Ouch My Head Hurts!

Crisis management: Herbert Hoover and W

I was wandering the web and came across one of the impeach Bush articles, (this one because he won't do more about peak oil). It got me thinking about the last set of crises to confront the country. So while I put W in the title, I'm going to talk mostly about HH.

If someone had walked up to President Hoover, before the stock market collapsed, and provided him with graphs and data indicating a catastrophic collapse and depression, and he did nothing, would that be an impeachable offense? Hoovers defense could be “Well, most people believed we were not in trouble”, and it would have been true. After all, for most Americans, life was good up till the crash, and you couldn't prove things were going to go to heck. The majority of citizens thought the good times would last forever. Dust bowl and great depression were not yet part of the American vocabulary.

There was no Internet to amplify and broadcast concerns, nor was there a huge federal bureaucracy watching and compiling statistics on every conceivable facet of life. There also weren't cable news networks that would endlessly masticated the facts. You can bet that Hoover never saw a flashy PowerPoint presentation with disturbing graphs and trend lines (since computers were not yet invented).

Hoover was president from March 4, 1929 – March 3, 1933. When the stock market started collapsing on October 24 of 1929 Hoover was only in office less than a year. A collapsing economy isn't like an airplane hijacking. A couple of sky marshals and 24 hours notice couldn't stop it. In fact I would say the responsibility for trying to stop the crash would fall more on Calvin Coolidge and congress.

But let's face it, it would take a catastrophe and a new president before the American public, and its institutions, would be willing to implement sweeping reforms. Besides, IMHO, most of what FDR did was just exude confidence and act like he was having an effect. It took WWII to end the great depression.

What has made Hoover synonymous with failure, was what happened after the stock market crash. The things Hoover promoted just didn't help (at least not immediately), and some of them made the situation worse. After reading the Wiki article on him, I think he reminds me of Jimmy Carter. A good man who tried to live a good life. His life prior to becoming president shows what kind of person he was. He was just the wrong man at the wrong time, a bad match for the circumstances. W's life prior to becoming president doesn't show similar devotion to human suffering IMHO.

One thing Hoover and Bush II do have in common, again IMHO, is that their ideology blinded them to what was happening in the real world. Hoover beliefs, specifically about economic volunteerism and self-reliance, kept him from a reality based approach to the crisis. Viewing the world through his ideological prism hampered his effectiveness.

Impeaching Hoover for high crimes and misdemeanors doesn't seem viable. Being clueless or inept doesn't seem like either a high crimes or a misdemeanor. That doesn't mean that congress couldn't do it. But I would think passing a law that allowed for a recall election would be more appropriate.

It's been over 70 years since Hoover was president. In another 70 years, how will history look at W?

My guess is that he will be viewed as a failure, probably a worse failure than Hoover. After all Hoover didn't start any disasters, he just got steamrollered by life. Also Hoover seems (through the lens of history) to be a genuinely honest and caring person. Just as Jimmy Carter has used his life since being president to enhance his reputation, Hoover's life prior to becoming president will always reflect well on him.