1. Hoover, FDR, and The Great Depression

2. Hoover’s Personal Life
Herbert Hoover was born in West Branch, Iowa in 1874.
He was a member of the inaugural class at Stanford University where he studied geology.
Hoover’s wife, the former Lou Henry, was athletic and brilliant. She was the first woman to graduate from Stanford and met Herbert in the geology lab.
Lou Hoover spoke five languages, assisted her husband in his geology and engineering work, often translating his articles and books.
She was a world traveler and often assisted her husband in the cultural necessities for international business.

3. Hoovers’ Mining Career
Herbert made a specialty of turning around struggling operations with organization and technology
His wife helped translate his work and bridge the cultural gaps in foreign nations. Their work made them wealthy.
They were forced to flee China for a time during the Boxer Rebellion, an insurrection aimed at purging the nation of western influence.
While in London, at the outbreak of the First World War, the Hoovers organized an impromptu organization to evacuate expatriated and vacationing Americans from Europe.

4. Belgium
Hoover organized his entire London mining firm as a relief operation for Belgium during WWI.
He negotiated with the Allied nations to allow the relief ships through the blockade and negotiated with the Germans to not attack the ships with submarines.

5. “Hooverizing”
Woodrow Wilson placed Hoover in charge of agricultural production for the American war effort.
Hoover was immediately successful.
In addition to rationalizing the American production system, Hoover convinced Americans that it was patriotic to go without in war time.
Cutting back became known as “Hooverizing,” rationing was one way that World War I affected people on the home front.

6. “They will be fed!”
Following the war, Hoover turned the United States Food Administration into a relief organization for the devastated populations, including the defeated Central Powers, in Europe.
American aid fed two million people per day in Poland alone.
When a critic accused Hoover of helping the Bolsheviks by providing food aid to the Soviet Union, Hoover responded in the following speech, “Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they will be fed.”

7. Secretary of Commerce
Hoover served as Secretary of Commerce under President Harding.
He remained unscathed by the scandal that impacted the president and, thus retained his post under Calvin Coolidge.
By the 1920’s the American economy was transformed, industry and commerce, rather than agriculture, provided the backbone of the American economy.
As Commerce Secretary, Hoover was in the middle of the economic transformation, leading to the impression, that Herbert Hoover was everywhere.

8. Hoover and the Great Depression
During Hoover’s presidency, the Stock Market crashed.
The illusion of prosperity came to an abrupt end.
Hoover, following conservative economic thinking, believed that economic matters were best left to the markets to sort out and, as a result, favored a minimal governmental response, largely centered on “trickle down theory,” to the growing crisis.

9. Dissatisfaction with Hoover’s Response
Many Americans resented what they saw as an insufficient governmental response to the economic crisis, and, as president, Hoover bore the brunt of their animosity.
To Hoover, charity was a matter for local governments and churches.
“Hooverizing,” a term embraced by Americans during the war to mean economizing, came to be a bitter synonym for poverty.

10. Roosevelt Becomes President
Hoover’s often tepid response to the Great Depression likely cost him any chance of reelection in 1932.
As it was, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the charismatic and confident former Governor of New York, appeared to be far more energetic and capable than Hoover.
Roosevelt’s First Inaugural Address was hailed as a landmark in American oration.
Roosevelt quickly set upon a course of active engagement with the Depression that changed American’s relationship with government.