BOOK REVIEWS gggff

The Missing Face on Mount Rushmore A Review of Ellis Hawley's The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their Institutions, 1917-1933, Second Edition Prospect Heights, Illinois, Waveland Press, 1992.   Review by Larry DeWitt December 2003 Ellis Hawley apparently believes a great injustice has been done in the telling of American history-that there should be one more face on Mount Rushmore. Hawley sees in his inner vision the starch-collared face of Herbert Hoover staring sternly down from its lofty granite perch beside the other great U.S. Presidents immortalized by Gutzon Borglum. To make his vision a reality, Hawley has devoted his career to a continuing effort to rehabilitate the reputation of Herbert Hoover-nowhere more so than in this present book. Whether it is Hawley trying to make the case that Hoover was an enlightened progressive; or whether he is helping Hoover deftly avoid any conceivable responsibility for the Depression; or whether he is merely making Hoover the center of the world during this period, Hawley gives us a portrait of Hoover as a colossus of a man confidently bestriding the world stage, failing only because the smaller minds of his day fail to grasp the New Era he is trying to bring about. One can be forgiven I suppose for reading Hawley and almost forgetting that Herbert Hoover was not in fact President of the United States during most of this period, since even when others occupy the White House, it is Hoover's Department of Commerce, Hawley tells us, that is the real center of public policy action during this period. One almost gets the impression that Hawley thinks it a mere inconvenient detail that Hoover was not actually President from 1920-1929, since he was by-god, in Hawley's telling, certainly acting-President. Hoover as the Center of the Policy Universe- Ostensibly, this is a book about America's involvement in the Great War and the period following the War, up to the coming to office of Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. Actually, it is a book about Herbert Hoover and the world events which just happened to swirl around his center of gravity. We learn first that the Progressive Era was merely a prelude to the New Liberalism or New Individualism of Hoover and his "associational state." We then learn that the Great War itself was a "progressive" undertaking because it embodied modern techniques of organization and management which, we will learn later, were the earmarks of Hoover's vision of governance. Hawley then tells us that Hoover should have been elected President in 1920 (pg. 44) but no mind, he was actually, from his perch in the Commerce Department the real player in the Harding administration while most of the rest of the Cabinet was too corrupt or inept to govern (cf. pgs. 53-57). In the Coolidge administration it was Hoover who was the force for innovation and change as the President and his Secretary of the Treasury fought a futile reactionary rear-guard action only slowing down his inevitable ascendancy (cf. the entirety of Chapter 6). In the concluding chapters concerning Hoover's presidency we find a world in which Hoover is, more plausibly, at the center of the story. Although here too, something is not quite right. We search in vain, for example, for any mild indication that Hoover had any policy responsibility for the debacle of the Depression. In the aftermath of his defeat in 1932 Hoover was, understandably, bitter and uncomprehending. He saw his defeat as a huge mistake on the part of the voters, rather than as an indication that he might have actually done something wrong himself. Three weeks before he left office he sent Senator Simeon Fess a secret letter, by way of a memorandum for the record. (1) It was his explanation of why the Depression happened and how it was that he was to blame for none of it. In Hoover's account, three forces caused the Crash and the Depression: the Democrats in Congress; Franklin Roosevelt's campaign rhetoric; and the Europeans. He instructed Fess to make the letter public if the Democrats started blaming the Republicans for the Depression. Twenty years later he was still repeating the same story when he published his memoirs. (2) Perhaps this is not surprising, given human vanity, of which Hoover seems to have had more than his fair share. But what is surprising is the extent to which Hawley's narrative sees the world through Hoover's eyes. Hawley manages to trace Hoover's entire career, even his failed Presidency, while skillfully avoiding any suggestion that Hoover ever actually got anything wrong. Hawley never says that Hoover was perfect, but he never really says he was anything less. Hawley typically describes a Hoover policy and explains its innovative character and its well-intentions. Then he alludes to what critics believed about it-showing a kind of even-handedness and neutrality. Then, when the trolley goes off the track, Hawley describes events in a curiously bloodless way, as if failed polices were the result of atmospheric conditions over which policymakers had no real control. One searches Hawley's account in vain for any instance in which he clearly indicates that Hoover actually made a wrong policy choice. It is very cleverly done. Let us look at an example. Consider the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. Hoover's support of this tariff increase while the world economy was teetering on the bring of depression is generally viewed as a serious policy error. William Leuchtenburg says of it: "As the economists had warned, the new law throttled world trade and brought a wave of retaliation from other countries." (3) David Kennedy said of the law "in fact the tariff bill represented both an economic and a political catastrophe," and he depicts Hoover's acquiescence in the legislation as a kind of turning point in the Hoover presidency, concluding "Hoover had failed the first great test of his capacity for political leadership." (4) What does Hawley say? "As summer gave way to fall, the economy reeled under the impact of a severe drought in the South and West, a collapse of commodity-holding operations abroad, and an intensifying international trade war aggravated by the new Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that Hoover (ignoring a petition signed by 1,038 members of the American Economic Association) had signed into law on June 17. . . Confronted with this worsening situation, the Hoover administration took action. In August it organized the National Drought Committee . . . In October it added a similar agency for unemployment relief . . . The president also de-emphasized developments abroad . . . Still, as the year drew to a close, contraction was accelerating, and the number of Americans who believed that Hooverism had failed and should be abandoned was now increasing." (5) Well, was Hoover's support of Smoot-Hawley a mistake? We cannot tell from Hawley's treatment because he uses two literary techniques to obfuscate the question. First he merges three separate topics in a single sentence to give camouflage to the tariff issue. Then he alludes to "negative" factoids to create the impression he is being even-handed by reporting something critical. First he tells us in passing that a thousand economists disagreed with Hoover, but he fails to tell us whether this means anything at all, and seems to imply therefore that it doesn't. Then he refers to a rise in a generalized negative public opinion (atmospherics) to show he is willing to be critical of Hoover. But critical of what? Was Smoot-Hawley a policy misstep by Hoover? One will never know from reading Hawley. (6) This imbalanced account of the role of Hoover in the interwar world is an important flaw. Books like Hawley's, which attempt to be surveys of a period, owe their readers the duty of producing a balanced portrait of the era, with the proportions of things properly represented. Hawley can, and has, produced works on the life and career of Hoover. He can focus all he wants on the glories of Hoover in such works. But in a period-survey, imbalance of this kind is a serious shortcoming. Despite this serious problem with Hawley, his book is valuable and important. There is much to like in this book, in somewhat the same way that is there much to like in a good encyclopedia. The work is thorough, comprehensive, full of useful information, and written with a very dry pen. Or to put it differently, this is a fine and important book, with a single jarring flaw. It has a vein of fool's gold running the length of the work; a vein which makes getting at the valuable ore much harder going than it should be. It is rather like having a best friend who is the soul of wit and charm and good fellowship, but who has a drinking problem, and this one flaw in his character warps everything in our friendship. The flaw in Hawley's book is his overreaching crusade to put Herbert Clark Hoover's face on Mount Rushmore. If the reader would simply discount everything Hawley says about Hoover by about two-thirds, the result would be a more reasonable history. A less partisan account of this period does not find Hoover to be the central figure in so much of what went on during these years. In Leuchtenburg's history of the same period Hoover assumes a more realistic-sized role. In Leuchtenburg's telling Hoover appears in the narrative where he logically should, but Leuchtenburg actually lets Harding and Coolidge be President rather than mere front-men for Hoover. For the statistically minded, it is perhaps revealing to observe that in Hawley's history Hoover appears on fully one-third of his pages, whereas in Leuchtenburg Hoover receives mention only in a more reasonable ten percent. Hoover as a Progressive- Calvin Coolidge did not give us much during his presidency, but he did give us half a definition of what it takes to be a progressive. A progressive, Coolidge said, was someone who, seeing ten problems coming down the road has to rush out and do battle with them. Coolidge's own home-spun counter-philosophy was that if you just ignore the problems, nine out of ten of them will go away somehow on their own. (7) So, to be a progressive, you have to support an activist role for government. But mere activism has no necessary connection to progressive politics. If our theory of governance is that government should enrich the rich and empower the powerful on the wan expectation that prosperity and power will then trickle down to the rest of us, this may well be an activist vision of the role of government, but it certainly has nothing to do with progressivism. Progressives believe that government should be actively engaged in trying to secure a more equitable distribution of economic well-being and political power-in trying to produce greater social justice. Without reference to these values and aims, we cannot tell the goats from the sheep, or the progressives from the McKinley Republicans. Hawley, it is clear, sees Hoover as a new kind of progressive. He buys completely Hoover's view of himself as an activist, compassionate, New Individualist. No hide-bound conservative Republican is Hoover. No old-fashioned Andrew Mellon type Republican. Hoover is a new, modern, bred of political leader. A kind of embodiment of the very essence of the New Era-efficient, managerial, socially-minded, given to governance with the light hand of the associational state rather than the dead hand of the old statist world view. Well, maybe. But let's not stray too far from the views of the subject himself. Hoover was a classic Lockean liberal, obsessed with issues of liberty. In 1922 he published the first of his major philosophical treatises on his theory of government. In American Individualism, Hoover, grandiosely, told his readers that there were "five or six great social philosophies . . . at struggle in the world for ascendancy." (8) Hoover announced that all these great world philosophies were wrong and that he had discovered a new way, American Individualism. Communism, Socialism, Fascism, Capitalism, plain Individualism, Syndicalism and Autocracy were the efforts of human beings throughout history to reconcile liberty and state power, and all were in error. Hoover, alone it seems among the great minds of history, had a vision of a grand synthesis which reconciled all that was noble and eliminated all that was corrupt in these prior philosophies. The new individualism was essentially the old individualism with a social conscience. Its methods of achieving a more just society were, in addition to standard Republican trickle-down platitudes, only the addition of what Hawley calls the "associational state." So by government acting as a facilitator to the efforts of the private sector, not just prosperity, but fairness and equity, would also somehow emerge, all without recourse to any type of heavy-handed intervention by the state. In 1934, after being turned out of office by the voters, Hoover was less sanguine about the prospects for an associational utopia. Instead he saw sinister forces at work everywhere he looked and in his second major treatise on governance, The Challenge to Liberty, Hoover made it clear that when push came to shove, it was the libertarian half of his equation which was were his real commitments lay. "It is a false Liberalism that interprets itself into government dictation, or operation of commerce, industry and agriculture," he wrote, with the New Deal in mind. "Every move in that direction poisons the very springs of true Liberalism. . . . Liberalism is a force proceeding from the deep realization that economic freedom cannot be sacrificed if political freedom is to be preserved. True Liberalism seeks all legitimate freedom first in the confident belief that without such freedom the pursuit of other blessings is in vain." (9) In the opening words of his book he sounded his alarm: "For the first time in two generations the American people are faced with the primary issue of humanity and all government-the issue of human liberty. Not just in the United States, but throughout the world, the whole philosophy of individual liberty is under attack. In haste to bring under control the sweeping social forces unleashed by the political and economic dislocations of the World War . . . peoples and governments are blindly wounding, even destroying those fundamental human liberties which have been the foundation and the inspiration of progress since the Middle Ages. . . . We have to determine now whether, under the pressures of the hour, we must cripple or abandon the heritage of liberty for some new philosophy which must mark the passing of freedom." (10) Hoover did go on, we should note, to aver his firm belief that out of this expansive Liberty would inevitably come both greater prosperity and greater social justice-in terms to which Andrew Mellon could not possibly object. So Hoover added a couple of new "spins" to classic liberalism. He gave voice to an (apparently sincere) concern for the potential excesses of an unbridled libertarianism, and he saw a new role for government, as facilitator and organizer and bringer of order. This was in keeping with the spirit of the times, which in Hawley's view, as well as Leuchtenburg's, and especially Robert Wiebe's, had to do with a search for a kind of managerial order. (11) But on the fundamental question of whether government had a responsibility to intervene to produce greater social justice, Hoover was unbending. He called any such effort National Regimentation and argued that its dead hand would necessarily always stifle liberty. One reason that Hawley and others mistake Hoover for a progressive, is that they mistake means and aims. Mere organization, order and efficiency are not progressive. No doubt Hoover was the first President to embody the new managerial ethos which Hawley and others say was a defining characteristic of the New Era. It is also undoubtedly true that some progressives believed that this new strategy of social science, appeal to expertise, modern management, and the rest of it, would offer powerful new tools to help them realize their aims. But it is those aims which are the key. Without a commitment to the social justice aims of the progressives, a mere adherence to the tactics and techniques of the modern era does not a progressive make. There are indications of progressive-like innovations in Hoover's presidency, at least relative to Republican orthodoxy. Certainly, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the production of the Recent Social Trends report, his efforts to jaw-bone business leaders into holding the line on wages, his advocacy of a limited agricultural policy in the form of expanded use of co-operatives, all could be taken as progressive tendencies. But there were plenty of signs that Hoover was a Republican first and a "new Republican" second. As the economic crisis hit, Hoover blocked federal appropriations to the Red Cross; restricted agricultural aid to feed and seed and not to farmers; routed the Bonus Marchers; blocked federal operation of the Muscle Shoals facilities; fought leaders of his own party over the McNary-Haugen agricultural price-support legislation; refused to consider any type of federal unemployment relief, etc. All of which, in my reading, call into question the bona fides of Hoover's claim to be a progressive. Notice also that there are some, shall we say ironies, in the story of Hoover's own career. His first big job in the federal government was as the national Food Administrator during World War I. As Food Administrator he was a virtual dictator, not only of broad agricultural policy, but of the conduct of individual citizens. He used the government's power to buy-up the entire sugar crop then re-sold it to refiners, and ordered grocers to sell no more than two pounds of sugar to any American family in a month; he grabbed the wheat crop from the marketplace through a government corporation he headed for that purpose; he set government-mandated prices for pork and wheat (a policy he would later reject in the McNary-Haugen legislation) in order to manipulate the market to increase production; he supported a law limiting the production of alcoholic beverages (the first serious step toward outright prohibition) in order to conserve grain. His use of the dead hand of government was very successful. Farm incomes rose 30% during the War, food production increased 25%, and food shipments to the Allies tripled. All of this of course in the context of the war effort. Nevertheless, his use of the powers of government as Food Administrator were essentially indistinguishable from those of the New Deal (although the New Deal certainly went well beyond Hoover). When practiced by the New Deal to relieve the Depression it would be excoriated by Hoover as "the coming of fascism to agriculture." (12) An uncharitable reading of Hoover's conduct might be that he favored statism when practiced for war-making but not when practiced in pursuit of social justice. Such a posture might even be defensible, but it is difficult to see how it could be fairly described as progressive. But even more instructive is the list of the aspects of modern government of which Hoover disapproved. In his memoirs on the Depression period, published in 1952, he seemed to still be fighting the election of 1932. Here are his mature reflections, seasoned, one would think, by the cooling of passions and the passage of time: "All through the 1932 campaign, something was in the air far more sinister than even the miasmic climate of depression or a political campaign. I was convinced that Roosevelt and some members of his Brain Trust were proposing to introduce parts of the collectivism of Europe into the United States under their oft-repeated phrase 'planned economy.' That was an expression common to all collectivist systems. . . Their purposes were stated in various disguises of new meanings, hidden in old and well understood words and in terms of glorious objectives. They involved the pouring of a mixture of socialism and fascism into the American system." (13) When reviewing the Roosevelt Administration's agricultural policies he summed it up as "fascism comes to agriculture." When contemplating the fate of Labor during the New Deal, where labor unions saw the establishment of a right to collective bargaining, this supposed friend of Labor could only see "fascism comes to labor." The Tennessee Valley Authority, which brought electricity to much of the rural south, was in Hoover's eyes nothing less than the "introduction to socialism through electrical power." New Deal monetary policy was of course "collectivism comes to the currency." How all these "isms" were put over on an unwitting public is explained by Hoover as due to the "building of the Trojan horse of emergency," which he explains as follows: "Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of 'Emergency.' It was a tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. . . . The invasion of New Deal Collectivism was introduced by this same Trojan Horse." (14) After leaping out of this Trojan Horse the New Dealers first set about "collectivizing the legislative arm" as part of its "usurpation of power." "The first tenet of collectivism is the concentration of power. Roosevelt's first step in this direction was the reduction of the legislative area to a rubber stamp. . . . We need introduce no evidence beyond that of Roosevelt's own supporters" (Hoover then trots out a quote from Al Smith from 1936!). (15) Hoover could be both shrill and petty in his review of the New Deal. In a chapter of his Memoirs entitled "Collectivism By Thought Control and Smear" he first decries the presence of public information officers in federal agencies; then he segues into a screed about the American Liberty League and implies it was somehow pro-Roosevelt (!); then he complains of the vast injustice done him personally when Roosevelt refused to name Boulder Dam, Hoover Dam; he then complains about the attempted prosecution of former Treasury Secretary Mellon. All of which somehow proves that the Roosevelt Administration was practicing collectivist thought control and smear. Some would certainly agree with some aspects of Hoover's world-view. His was a fairly traditional political take on the rise of big government in the mid-twentieth century. But the tradition in which it is typical is that of conservatism, not of progressivism. If Calvin Coolidge were as prolix as Hoover it would not be hard to imagine him speaking these very words. If Warren Harding gave it much thought, or gave much of a damn, he would probably get his moss-back up in much the same way. But don't we have to give Hoover some due as a conservative with a conscience? Was he not an early practitioner of what George W. Bush likes to call "compassionate conservatism," or what his father called the "kinder, gentler" Republican Party? After all, Hoover did reject the classic laissez-faire ideology of his party, saying with evident conviction, "No doubt, individualism ran riot, with no tempering principle, would provide a long category of inequalities, of tyrannies, dominations, and injustices." (16) Hoover was, in my reading, a would-be progressive who did not understand what it takes to be a real progressive. He was afflicted with a false view of human nature and thus by a false theory of governance. Hoover apparently believed, pretty much against the evidence of history, that human beings all want fundamentally for everyone to get a fair share of the advantages of life, but they just do not understand how to organize their affairs with sufficient efficiency to permit this fundamental fairness to become manifest. Thus, the role of government is that of facilitator. All government has to do is put people of good will in the same room, so to speak, give them the information and tools they need to be efficient and effective, then turn them loose to skip off hand-in-hand into the beautiful sunset of the Associational State. A darker and closer reading of history tells many of us that human beings are often good and gracious, but also too often are selfish and greedy and indifferent to one another's welfare. Hoover was certainly aware of some of the ugly aspects of human conduct, but he apparently believed that they all occurred, not because of the lesser angels of our nature, but because people believed a mistaken grand philosophy, and if these old outmoded philosophies (Fascism, Communism, Statism, etc.) were simply replaced with his New Individualism, all conflicts would become resolvable. But interests clash-labor versus management, immigrant versus old-stock, industrial versus rural, rich versus poor-not just because people fail to organize their affairs efficiently, but interests clash precisely because interests clash. That is, different groups and individuals in a complex modern society have different agendas and aims, and these agendas and aims are sometimes simply incompatible. For example, from the late 19th century agricultural producers in the rural south tended to see high tariffs as inimical to their financial well-being while New England textile manufacturers thought such tariffs were precisely what they needed to maintain their own prosperity. It is doubtful that a Convention of Parties with an Interest in Tariff Policy ( `a la Hoover) would ever reconcile these two competing self-interests. Thus a modern theory of progressive governance recognizes the necessity for the deft hand of government intervention when needed (the regulatory state) and for the direct amelioration of the inevitable distresses produced by the workings of the marketplace (the welfare state). Having just come out of the Great War, and having seen some of its effects first-hand, one would think Hoover would understand this. But apparently not. He seemed sincerely motivated to do good, and seriously without a clue as to what doing good in the modern world actually requires. Hoover, according to one earlier school of pro-New Deal historiography, was a failed President because he lacked charisma, or perhaps, the common touch, necessary to connect with average Americans. He was, so this account goes, aloof and cool, and perhaps even indifferent, to the problems of ordinary people. He may well have been some of this, but that was not the heart of Herbert Hoover's problem. Hoover was a failed President because he was above all else a political philosopher who took his own ideas far too seriously. He was a political ideologue, who bracketed his federal career with two books, one in 1922 (The New Individualism) and one in 1932 (The Challenge To Liberty) both of which portrayed him as the ideological savior of the American way of life, which was being threatened on all sides by the false ideologies of the ages. But even to call him an ideologue would almost miss the point. Hoover was a grandiose thinker of Big Thoughts-a man who took his big thoughts more seriously than he took the practical day-to-day business of governance. The wall that Hoover hit was that he could not effectively respond to the crisis of the Depression without violating his philosophy of governance-without dabbling in a role for government which went beyond mere facilitator. But he could hardly bring himself to do this because to do so was not just a violation of some political platform plank, it would be a violation of a Great World Philosophy. Hoover was not an utter fool, so he did try a little innovation here and there, as Hawley details, and as others have observed. Some have even suggested that we could see Hoover as dabbling in some small way in a kind of Keynesian economic intervention. Well, perhaps. But if Hoover was dabbling with one hand, he was holding his nose with the other. Because he could not but see the whole business as profoundly distasteful-as a violation of some very large principles. Herbert Hoover could not bring himself to violate his own big thoughts and world philosophy in the thoroughgoing way demanded by the Depression. The Depression required a fly-by-the-seat-your-pants extemporizing and an ability to avoid becoming enmeshed in nets of ideology and high-theory. No one was more suited for this task than Franklin Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt was a successful President precisely because he didn't have a big thought in his head. Or at least, he didn't have a big thought which he was unwilling to change if need be. FDR had one principle as his political cannon. He understood that the nation was in serious trouble and he believed it was the job of government to do something about it. Coupled with this simple idea was a set of exquisite political skills, a powerful and engaging personality, and, more than anything, a thoroughgoing pragmatism, in the service of which FDR was willing to try most anything to see if it would work. Consistency with some idealized set of first principles never, as far as we can tell, troubled a moment of FDR's sleep. FDR never really concerned himself with evolving a consistent set of political principles, which is why historians search for them in vain in the New Deal. He had principles and a general political philosophy, but his were not the sort of principles which must be announced always in capital letters. It was enough for FDR that an idea looked like it might work, and that it be politically feasible. Because he was a practical man and not a grandiose political philosopher like Hoover, FDR was constantly engaged in trying to do something about the nation's problems. This kind of active effort was seen and appreciated by the public and was the reason FDR was loved (and hated) by the American people. Franklin Roosevelt was, in my reading, the greatest President of the 20th century. Herbert Hoover may well have been the worst. Not because he was asleep at the switch, like Harding, or because he was ideologically disinterested (like Coolidge) but because he was smart, energetic, and actively engaged, but was stuck in the amber of his own philosophical model. Hoover was faced with one of the two greatest crises of the century (the Depression) and he failed utterly in his efforts to cope effectively and lead the nation successfully through that crisis because of his own intellectual arrogance. Because he could not imagine that he might be wrong. Because he could not conceive that maybe the New Individualism was not, after all, the Big Thought surpassing all the big thoughts produced by all the human thinkers who had gone before. Herbert Hoover suffered from intellectual hubris. For this he deserves a harsher judgment in history than that reserved for the mere incompetents of the era. Hoover suffered from hubris, and the nation suffered as a result. For this failing, all the efforts at rehabilitation by Ellis Hawley are to no avail. Acknowledgements- Professor John Jeffries of the History Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County reviewed an earlier version of this review and his comments resulted in a more moderated end-product. I think, however, that he still views my thesis as somewhat extreme. ENDNOTES 1. The Hoover letter to Fess is available on the Social Security Administration website at: http://www.ssa.gov/history/hooverletter.html, accessed 10/27/03. 2. Hoover was still trying to sell these same stale fish, wrapped in twenty year-old newspaper, when he published his memoirs of the depression period. See Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression 1929-1941, (New York, the MacMillan Company, 1952). 3. William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity: 1914-32, Second Edition, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993), 110. 4. David M. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999), 49-51. 5. Ellis W. Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their Institutions, 1917-1933, Second Edition, (Prospect Heights, Illinois, Waveland Press, 1992),167. 6. Smoot-Hawley receives one additional mention in Hawley, on page 171, where he uses the same techniques to hide Hoover's policy choice amidst a general discussion of the economic problems in Latin America. In his Memoirs Hoover himself is unrepentant on Smoot-Hawley. He expends most of his energy trying to establish that if anything was wrong with his tariff policies that FDR shared the errors. In a final bit of creative policy logic, he argues that the devaluation of the dollar during the New Deal was in effect a 50% tariff on everything and hence FDR was a bigger tariff proponent than himself. He concludes, with more cleverness than usual in his writing, "Should Mr. Roosevelt meet Senator Smoot in the next world, his first act should be an apology." (Hoover, Memoirs, 407.) So, FDR, not Hoover, is the one who must apologize for the Smoot-Hawley tariff policy! 7. This was of course utter nonsense. Serious social problems do not go away if we ignore them, like the morning mist with the sunrise. What Coolidge really was saying was that if he as President ignored most social problems he found he could successfully avoid ever having to deal with them. And there were problems aplenty during Coolidge's term which he ignored: the rise of the Klan and the outbreak of lynching; race riots in the cities; crushing poverty among urban working-class immigrants; etc. So whatever Coolidge was, we should have no trouble seeing he was not a progressive, by his own terms. 8. Herbert Hoover, "Herbert Hoover on American Individualism-1922," in Major Problems in American History: 1920-1945, ed. Colin Gordon, (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1999). 9. Herbert Hoover, The Challenge to Liberty, (New York, Scribner's, 1934), 203-204. 10. Hoover, Challenge,1-2. 11. In addition to Hawley's The Great War and Leuchtenburg's Perils of Prosperity, see Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order 1877-1920, (New York, Hill and Wang, 1967). 12. Hoover, Memoirs, 408. 13. Hoover, Memoirs, 329. 14. Hoover, Memoirs, 357. 15. The former President's memory seems to have failed him here as Al Smith was a bitter opponent of FDR from 1932 on. 16. Hoover, "Herbert Hoover on American Individualism-1922," in Gordon Major Problems.