Word: hooverizers
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...exactly half a century ago this summer that the call to arms was sounded, and half a century ago this fall that it was answered. Roosevelt swept the bewildered Herbert Hoover out of the White House by a landslide of 472 electoral votes to 59. The new Congress too was ready for bold leadership-ready indeed to give up much of its own authority-and in Roosevelt's legendary first hundred days he won approval of 15 major legislative innovations. Many of the New Deal's experiments failed or faltered into limbo, but others became part...
...fundamental business of the country is on a sound and prosperous basis," President Hoover said the day after Black Thursday. He was expressing the standard and perfectly correct view that Wall Street is quite different from the U.S. economy as a whole. But the U.S. economy suddenly seemed just as stricken as Wall Street. The index of manufacturing production sank from 127 in June 1929 to 97 a year later. Farm income dropped even more. In 1930, 26,355 business firms went bankrupt. Hoover kept saying it was a temporary problem...
...Hoover was rather dour by nature-Secretary of State Henry Stimson described a White House meeting as "like sitting in a bath of ink"-and he insisted that reduced spending and a balanced budget would end the slump. "Nobody is actually starving," Hoover said. "The hobos, for example, are better fed than they have ever been." Other U.S. officials were equally astute. Said Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon in 1930: "I see nothing in the present situation that is either menacing or warrants pessimism." (Joke of the day: Hoover asks Mellon, "Can you lend me a nickel to call a friend...
Indeed, while Hoover fulminated against "socalled new deals," it was Roosevelt who accused the President of "reckless and extravagant" spending, and of thinking "that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible." Roosevelt's running mate, Congressman John Nance Garner of Texas, 63, even claimed that Hoover was "leading the country down the path of socialism." Eleanor Roosevelt best summed up her husband's uncertain command of the future when she wrote at the time of his Inauguration: "One has a tremendous feeling of going it blindly, because...
Buckley embroiders this story with subplots and uneven characterizations of such personages as Allen Dulles, J. Edgar Hoover, Dean Acheson, Nikita Khrushchev and Charles de Gaulle. The results are mixed. The author's portrait of Hoover, for example, seems a weak parody of old newsweeklies: "Jut-jawed, beefy, all business...