Word: hoovers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...first order of business was to save the nation's banks. The largely unregulated banking system, which Democratic Senator William Gibbs McAdoo of California said "does credit to a collection of imbeciles," was on the brink of total extinction. During the last week of the Hoover regime, $250 million in gold had been withdrawn by frightened depositors. Overall bank reserves now stood at a mere $6 billion against liabilities of $41 billion. Roosevelt decided that he had no choice but to proclaim a nationwide "bank holiday" to last until he could push a recovery bill through Congress...
Hopkins violated the rules that most Americans had learned in childhood: that taking charity was shameful; that unemployment was shameful; that a man who couldn't feed himself and his family was hardly a man at all. "Under our political system," Hoover had said in 1930, "Government is not, nor should it be, a general employer of labor." Federal aid to the unemployed, Hoover said, would weaken their "moral fiber." Hopkins disagreed. "People don't eat in the long run, Senator," he said to one legislator, "they eat every...