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The reaction from Washington to Wall Street woes. Hoover calls Senate investigation into market practices, Roosevelt wins White House, short selling depresses market, F. Pecora becomes lead counsel for hearings. Wall Streeters give testimony. Congress passes banking and securities acts in 1933. Stock exchanges regulated in 1934 and SEC is created.

This chapter reveals that Herbert C. Hoover was a “forgotten progressive.” In the 1970s, his place in American history was being reconceived by historians, who argued that Hoover was not the heartless and dogmatic conservative who waged relentless war against the New Deal. Trained as an engineer, widely traveled, and committed to scientific management, Hoover wanted to use knowledge to transcend class divisions and national rivalries without overextending the reach of government. Serving as an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson during World War I and orchestrating the distribution of relief after the conflict, he believed that the system of democratic capitalism was beleaguered by mass politics and the ideological appeal of rival systems of political economy. He wanted to safeguard the American way of life, the defining quality of which was individual opportunity. He believed that to achieve this goal he had to encourage businessmen, workers, and farmers to see that their interests could be served through voluntary cooperation.

This chapter demonstrates how the Great Depression allowed Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt to pull back from Theodore Roosevelt's imperial commitment. The Depression facilitated the end of the first American empire by breaking up the coalition between creditors and direct investors. Under Depression conditions, however, governments faced a painful bind: they could maintain payments on their foreign debt at the cost of austerity measures that undermined political stability; or they could impose tax hikes that directly influenced the profitability of foreign direct investments; or they could default. In the battle between bondholders and direct investors, the direct investors won: the Depression had devastated the domestic influence of the financiers.

Herbert Hoover was the nation’s first Quaker chief executive. The Society of Friends significantly affected Hoover’s temperament and character, especially his sense of duty, work ethic, self-reliance, and his worldview, most notably his emphasis on good works, private charity, and peace. While numerous factors affected his work as president, including his personality, business experience, engineering mind-set, and commitment to capitalism, his Quaker faith had a strong impact. As president, Hoover’s political philosophy and policies, especially his response to the Great Depression, were guided by Quaker concepts of “ordered liberty” and “corporate individualism” and his belief that Americans would respond generously to appeals to help those in need. His efforts to aid children, blacks, and Native Americans, reform prisons, protect civil liberties, and promote world peace illustrate how Hoover’s faith helped shape his policies. Religion also played a major role in the 1928 election that pitted Hoover against Catholic Al Smith.

The right of children to be registered at birth was not part of early universal declarations of entitlements for the young adopted in the wake of the First World War. But during the interwar years, the main proponents of these declarations — the Save the Children International Union and the American Child Health Association, headed by philanthropist and future President Herbert Hoover — soon understood that the registration of infants was at the basis of their work, especially that concerned with the reduction of infant mortality. This chapter studies their respective campaigns in Africa and in the United States, respectively, to show how registration came to be understood as a prerequisite for the full promises of children's rights to be realized. It draws surprising parallels between the two efforts, related to the size of the territory and the discrimination faced by children due to their race and their ethnic origins.

This chapter focuses on Learned Hand's career during the Depression. Nothing testifies more tellingly to Hand's growing renown during these years than his first genuine prospect of promotion to the nation's highest court: early in 1930, as he turned fifty-eight, he was seriously considered for a seat on the Supreme Court when Chief Justice William Howard Taft retired because of failing health. In selecting a new chief justice, President Hoover confronted a difficult choice: Should he name his close friend, fifty-seven-year-old associate justice Harlan Fiske Stone? Or were there stronger reasons to select Charles Evans Hughes, the sixty-eight-year-old elder statesman of the Republican party? Hoover chose Hughes, but only, it has been said, after he considered promoting Stone and filling the resulting vacancy with Learned Hand.

In underscoring his policy in the South with a southern journey, Herbert Hoover was carrying on a Republican Party tradition dating back to 1877. Hoover sought to become a national president by breaking down the Democratic Party's electoral dominance in the states of the former Confederacy. The inroads made by Hoover during his 1928 campaign seemed to represent the fulfillment of a dream for Republican success in Dixieland that had largely eluded Republican presidents since 1877. The Elizabethton address was one of only eight major speeches that Hoover made while campaigning for the presidency in 1928, and as mentioned, it was the only one delivered in what was considered to be a traditionally southern state. Hoover laid the foundation for the strategy with his Elizabethton speech and then added levels to it during a critically important press conference during his first year in office.

‘Everywhere there emerged the centrality of America — whether loved or loathed — as the crucial term of comparison when the topic was building the future in any form’; the challenges of 1920s modernity now become obvious: mass democracy, mass production, mass communication, and the last two bore unmistakeable signs of America all over them. A wave of adaptation ensued, particularly in Germany, where Fordism was thought to be the key to reconstruction. While the Americans, particularly Herbert Hoover, started to elaborate a new theory linking the survival of democracy to the promise of mass prosperity, a surge of self-conscious criticism of American mass society arose in Europe. Here French intellectuals created a new tradition, but disquiet in Britain was strong across the political and business classes. They attempted a controlled, limited, adoption of American ways, but were not particularly successful.

The seeds of African American alignment found a fertile ground during the presidencies of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, but it accelerated and sprouted during the Great Depression and the New Deal. By the 1920s, the African American alienation was a budding flower in the Lincoln administration but found no viable outward expression. This chapter discusses the growing alienation of the black voters as the Republican Party that was once ruled by the motives of ensuring the welfare of the blacks started to turn its back on the blacks. It discusses the Grand Old Party's policies which led to the alienation of the blacks. In the chapter, the presidency of Hoover, the “southern strategy,” the emergence of “black and tan” and “lily-white” factions in the GOP, and the Republicans' taking for granted of the political importance of the blacks are discussed. While the New Deal and the Great Depression may be pointed as contributing factors to the increasing disaffection of the blacks with the GOP, the change of allegiance of the black voters was primarily caused by the interplay of factors that were deliberately designed to alienate them.

Germans hoped the Allied blockade would be lifted with the Armistice, yet it was not fully lifted until July 1919, after the Treaty of Versailles had been signed. Interim treaties relating to food were made between the Allies and Germany in between the Armistice and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. This chapter considers the various attempts during this eight-month period within and without Germany to revictual the country, as well as efforts by some of the victors to prevent foodstuffs from entering. Germany was still the enemy, feelings were charged, and there was political pressure, particularly from France, to continue the blockade. The United States Food Administration, created in 1917 and based on the vision of Herbert Hoover, increased total food supplies available for shipping to the Allies during the war. This resulted in a surplus amount of food during the armistice that could have been directed towards feeding vanquished Germany, but only if the Allies agreed.

This chapter explores the decline of the use of the public utility model for traffic with respect to the “floor space” problem. Street railways added to discontent over traffic problems. By the time Herbert Hoover became U.S. Secretary of Commerce, attraction to a new model known as “associationism” was gaining ground. This model mobilized private interests and gave them a direct role in solving social problems. As a result, the National Chamber and Commerce Department opted to work together in solving the problem of big business, taking into account the problem of traffic. A number of experts gathered at the Hoover Conference and sought to come up with new means to improve traffic rather than traffic surveys or other similar investigations on street conditions. Other measures that were taken include a gasoline tax and parking meters, which eventually led to the free-market model of city traffic.

This chapter examines the latter stages of U.S. military intervention in Haiti, which took violent and obtrusive turns in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries under the U.S. president Herbert Hoover and how it led to the formation of the Robert R. Moton Educational Commission to Haiti in 1930. The president of the Tuskegee Institute, Moton suggested that both radical and conservative changes be implemented in the Haitian educational system. Through the Good Neighbor Policy, a political derivative of nineteenth-century U.S. Pan American ideals of hemispheric unity, Moton outlined a program that both enabled and challenged U.S. occupation beyond the rubric of education.

The mobilization for the First World War had been organized through a powerful configuration of voluntary associations and national agencies. After the war, what use could be made of these arrangements? National organizations such as the American Red Cross struggled to define a new mission suited to domestic efforts during peacetime. Local organizations, notably the Community Chests, were increasingly influential as a civic alternative to municipal government. But with the Mississippi River flood of 1927 and the onset of the drought and unemployment that would become the Great Depression, these models were deployed to meet new and difficult crises. Prior to the New Deal, the limits of voluntary responses to the Great Depression created the context in which a substantial expansion of federal aid could be contemplated.

New political challenges arose for black Memphians from 1928 to 1939. The Republican Party became less attuned to African American concerns with Herbert Hoover as president. Edward H. Crump saw Franklin D. Roosevelt's election to the presidency in 1932 lead to greater national influence than when Republicans occupied the White House, and he cracked down on Memphians who challenged his power. In addition, Memphians faced the blow of the Great Depression. Despite all these difficulties, black Memphians engaged in a variety of electoral activities. While some found it beneficial to work with the Crump machine, others protested it. Robert R. Church Jr.'s Republican faction remained the most powerful local Republican group, and Church continued to be an influential Republican figure nationally. Rivaling Church in power, businessman J. E. Walker emerged as the city's most prominent black Democrat; he represented the shift of African Americans nationally to the Democratic Party.

Germans were dismayed that the Allied blockade continued during armistice, and loudly protested the nutritional distress it created for women and children. Official reports of the German food supply and living conditions of the civilian population were commissioned by the Germans, the Americans, the British, and a conglomerate of European neutral countries. Less official studies were also made, and first-hand reports were published across the world. Beyond the political hurdles of sending food into a blockaded country, there were also bureaucratic issues under the Supreme War Council related to food control and distribution. Limited amounts of foodstuffs were eventually allowed into Germany starting at the end of March of 1919, and these are analysed for their caloric value. Herbert Hoover became an influential figure in efforts to change public opinion to lift the blockade.

This chapter focuses on Herbert Hoover, who, despite sharing Calvin Coolidge's reticence, defended the president's authority to execute the law even before he was in office as president. While a member of the Coolidge administration, Hoover had questioned the constitutional propriety of conferring executive powers upon independent agencies, arguing that “there should be single-headed responsibility in executive and administrative functions.” He reiterated these views after assuming the presidency. Addressing the problem of departmental reorganization in his first annual message, Hoover urged that all executive administrative activities should be placed under single-headed responsibility. Consistent with these views, he assumed full responsibility for all executive policies. Hoover asserted his authority over Andrew Mellon, the strong-willed secretary of the treasury, by ordering Mellon's department “to publish all large governmental refunds of gift, estate, and income taxes[, which] was an important repudiation of the secretary's earlier policies.”

This chapter details the history of the Republican Party from 1921–1933. Topics covered include the revelations of corruption under Warren G. Harding's presidency, for which he was vilified after his death; the election of Calvin Coolidge as president; and the disastrous performance of Herbert Hoover's administration during Great Depression of the 1930s.

Harding administration scandals and the president’s death did not prevent Coolidge from winning election as president in 1924 by a huge popular vote. Barkley characterized the new administration as a period of calm but of little accomplishment. The focus of his attention was on the economic depression suffered by his farmer constituents. Much congressional attention centered on the McNary-Haugen farm bill, which Coolidge vetoed twice. During the 1928 Democratic national convention, Barkley was a failed candidate for the vice presidential nomination. He seconded the presidential nomination of Al Smith and served as Smith’s campaign manager in Kentucky. Hoover won the White House. The new president signed the Agricultural Marketing Act into law, but it proved to be a failure largely because of the Great Depression. Barkley strongly opposed the Hoover-signed Hawley-Smoot Tariff. He correctly predicted that the high protective rates would shrink foreign markets for US products and thus expand rather than reduce the Depression.

Although most research libraries accepted their reliance on the government-sponsored Library of Congress Mission, the Hoover Institution and Library on War, Revolution, and Peace did not. Its founder Herbert Hoover used the influence and reach of a former president to enable a private institution to operate where others were barred. Although eventually the Hoover Library won an authorized spot on the LCM, it largely operated in the shadows of the American military government. It drew upon an overlapping informal network of collectors, war correspondents, and intelligence agents to operate within the gray market for information in a defeated nation. These operations briefly came under scrutiny when one acquisition, The Goebbels Diaries, was published. Despite that episode, the library’s wartime collecting mission hastened the growth and prominence of the Hoover Institution as a center for the study of global politics, war, and diplomacy.

On May 28, 1928, Mary P. Follett set sail for Europe to study the functioning of the League of Nations in Switzerland. She also visited the International Management Institute, an organization founded in 1927 and whose founding vice-chairman was Henry S. Dennison. In September of that year, Follett presented a paper at the Twenty-seventh Lecture Conference for Works Directors, Managers, Foremen and Forewomen in Oxford, based on her observations of the League's Assembly and the commissions. By early November she was back in Boston, voting for Herbert Hoover in the 1928 presidential election. Follett again traveled to Europe on April 13, 1929, upon the invitation of Dame Katharine Furse, whom she met while in Geneva the previous summer. After deciding to live with Furse, she returned slowly to work. She began by reviewing two books, Ella Cabot's Temptations to Rightdoing and Harry A. Overstreet's The Enduring Quest. She also presented a paper for the Bureau of Personnel Administration.