing his prospectus. It was called American Individualism. Did anyone really read it? Whether or not he quite realized it himself, the life upon which he looked back bordered on the miraculous. Mr. Hoover was a man not yet fifty years old. His first twenty years had been passed in the harsh obscurity which surrounds the poor American boy. Then had come a startling transition — the next twenty years were spent in the very different, but hardly less complete, obscurity which enshrouds the successful Briton. Then for a second time chance intervened; on the threshold of his fifth decade Mr. Hoover suddenly became a world figure, a great American whose name was recognized in millions of households throughout his own country and abroad, whose opinions were eagerly quoted by any newspaper to which he gave them, upon whom there beat, for largely accidental reasons, the blazing light of an international and wholly favorable publicity. At twenty, fate had translated him from insignificance and poverty to importance and wealth; at forty, the magic wand had waved again and he had been metamorphosed from a London business man and private individual into a great humanitarian and American public servant. To be the subject of such miracles is sometimes perilous. Mr. Hoover, of course, possessed the character which enabled him to take advantage of these strange opportunities; but that does not mean that he created them himself or that he was quite the same man as another would have been who had attained to such eminences by a less dizzy route.
Mr. Hoover had passed his boyhood on the slimmest of resources and no prospects, struggling for a living and an education in the raw newness of the Pacific Northwest. He had worked his way through a raw, new college, arriving upon its campus before its first buildings had been completed and graduating in its first class. The following winter he had kept himself alive as a manual laborer, pushing an ore car in a California mine, and in the succeeding spring he had taken a job as a typist in the office of a consulting engineer in San Francisco. But it was hardly more than a year later that Mr. Hoover was arriving in West Australia as a responsible agent for Bewick, Moreing and Company, an important British firm of mine managers and promoters; and only two years after that, at the age of twenty-five, he was its nominee for the post of adviser to the Chinese Bureau of Mines — at a moment when the Dragon Throne was tottering and the governments of the world (to say nothing of its enterprising business men) were closing in for the spoils.
Thus abruptly was Mr. Hoover plunged into the centre of that golden web of nationalist rivalry and international finance which irradiated in those years from the European capitals into the more backward, and more lucrative, portions of the earth. In spite of his youth, his inexperience, and his American citizenship, he found himself the representative of important British national and financial interests, in a highly predatory atmosphere and at an exciting moment of world history. It was a delicate as well as a dramatic situation; Mr. Hoover, however, appears to have made no mistakes. His precise rôle in the transfer of the great Kaiping coal mines from Chinese into foreign hands is a matter of some dispute, but he himself, at all events, emerged from the transaction with his feet upon the sure road to success. The Chinese lost the mines, but Mr. Hoover, at twenty-seven, became a director in the company formed to exploit them under Anglo-Belgian control and a partner in Bewick, Moreing and Company, which had first employed him, an unknown American, some four years before.
For many years thereafter he was to centre his energies in London, building up a fortune from the swift profits of mine management and company promotion, known to a small circle of City men and mining operators, British and colonial financiers and officials, but having no contacts with the public life of either Great Britain or the United States. He appears to have operated in that shadowy but remunerative half-world between engineering and company flotation. He traveled incessantly in the furtherance of his rapidly multiplying interests; there was no year (as his friends often repeat) in which he did not set foot in the United States, or in Great Britain either, it would seem, and few in which he did not make a complete circuit of the earth.
He rarely appeared as the engineer in charge of any of his enterprises, — he scarcely paused long enough for that, — but he held directorships in many companies dealing with mineral resources of all kinds in every continent. He must have acquired a singular knowledge of the world and its peoples, but his interest in them seems to have been that of the business operative rather than that of the sympathetic leader in a great society. The larger aspects of the vast community in which he prospered appear to have meant little to him. Like countless other men who ride the crests of great periods of development and expansion, whose shrewd and stubborn hands grasp the rich prizes that their times prepare for them, he seems scarcely to have realized the existence of the immense social tides upon which he arose.
Mr. Hoover was a practical, successful business man, finding the main field of his operations abroad. In 1910, after he had given some lectures on mining at Columbia and Stanford, he first appeared in the American Who’s Who. In the volume for 1914 he frankly listed his achievements: —
Engineer.... In W. Australia as chief of mining staff of Bewick, Moreing & Co. and mgr. Hannan’s Brown Hill Mine, 1897; mgr. Sons of Gwalia and E. Murchison mines, 1898; chief engr. Chinese Imperial Bur. of Mines, 1899, doing extensive exploration in interior of China. Took part in defense of Tientsin during Boxer disturbances, 1900. Representative of bond holders in constm. of Ching Wang Tow harbor, 1900; gen. mgr. Chinese Engring. & Mining Co., 1901; partner Bewick, Moreing & Co., mine operators, London, 1902—8; dir. or mng. dir. Zinc Corpn., Ltd., Ivyshtim Corpn., Ltd., Tanalyk Corpn., Ltd., Granville Mining Co., Ltd., Oroya Exploration Co., Ltd., Chinese Engineering & Mining Co., Ltd., Russo-Asiatic Corpn., Ltd., Gen. Petroleum Co., etc., 1908-13. Trustee Stanford Univ. . . . Clubs: Devonshire, Albemarle, Ranelagh (London), City (New York). . . . Home: Red House, Hornton St., London.
He was then in his fortieth year.
II
Five and a half years later he was being advanced as a prominent contender for the Presidency of the United States, the greatest political office in the gift of any people in the world. The war, which tore so many millions of men and women from their routine, uprooted Mr. Hoover with an equal violence. For him, however, there were once more reserved, not the agony and the loss, but the great prizes. It was very sudden. Brand Whitlock described him to a Belgian audience as ‘that extraordinary man whom, by a fortunate chance, we discovered at the beginning of the war’; and to the multitudes who in the last days of 1914 first began to hear of Herbert Hoover he seemed indeed to have been conjured out of nothing.
Possibly the selection of Mr. Hoover to head the Commission for Relief in Belgium was not quite so fortuitous as it appeared. It has been pointed out that the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company was a Belgian as well as a British enterprise, and Emil Francqui, the banker who organized the Belgian part of the relief undertaking, had fourteen years before been associated with Mr. Hoover in the transfer of the Kaiping mines. Mr. Hoover’s long and intimate association with British interests — an association which had not, however, deprived him of his American speech and manner — also peculiarly fitted him for the very delicate responsibilities of the post to which he was called. But however that may be, although no reasonable mind has ever supposed there was anything scandalous about it, the veils of a gathering reticence have since accumulated over the precise manner of the choice. The emphasis has rather been placed upon the striking success with which he managed the great humanitarian enterprise.
It was natural for the public, both then and later, to conclude from this success that Mr. Hoover was also a great humanitarian. It was natural; it was hardly justifiable. To create and direct a vast organization for collecting money, buying and shipping enormous quantities of food through the complex restrictions of the war zones, controlling the distribution behind the German lines, and mollifying the several belligerent governments involved, called less for the heart of the humanitarian than for the harder talents of the practical business executive. And it required something else — publicity.
The Belgian Relief had to be ‘sold’ to millions throughout the warring and neutral nations; it had to be floated upon the tides of world opinion by arts not differing in their fundamentals from those used to float mining securities on the London Stock Exchange. The field was vastly enlarged, but on the other hand it was uniquely favorable. Amid the fierce and uncritical emotions of the war, the altruistic propagandists of the Belgian Relief did not have to break down ‘resistance.’ By those who accepted it at all, the importance and nobility of the relief work were accepted without question, and the response was immediate. By a familiar device of press-agentry, moreover, the propaganda was centred less upon the vague entity of the Commission for Relief in Belgium than upon the concrete personality of its chairman. From 1915 onward, Mr. Hoover’s name began to appear attached to estimates of the food situation, appeals, reports, and so on; he was eagerly interviewed, and statements and character sketches were widely printed. Rapidly the figure of Mr. Hoover as the great engineer, the great organizer, the embodiment of American benevolence amid the horrors of European war, began to take form. The fact that this figure was being shaped by forces far more powerful than anything in Mr. Hoover himself was naturally overlooked by the peoples. Was it, possibly, overlooked by Mr. Hoover as well?
In April 1917, there came the American declaration of war, and immediately President Wilson found himself in need of a food controller. The choice was almost automatic; it was certainly admirable. Mr. Hoover was at the same time an unquestioned American and a man with almost no previous contacts in America to embarrass him. He was a food man by virtue of two years of experience on a large scale, but he was unencumbered by those associations which would have caused any one of our established food magnates to be torn to pieces by irate producers and consumers a month after he had taken the job. Partisan bias has since professed to find flaws in Mr. Hoover’s administration of the office. In such indictments there is nothing very impressive or very remarkable. What is remarkable is the way in which the great engines of publicity now came into play with redoubled effect.
Mr. Hoover had early resolved to run his food administration upon the motive power of voluntary cooperation. This meant a direct, a personal appeal to every household and restaurant table in the United States. It meant an appeal to every food grower and processor, and to the public opinion which would force them into conformity. It meant, in short, an overwhelming campaign of nation-wide advertising, again centred about the personality of the ‘miracle man’ into whose hands the food resources of the nation and the Allied armies had been entrusted. In 1917 and 1918 there was not a menu card in the country which did not carry the name of Herbert Hoover, and hardly a day upon which the patriotic press agents in his organization did not pour forth their releases to a readily cooperating press. ‘I think,’ said the recalcitrant Jim Reed, ‘he is now engaged in the largest promotion scheme he has ever undertaken in his life.’
The war was the golden age of the publicity expert. There was no opposition ; as far as the enemy was concerned, there were not even any libel laws. The campaign of ‘voluntary coöperation’ was remarkably successful, or, as Mr. Hoover’s friends have since put it, ‘his confidence in the American people was not misplaced.’ The food administrator had discovered that by ‘appealing to the people’ — which in practice meant by organizing a high-pressure propaganda drive — he had triumphed in a very difficult job of public administration, a job in which more adept and experienced men had failed lamentably in Europe. A complete outsider, he had grasped, it seemed, the true secret of success in public office. But it was a dangerous secret. Mr. Hoover had never tried ‘appealing to the people’ in time of peace and in face of opposition.
III
Voluntary cooperation had succeeded in winning the war. Strangely enough, it had also succeeded in building up Mr. Hoover as one of our greatest public servants. With the relaxation of the martial pressures, other war-built reputations began to crumble. Political opponents began to discover errors in Mr. McAdoo’s administration of the railroads or Mr. Baker’s conduct of the War Department. But Mr. Hoover had never been in politics; he had no political opponents. No one even knew whether he was a Democrat or a Republican; they could not, since he did not know himself. The fact only endeared him to a public suddenly seeing new visions above the chaos of the war’s end; while the professionals of politics obviously had no reason for attacking a man until they were sure he belonged to the other side. Mr. Hoover advanced almost inevitably from his achievements as food administrator to even larger responsibilities as an American statesman amid the tangled, desperate, and ignoble rivalries of Paris and the Peace Conference.
There his fame continued to grow. He sat upon the Supreme Economic Council and organized the new American Relief Administration, thereby simultaneously saving the despairing peoples of Central Europe from starvation, the overstocked farmers of America from a surplus, and the whole situation from disastrous collapse. As we look back upon it now, it would seem to have required neither great genius nor a great heart to seize upon the patent truth that unless something were done the practical results would be appalling. But amid the fierce and furiously distorted passions of post-war Paris it was very difficult to see anything clearly. Mr. Hoover displayed the energy and capacity of a competent business executive. To the people at home he seemed not only a tower of administrative ability but also of a humane and forward-looking liberalism. Was he not feeding babies? Was he not free of the grimy taint of politics? Had he not, the year before, upheld Mr. Wilson’s hand in the appeal for a Democratic Congress to support the high decisions of Versailles?
He had spoken then of ‘America’s burden in the rehabilitation of the world’; he had declared that ‘we must nurse Europe back to industry and self-support’ under the leadership of Mr. Wilson. ‘We must,’ he had been careful to add, ‘avoid entanglement,’ but in September of 1919 he was telling the reporters that ‘I stand for a league of nations just as it is planned now.’ As the year ran out, as Mr. Wilson was struck down, and as it became apparent amid the passionate manceuvrings of the ratification fight that his successor would have to be elected in the following year, the name of Herbert Hoover arose spontaneously as that of a logical choice for the American Presidency.
In the spring of 1920 a cartoonist depicted the Hoover boom as an automobile driving furiously along with nobody in it and the wheels three feet above the ground. But, mysterious as the Hoover strength appeared, it scarcely demanded a supernatural explanation. The currents of doubt and disillusion were just beginning to set across the ebbing tide of war-time altruism. The doubters saw Mr. Hoover as a less dangerous type of idealist than Mr. Wilson; the idealists saw him as a liberal less likely to get wrecked in the new whirlpools of doubt. The fact that no one really knew anything about him only added to his peculiar availability; common men and women everywhere, confused by the immense issues amid which they found themselves, did not know what they wanted, but were increasingly sure that they did not want a politician. They wanted a great administrator.
It was a desire with which the politicians naturally had no sympathy. The professionals in both parties regarded Mr. Hoover without enthusiasm. The Democrats discovered that he had once belonged to the Republican Club of New York. The Republicans were reminded by Boies Penrose that he had advocated the return of a Democratic Congress in 1918. An even more startling suggestion was advanced. Was not Mr. Hoover actually ineligible, under the fourteen-year residence clause of the Constitution, for the high office to which he aspired? That such a doubt could exist about a serious contender for the Presidency shows how strange was the political atmosphere of 1920. Nobody knew what Mr. Hoover had really been doing or where he had been living during the earlier part of the preceding fourteen years. It did not matter. An official statement, couched, it must be said, in language which was less than frank, was read into the Congressional Record, and the point was dismissed by the public as simply indicating the wiles to which mere politicians would resort in their selfish efforts. So the boom went on, the professionals on each side terrorized by the thought of how strong a candidate he would be if nominated by the other, until Mr. Hoover decided too soon which party he belonged to, and the managers of both were able to dismiss him with a sigh of relief. The ineptness might have been suggestive.
Throughout the remainder of the campaign, Mr. Hoover continued to be the great, but safely Republican, liberal. He was one of the leading exponents of ‘a’ league of nations. He relapsed on to the convenient ground of the Lodge reservations, and, as the Harding campaign began to look more and more like a turning of our back on the whole of Europe, Mr. Hoover continued on the original line, becoming one of that group of eminent men who in 1920 saved the state by assisting Mr. Harding to play it both ways. ‘It is now a dozen years,’ said Mr. Hoover, ‘since Republican leaders — including Roosevelt — first proposed a league. This ideal cannot be ignored by the party. Its living force will insist upon our joining in the organization of the moral forces of the world to reduce armament, check militarism, and relieve oppression.’ At another time he flung a challenge at Hiram Johnson. ‘Will the Senator change his expression from “I have never opposed a league” to “I will support a league” for this purpose?’
What happened, of course, was that Mr. Harding won, that the living force of the Republican Party failed to insist upon doing anything, and that Mr. Hoover was paid off for his valuable services by burial (as it was thought) in the Department of Commerce. If he thereafter supported a league in the councils of the Harding Cabinet, the nation was unaware of the fact.
IV
Such was the unusual experience out of which Secretary Hoover, at the age of forty-eight, formulated his philosophy and prepared what must have been his prospectus as a still-hopeful Presidential candidate. In the light of what has happened since, this book becomes of considerable interest. Thin in outward shape, the volume to-day seems curiously thin in content as well. As one turns its pages one becomes conscious that somewhere there was a strange mistake. Mr. Hoover, it seems, was not a great liberal. He was scarcely even a humanitarian; and could one have called him an altruist? ‘For the next several generations,’ he wrote, ‘we dare not abandon self-interest as a motive force to leadership and to production, lest we die. The will-o’the-wisp of all breeds of Socialism is that they contemplate a motivation of human animals by altruism alone.’
Unless statesmanship consists in the safe laboring of the conventional, Mr. Hoover could hardly lay claim to being a statesman. His political philosophy was simple. Not only economic progress, but ‘social’ and ‘intellectual’ advance he felt to be ‘almost solely dependent upon the creative minds of those individuals with imaginative and administrative intelligence who create or who carry discoveries to widespread application’; and these individuals could arise ‘solely through the selection that comes from the free-running mills of competition.’ Though a natural doctrine for the successful mine manager and promoter, it seems a narrow one in a leader of a democratic society.
Mr. Hoover, however, did not think in social terms, and he seems to have been less than a democrat. ‘The crowd,’ he wrote, ‘only feels; it has no mind of its own which can plan. The crowd is credulous, it destroys, it consumes, it hates, and it dreams — but it never builds.’ And again: ‘I may repeat that the divine spark does not lie in agreements, in organizations, in institutions, in masses, or in groups. Spirituality with its faith, its hope, its charity, can be increased by each individual’s own effort. And in proportion as each individual increases his own store of spirituality, in that proportion increases the idealism of democracy.’ In short, Mr. Hoover, one of the great prize winners himself, was content to leave everything — from economic progress to spiritual ennoblement — to the individual, who was to win or lose as best he could in what Mr. Hoover evidently felt to be the best of all possible worlds.
All that was required was the free play of individual initiative, checked only by an insistence upon ‘equality of opportunity.’ The great issue of how this proviso is to be made effective — and it is perhaps the fundamental issue confronting all modern statesmanship — Mr. Hoover did not discuss. He seemed not even to realize that such an issue existed. ‘It is where dominant private property is assembled in the hands of the groups who control the state that the individual begins to feel capital as an oppressor. Our American demand for equality of opportunity is a constant militant check upon capital becoming a thing to be feared.’ It was as easy as that.
Mr. Hoover’s outlook was simply the narrow and complacent outlook of the successful and conservative business man. In all the years through which he had ranged the earth, in all the months through which he had sat in the inner councils of the war leaders and treaty makers, working with the principal statesmen of the world upon the most stupendous political and social problems which the world had ever confronted, Mr. Hoover had penetrated no more deeply than this into the infinite complexities of the political organism. He had never risen to any broader or more pregnant view of human society than that held in hundreds of chambers of commerce and business luncheon clubs — the self-satisfied view of the men who have known how to gain riches and power for themselves, and who assume that what has contributed to their own success must be what the country needs. That there is a difference between making a private fortune and guiding the public affairs of a nation apparently did not occur to Mr. Hoover. But neither did it occur to countless others who were to support him. If Mr. Hoover was not a wide-visioned public thinker, it was at any rate not his fault. He never pretended to be.
It has become a tenet of American faith that politicians are self-seeking rascals by nature and that successful private business men are monuments of ability and probity, the ideally equipped administrators for our public affairs, could they only be induced to devote themselves to the work. But had anyone really pondered the philosophy which Mr. Hoover offered in the service of the state, he might have had his doubts about this theory. Mr. Hoover revealed the depths of his insight into government with this summary of the triumphs, in the year 1922, of our system: —
Public opinion has become of steadily increasing potency and reliability in its reaction. . . . Moral standards of business and commerce are improving; vicious city governments are less in number; invisible government has greatly diminished; public conscience is penetrating deeper and deeper; the rooting up of wrong grows more vigorous; the agencies for their exposure and remedy grow more numerous; and above all is the growing sense of service. Many people confuse the exposure of wrongs which were below the surface with degeneration; their very exposure is progress.
This, from a member of the Harding Cabinet, at a moment when the oil scandals, to explode only a year later, were in preparation, was less than profound. The philosopher was willing to admit, of course, that there were faults on the surface of perfection. He noted: —
The uncertainty of employment in some callings; the deadening effect of certain repetitive processes of manufacture; the twelve-hour day in a few industries . . . arrogant domination by some employers and some labor leaders . . . unfair competition in some industries; some fortunes excessive far beyond the needs of stimulation to initiative; survivals of religious intolerance; political debauchery of some cities.
But in such things he perceived no cause for ‘general criticism.’ On the contrary, ‘most of these occur locally,’ he found, and were steadily becoming ‘more local.’ They could be left to themselves for cure. In the bleaker light of after knowledge, what Mr. Hoover brought to his countrymen seems strangely inadequate to the great responsibilities they were to put upon him. However, when it comes to returning men to public office, who ever stops to reflect upon what they bring? Was not Mr. Hoover a great engineer?
Seven years later the great engineer, the great humanitarian and administrator, was installed as President of the United States, and as he passed into the dazzling spotlight which is trained upon that office his countrymen turned for the first time to examine him for what he really was. If they were disappointed in what they saw, who was to blame? Mr. Hoover as President has been betrayed by fortune. He has been betrayed in part, perhaps, by the defects of his own character. But chiefly, I think, he has been betrayed by the shallowness of the people who returned him to power, who created him in an image for which there was no basis, and who then demanded that he work miracles for which he was fitted, as they might easily have known, neither by temperament, by inclination, nor by experience.
V
Through the summer and fall of 1928 the solemn periods of Mr. Hoover’s Presidential campaign had rolled on. The candidate’s ideas were clothed in a suggestion of technical expertness; he scattered figures and percentages through his speeches, and eschewed the brighter flights of political oratory in favor of a dry directness natural to his own habit of thought and according well with the character of an engineer and administrator. It could not conceal the fact, however, that the ideas themselves were simply the smooth-worn platitudes of conventional American politics. Save possibly in his prose style, the business administrator was for the most part indistinguishable from the countless politicians who had preceded him. He evaded the dangerous issue of prohibition. He spoke strongly in favor of the home. He opposed poverty and supported the American standard of living. He denounced government interference with business and upheld the tariff. And from first to last he dedicated himself to ‘our American system’ of things as they were.
It is true that in at least two respects Mr. Hoover’s campaign took on an emphasis which was wanting in those of earlier Republican politicians. His attitude toward foreign affairs was internationalist and pacific rather than ‘patriotically ‘American. This was natural in a man who had found his own career abroad, working in many countries under various governments. Mr. Hoover had been impressed not only by the colossal agony and waste of war, but by the peace-time wastes and general nuisance-making obstructiveness of nationalistic rivalries. He disliked armies and navies, political nationalism and jingoistic fervors; though the fact that he himself, when Secretary of Commerce, had not hesitated to beat the patriotic tom-toms over the British rubber scheme should have warned him of the perplexities which these things conceal. In his speeches it all seemed simple. Mr. Hoover’s aims were disarmament and peace, joining the World Court, and cooperation between peoples for the common good. Whether he really appreciated the immense difficulties in the way of these aims is a question; the point is that, where other politicians had spoken for the nationalistic business men and patriots of the interior, Mr. Hoover was reflecting the new influence of cosmopolitan business — of Wall Street, of the international financier, of the great industrialist with foreign trade interests.
Chiefly, however, Mr. Hoover spoke as the representative of business of all kinds, large and small, in every sphere. Campaigning at the very peak of the boom years, he proclaimed — more consciously, more emphatically, more completely than ever before — the great thesis that it is the true function of government to support and assist business enterprise. The thesis was an old one; Mr. Hoover asserted it with all the confidence and conviction of seven years of unparalleled and seemingly endless prosperity. This went beyond the simple doctrine of individualism; the candidate was preaching more than a mere laissez faire. With him the government became not simply a kindly supervisor of private enterprise, but its obedient handmaiden. The candidate of course did lip service to the regulatory function, but it was hardly more. ‘It is the duty of government,’he felt, ‘to avoid regulation as long as equal opportunity to all citizens is not invaded.’ To be sure, it was ‘the duty of business to conduct itself so that government regulation or government competition is unnecessary,’but the enforcement of this obligation Mr. Hoover seemed ready to leave to ‘ faith — faith among our people in the integrity of business men.'
Government was to avoid competing with private enterprise; it was to refrain from ‘unnecessary contacts’ with business, from interference or control. But Mr. Hoover had no intention of taking government out of business. On the contrary, the ‘proper promotion’ of business was to be one of its chief cares. It was to maintain a high tariff, to promote foreign trade, to encourage and cherish trade associations and agrarian cooperatives. It was to construct those public works which private enterprise (because of their size or the improbability of profitable return) preferred not to finance. It was to undertake scientific and technical research on behalf of business; it was to assist business toward standardization and operating economies; it was even to foster directly, through governmental favors or open subsidies, such specific businesses as radio, aviation, shipping. Mr. Hoover’s belief in individualism appeared to be tempered with the proviso that it was proper for the government to do a whole lot in aid of the individual business man.
In this concept of the functions of government Mr. Hoover may have been right, even if he was not profound. Who knows? He was at any rate thoroughly in accord with the thought of our great business community, and expressing the views held by nearly every one of those distinguished captains of industry who were supposed to be so much better qualified for public service than the mere politician. Mr. Hoover voiced the political philosophy of the moment. He saw the feverish expansion of the boom years as something permanent and unlimited, a process leading automatically to wellbeing, to contentment, to the better life.
Due to increased efficiency [he proclaimed at Newark], hundreds of thousands of men and women have been transferred from the factories to our expanding insurance and banking to take care of enlarged savings, other hundreds of thousands have been transferred to our filling stations, our garages, our hotels, and our restaurants. We have in this period seen a half-million families find occupation in increased export of goods, and, above all, we have seen an increase of nearly two million youths taken largely from the potential ranks of labor and placed in institutions of education. This is proof of real progress. It is the road to further progress. It is the road to abolition of poverty.
Here was the marvelous tool lying ready to the uses of government. One need only promote the business process and every governmental problem would solve itself. Upon this promise Mr. Hoover was duly elected; he was installed in office; the ‘new day’ which he had proclaimed was about to begin. Unfortunately, seven months after he had taken the Presidential oath a new day did begin. The bottom fell out of the business structure.
VI
No one yet knows why depressions come or what should be done about them, but it seems self-evident that they are the inherent consequences of precisely that process of business expansion and development upon which Mr. Hoover had so completely pinned his faith. The statesman who had based his whole policy upon an easily optimistic rationalization of ‘our American system’ suddenly found himself faced by an angry public, illogically demanding that he do something about the system’s natural consequences. Mr. Hoover was a business man, was n’t he? Then why could he not stem a business disaster? They failed to see that the very fact that Mr. Hoover was dedicated to the promotion of business as it was debarred him from dealing in any effective way with these bitter fruits of the process. The trouble was that Mr. Hoover did n’t see it either. Like other prophets before him, the confident prophet of individualism, of private enterprise, and of the ‘freerunning mills of competition,’ had been badly let down by his own dogma — without quite realizing it.
Mr. Hoover behaved exactly as anyone who had given two thoughts to his campaign speeches might have expected him to behave. He believed that the true function of government was the promotion of business. When the slump came he turned desperately to promote business. He summoned the business heads of the nation into conference. He endeavored to peg wages, to keep up prices, to reestablish ‘confidence’ and create ‘psychology.’ He sought to carry the nation across the abyss sustained upon the power, not of fact, but of his own faith. He announced that the corner had been turned. He issued optimistic statements.
Unhappily, the corner had not been turned; the statements were not well grounded in fact. This would have made no difference had they achieved the effect they were intended to produce; the difficulty was that they achieved no effect whatever — except possibly a rather minor one in the wrong direction. The vast process in which Mr. Hoover had been caught ground remorselessly on, totally without regard either for Mr. Hoover or for the philosophic virtues of individualism. It was inherently impossible to cure the ills of the business system by promoting the system itself. Perhaps after all it is not the chief function of government to promote business. Perhaps its only function is to govern; and, if it does not wish to take over business, then to let business run itself and cure its own ills in its own way.
A more practised and more professional politician probably would not have cared what the function of government was, but he might have perceived more vividly where safety for his own skin lay, and retired in good time and good order to the conventional dugouts of politics. Such a surrender did not recommend itself to the sensitive, the restless and ambitious character of the President, goaded by his own enormous, if adventitious, reputation into an intense desire to achieve the results which would justify it.
It had seemed so easy, in the happier summer of 1929, to translate those portentous theories of individualism and the state into the new day which they appeared so surely to delineate. Peace and harmony abroad, and at home an ever-expanding economic activity, stimulated and maintained by an efficient, unmeddlesome government, and producing by some mystic automatism not only more goods but more health, more happiness, even more ‘spirituality’ as each year advanced — what was there wrong with that vision of service? Feverishly Mr. Hoover sought to recover it from the wreckage amid which it had been buried, and under the nervous strain of the attempt still further defects in the President’s character and training began to appear.
The professional politician would have lain low; he would have played the familiar stops of the political machinery with an adept hand and waited for things to improve. But Mr. Hoover had no political training, and he did not know how to work the machine. He was a business administrator, and, like a great many other successful executives of private enterprise, he was incapable of meeting his public in the mass, or even of dealing easily with its representatives. Under the pressures of disaster he developed an extraordinary sensitiveness to criticism, a self-conscious inability to make the graceful gesture or the frank public statement. He was unhappy in his relations with Congress. He was unhappy in his choice of advisers and political assistants. He exasperated the newspaper correspondents. He alienated his own party support to such an extent that his predecessor (with what seemed to Mr. Hoover’s friends a smug insolence) took occasion publicly to shepherd it back to him.
Unable to utilize the ordinary tools of the trade, — very naturally, since one reason for his election was the fact that he had never been trained to do so, — Mr. Hoover was reduced to going outside the political system entirely and seeking to secure his effects either through the business leaders of the country or by direct appeal to public opinion. The business men were of little help in what was fundamentally a problem of government. And in his attempts to use public opinion Mr. Hoover was to reveal one of his most damaging weaknesses. If a public man can make any greater mistake than hiring a public-relations counsel, it is by hiring a bad one. Mr. Hoover in effect did both.
The dangerous lesson of the Belgian Relief and Food Administration days had been learned too well. Once more Mr. Hoover tried ‘appealing to the people’; but once more his approach was through the arts of expert pressagentry. He did not see that a method which had worked well enough in war time was worse than useless under the fierce tests of political opposition. He appeared to imagine that the leadership of a President could be ‘put over’ by the adroit use of the technique of an advertising agency.
It is an error common in the business world from which the President had sprung. It is natural for the business executive, who solves so many problems by summoning the relevant technical expert and having him attend to them, to meet the problem of ‘the public’ — that impersonal and invidious monster — in the same way. The executive remains in a plush-lined seclusion attending to his own affairs; the public-relations counsel handles the publicity end by giving out the calculated statement, seeking to suppress the unfavorable, managing the news, creating the ulterior effect. It is possible that in business not all the money expended upon such services is wasted; but in business, at all events, it is rarely the public which has the final say. In politics the public reaction is paramount; and the effort to control it by the expert artifice of the press agent is fatal.
The political leader knows how to cajole, to influence, even to mislead public opinion; but he seldom attempts to manage it by the disingenuous outgiving, because he knows the dangers of the method. He knows that, however eager his own side may be to support him, there is always a shrewd and determined opposition ready to expose the trick and use it with damning effect. Inexperience has unhappily concealed this knowledge from the President. He has seemed to look upon the public and the press as just another of those problems to be solved by expert engineering, and a long train of disasters, from the incredible ineptness of the Wickersham report down to the minor ridiculousness of Master Bryan Untiedt’s visit to the Capital, has been the tragic result. Even yet Mr. Hoover does not seem to see that frankness, tact, and some common horse sense are better than all the technical publicity ever invented.
VII
Mr. Hoover rode the waves of the war enthusiasm so easily that he cannot now understand why the press refuses to unite behind national policies that seem to him of the first importance. He cannot see why editors should print irritating and damaging assaults upon his most serious efforts, why motives which he knows to be good or incidents which anyone can see are innocent and trivial should be persistently distorted or ‘played up’ in unfavorable ways. He is exasperated by what appears to him — and in fact not infrequently is — a pure, willful ‘cussedness’ and obstructionism; and, because he does not realize that this is a permanent feature of the political leader’s work, he beats angrily against it. He considers abandoning the press entirely in favor of the more docile and manageable (because more completely institutionalized) radio; he cuts short his own press conferences while his friends seek even harder to find the man or the method for managing the publicity; he even loses all patience and lashes out, as he did in the case of the Navy League, with the result that what he might have presented as a true issue of principle actually appeared as nothing more than an undignified squabble between the President of the United States and a relatively unimportant propagandist who had insulted him.
The handicap is an overwhelming one, as can be seen in those of Mr. Hoover’s efforts in which it has not operated. In forming the $500,000,000 credit corporation, for example, Mr. Hoover did not have to rely in the first instance on the public. He was able to summon the bankers, as any business executive might have summoned his associates, present the issues to them, and secure their promise of action. When the plan reached the public, it was amid a psychology of crisis rather like that of the war days; it came as a genuine emergency measure, recognized to be of the first importance, and to attack it would have imperiled the safety of the country. There was no attack; on the contrary, nearly every agency of opinion worked for the success of the scheme, and without artifice or management of any kind it swept forward on a wave of favorable publicity to produce a real effect.
The Hoover moratorium offered another case of the same kind. A day before the moratorium was announced, the idea would have seemed courageous to the point of recklessness. Actually the very boldness of the plan, its breadth of view, and the imminence of the emergency it was designed to meet commanded instant approval for it, and Mr. Hoover found the country behind him. But it was the result of swift executive action. It was not a matter of building a national opinion to support a general line of policy; indeed, that pacific and internationalist attitude upon which the moratorium idea was based has never been shared by the nation at large.
The President could succeed with the moratorium; he has never succeeded in bringing the nation to the point of view which could alone make it a logical and consistent expression of American policy. This inability to build the popular basis for the new orientation which he seeks to give our foreign policy has caused him endless trouble, and is likely, as the shadows of the Geneva conference and the debt settlements draw nearer, to cause him more. It tends to convert what some would feel to be his most valuable contribution to our affairs into an actual source of weakness.
At the London naval conference, at the League headquarters in Geneva, in Manchuria, in Washington when the visiting statesmen come, American policy has seemed divided and inconsistent, because the President is striving in one direction while his more nationalistic people continue in the other. Mr. Hoover himself must have noted, when he watched President Wilson at Versailles, another more serious example of the same thing; if so, it was a lesson which he has not succeeded in applying. The division is dangerous for Mr. Hoover, if not for the country; but the President apparently prefers to ignore it, if, indeed, he realizes that it exists.
VIII
In the end it must be repeated, however, that the defects, if defects they be, which have appeared in Mr. Hoover’s conduct of the Presidency are hardly chargeable to Mr. Hoover himself, for there is none of them which might not have been quite clearly foreseen from his record. Mr. Hoover, it is said, has worked harder at his great task than any recent President; and if there are those who also claim that he has made the worst failure, they should reserve their strictures, not for the harassed and unhappy man who suddenly found himself in an impossible situation, but for the blindness of the multitude which so little understands either itself or the servants whom it chooses to rule over it.
Mr. Hoover was simply not well qualified for the public post to which he was elevated. It was too easily assumed that his lack of political experience made him the ideal candidate for political office; or — by an even stranger aberration — that, since technical experts have achieved so much, we should put into the Presidency a man who knew nothing of its technique.
Mr. Hoover has done a number of very excellent things; he has tried with an earnestness beyond that of some of his predecessors, and he has undoubtedly been deluged with a vast deal of criticism which he does not deserve. But the results, on the whole, have not been happy, and one may doubt whether the American people will very soon repeat the experiment of placing their chief magistracy in the politically inexperienced hands of a comparatively unknown man of business.