This Week in History

November 1-7, 1932

Roosevelt and Hoover Close the 1932 Presidential Campaign

On Nov. 5, 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt closed his campaign for President with a speech at Madison Square Garden in New York City. His opponent, incumbent President Herbert Hoover, had spoken in the same location five days earlier. The difference in philosophical outlook between the two men was striking, and offered a clear choice to the American people.

Herbert Hoover had become an American celebrity after World War I, praised as the "Great Engineer," who had overseen relief efforts in war-torn Belgium. Although he was orphaned early in life, he had managed to accumulate a small fortune by means of what he viewed as hard work and individual responsibility. His perspective on the "American System," which he cited often in his speeches, was that the greatness of America depended on rugged individualism and decentralized government.

Therefore, Hoover did not believe that government action could or should be used to end economic depressions. By "letting nature take its course," he had greatly magnified the effects of the stock-market crash of 1929. This policy was more than agreeable to his murderous Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, who advised Hoover: "Let the slump liquidate itself. Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system."¹

Therefore, in his State of the Union address on Dec. 2, 1930, President Hoover had told the Congress and the country that, "Economic depression can not be cured by legislative action or executive pronouncement. Economic wounds must be healed by the action of the cells of the economic body—the producers and consumers themselves. Recovery can be expedited and its effects mitigated by cooperative action. That cooperation requires that every individual should sustain faith and courage; that each should maintain his self-reliance; that each and every one should search for methods of improving his business or service; that the vast majority whose income is unimpaired should not hoard out of fear but should pursue their normal living and recreations; that each should seek to assist his neighbors who may be less fortunate; that each industry should assist its own employees; that each community and each state should assume its full responsibilities for organization of employment and relief of distress with that sturdiness and independence which built a great Nation." President Hoover insisted that relief for the unemployed must be locally and privately financed.

By 1932, local municipalities and states were finding it absolutely impossible to organize enough employment or to relieve the distress of millions of undernourished and homeless American citizens. Joseph Heffernan, the Mayor of Youngstown, Ohio, wrote a magazine article in May of 1932, which described that city's battle to help its citizens, and called for Federal intervention to restore the economy: "Never had Youngstown suffered such a shock to the spirit which had made it one of the great industrial centres of the world. Another winter was approaching. The numbers of the unemployed had increased and suffering had grown acute. Many heads of families had not earned a penny in two years. Landlords clamored for their rents and sought evictions. Thousands of the city's water bills were unpaid, and officials were torn between their desire to be charitable, their fear of disease if the water were cut off, and the city's urgent need of money. Property owners could not pay their taxes, and delinquencies became appalling. As in Cleveland, we adopted the slogan, 'Pay your taxes, so the hungry can be fed,' and the words meant just what they said, for by this time the private charities were swamped, desperate, and bankrupt."

Yet despite the massive suffering, President Hoover transformed the Constitutional principle of promoting the general welfare into a call for "self-help." In his speech at Madison Square Garden, Hoover claimed that "our opponents are proposing changes and so-called new deals which would destroy the very foundations of our American system." Continuing his microscopic view of humanity, he dropped his earlier reference to people as "the cells of the economic body" in favor of talking about a society that was "absolutely fluid in freedom of the movement of its human particles." The President claimed that any expansion of government expenditure to reverse the Depression and relieve suffering was nothing but "yielding to sectional and group raids on the Public Treasury," and announced proudly, "This I stopped."

'People Aren't Cattle...'

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