Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)

Who They Were

Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) was the 31st president of the United States, elected in 1928 shortly before the stock market crash of 1929 that ushered in the Great Depression. A mining engineer and administrator who had won international praise for organizing food relief during and after the First World War, Hoover entered the White House with a reputation for technical competence. His presidency was defined instead by the economic collapse that followed the crash. He struggled to gauge the depth of the downturn from fragmentary economic indicators that had never been assembled into a coherent whole, and his response was widely judged too limited for the scale of the crisis. In 1932 he lost re-election to Franklin Roosevelt in a landslide, and the long gap before the transfer of power helped prompt a constitutional amendment, ratified in January 1933, to shorten the lame-duck period.

Key Contributions

Hoover's most durable policy response was the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which he established in 1932 to provide emergency loans to banks, railroads, and other struggling businesses; the agency outlived his presidency and became a major tool of the later New Deal. He generally favored voluntary cooperation among businesses and limited direct federal relief, a stance critics saw as inadequate to mass unemployment. He also signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 despite a petition from more than a thousand economists urging a veto, a measure later widely blamed for deepening the collapse of world trade. In standard AP US History narratives, Hoover's constrained response is the foil for Roosevelt's activist New Deal, and the contrast helped reshape expectations about the federal government's role in managing the economy.

On EconRecall

The 31st U. Play the games that feature Herbert Hoover:

• The Great Depression 1929