Hoover Appeals To The Laboring Man

Abstract

ONE CAN HARDLY ACCOUNT for the nomination and election of Republican candidate Herbert C. Hoover in 1928 on the basis of the antagonistic and partisan treatment he has often received in accounts written since that time. We are told, “Leaders like Herbert Hoover had not, by their personal life, been attuned to the wants of inconspicuous people….” Here was “a member of the managerial class” unacquainted with the “daily yearnings of ordinary humankind.”¹ Another volume found little good to say about the man elected overwhelmingly in 1928, except that he was a rich and successful man, a good organizer, and a friend of business with a passion for facts.² Yet another book, on the other hand, found him to be a man with “a vivid record as a humanitarian” who actually “assumed office amid the warm plaudits of his countrymen who hailed him as a brilliant liberal who had earned his position by his distinguished humanitarian and administrative services for over fifteen years.”³ Can this be the same person? It is admitted in at least one textbook—and ought to be better known—that Mr. Hoover “was not regarded with approval by the old-line Republican politicians.”⁴ Indeed, the favorable portrait of Hoover painted by the Beards in their final “historical judgment which we have reached after more than forty years” has been ignored by some historians who pay qualified tribute to Charles A. and Mary E. Beard in matters of politics and economics.