I've been saving this one for election day. The couple in the middle are Herbert and his wife Lou Hoover. It's dated on the back, 1928, the year he won the presidency. Herbert Hoover was a farm boy from Iowa, graduated with an engineering degree from Stanford, went to Australia and worked as a mining engineer. After a year, he made a brief return to the U.S. to marry Lou who was the first woman to get a degree in geology from Stanford. Between them they made a fortune in both Australia and China. They were in China during the Boxer Rebellion. During World War 1, Hoover headed up the food relief program for western Europe, and he did the same thing during the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. What's sad about Hoover was that he was a very accomplished and decent person who didn't know what to do about the great depression. It kind of destroyed a well deserved good reputation.
"What's sad about Hoover was that he was a very accomplished and decent person who didn't know what to do about the great depression." Yes, that's right. The problem is he did things, but he did the wrong things, and if he had done nothing at all, we probably wouldn't have had a depression at all, or at worst a short and mild one like 1919-20.
ReplyDeleteAfter the sports lost their money in the stock market crash, federal revenues from the income tax and tariffs went down, and the country was running a deficit. Hoover and Treasury Secretary Mellon felt they needed to balance the books (which was the big mistake) so they increased the interest paid on Treasury bonds, to make them more attractive and so take in more money. But what happened was all the frightened investors put their money into these bonds and there was little money left over for investment in stocks and commercial bonds, and businesses started cutting back and failing for lack of capital. Which led to job cuts, lowered incomes, even less business activity, and the spiral to depression.
If Coolidge had run again in 1928, he would have been reelected, and when the stock market crashed he would have said "Some plungers lost their money. That's no look-out of mine," and done nothing, and we all would have been better off.