At various points throughout his administration, George W.
Bush has been likened to Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman, to Teddy Roosevelt
and William McKinley. But during his second term, a consensus has been forming
on the president he most brings to mind. As early as the fall of 2006,
historian Douglas Brinkley wrote that Bush “has joined [Herbert] Hoover as a case study on
how not to be president,” and the comparison has only become more commonplace
since then. A television ad sponsored by MoveOn.org asserted, “George Bush is
going to be the first president since Herbert Hoover to lead an economy that
loses jobs,” and Senator Charles Schumer of New York declared, “The president’s
hands-off attitude is reminiscent of Herbert Hoover in 1929 and 1930.”
Not until the credit meltdown of the past few weeks raised
new doubts about Republican policies, however, did the analogy reach its
current pitch of intensity. On ABC’s This
Week, Cokie Roberts remarked, “Whenever Republicans get into this kind of
mess … the specter of Herbert Hoover comes out to haunt them.” During the
debate on the bailout, conservative Republican Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, after saying
that “this bill offends my principles,” announced he was going to vote for it.
“This is a Herbert Hoover moment,” he explained. “He made some big mistakes in
the Great Depression, and we have lived with those consequences for decades.
Let’s not make that mistake.”
But these statements about Hoover provide a grossly distorted view of
history. In contrast to George W. Bush, who, as the Yale historian Beverly Gage
has said, “stood by and didn't forge a clear direction” as the housing market
collapsed around him, President Hoover moved in unprecedented ways to cope with
economic calamity. Two days after entering the White House in March 1929, Hoover, who for years had
been warning about “the fever of speculation,” exhorted Federal Reserve
officials to rein in brokers and investment bankers. Following the Black Monday
stock market crash that October, he summoned leaders of industry and finance to
the White House, where he implored them to maintain wage rates; he urged
Congress and state and local governments to accelerate public works spending;
he prodded the Federal Reserve Board to expand credit; and he encouraged a
newly created Federal Farm Board to bolster crop prices.