Miss Harris "Hoover Vs. FDR"

Did Exhausting The Government Make As Much Of A Difference As They Are Credited For?
The stock market crash, underproduction, spending on credit, decline of morals, decline of ethics, the boom and bust of economy, and Herbert Hoover. These rather differentiating things do have something in common- all of them, somewhere, somehow, are blamed for the Great Depression in America. As are most triumphs and failures, the Great Depression was probably due to a mixture of things, not one definitive cause. The Great Depression was a triumph in that once it had happened, the amount of will and prayer that something this terrible would not happen again to the United States set up programs, laws, and deals that prevented it from happening again. The United States’ citizens eventually overcame the Great Depression, learning from their experience on how to thrive on literally nothing at all. The question is, should Franklin D Roosevelt have gotten as much credit as he did?
It has been said that the Presidential election of 1932 had an unprecedented amount of no thought put into the ballots, as “it did not matter who the Democratic Party nominated,” because the “next president could be anyone but Hoover.” (Depression America Vol. 4: 13). Is it possible that Herbert Hoover was not given enough of a fair chance to fix this problem? From when the Great Depression started, to when Franklin Roosevelt moved into the white house there was approximately a three year span; which might seem like a long time, but from when Roosevelt took office to the start of WWII, (when the U.S. started to recover at an acceptable rate) there were roughly seven years. Is it possible that Roosevelt was given more then twice the amount of time Hoover was given to fix the Great Depression because Roosevelt was more personable and held fireside chats? Hoover did try to aid those in need, “throughout his political career from 1914 to his death in 1964 Hoover did not take any pay: He gave all his presidential salary to charity” (Depression America Vol. 1: 103). The same was never said about Roosevelt.
While President Hoover was extremely shy, finding “speaking to crowds an ordeal and came across as stiff and dull”, he did feel that it was his duty to “issue a reassuring statement even though he had expressed his reservations about the stock-market boom in the past” (Depression America Vol. 1: 104) (Depression America Vol. 1: 93). However, all this is not to say that Roosevelt was not effective- he did, of course, have the 100 days in office where many new groups, bills, revisions, etc. were made to help out the suffering. Hoover and Roosevelt merely went about the same goal in two different ways- while Roosevelt tried everything and anything, trying to help one group of people at a time, Hoover believed in a trickle system. He believed that this was partially to blame for the gravity of the Great Depression, as “once the lower-paid consumer stopped purchasing, the results were reflected upward” in the top businessmen, who then might have had to raise their prices, but then more people would not be able to afford them (Depression America Vol. 1: 85).
In previous depressions that the United States had endured, most people were farmers, and were able to live off of what they grew and/or slaughtered, but when the Great Depression hit, people were secretaries, actors, industrial line workers, and painters, living in cities, not farm houses. What this meant was that unemployment was “almost immediate hardship for workers and their families”, with unemployment levels reaching never before seem numbers and statistics “in a nation that prided itself on being a land of plenty” (McElvaine The Depression And New Deal A History In Documents: 14). Indeed, this land of plenty became riddled with nothingness and dust bowls with less then a year after Hoover left, “one-quarter of the U.S. workforce was jobless” (McElvaine The Depression And New Deal A History In Documents: 14).
Perhaps because “the three years after the crash were a downward spiral of misery and destitution as millions were thrown out of work” the people were so quick to name their shacks made out of whatever they could find ‘hoovervilles’ (Depression America Vol. 1: 86). Or perhaps because “by election day in November 1932 there were more then 13 million unemployed,” but Hoover had already had experience in distribution of resources before he even became President (Depression America Vol. 2: 6-7). He was first “called to Washington to serve as food administrator”, an office created to “encourage agricultural production and food conservation and to coordinate fair distribution of available resources” (Depression America Vol. 1: 103).
While Roosevelt had an entire New Deal laid out, many of his organizations failed, or were considered to be unconstitutional. Robert S. McElvaine writes that while “The New Deal was highly successful in its first objective of easing the pain of the depression,” it “never managed to bring about the full recovery it sought,” and this was almost seventy years after the Great Depression ended (McElvaine The Depression And New Deal A History In Documents: 15). The Great Depression and the way it was handled affected more then just the generations who survived it, grandchildren of those people would rip buttons off of old clothing, wash saran wrap, and squeeze every penny possible.
The space in-between the classes of people only grew during the 1930s, when “the top 0.1 percent of American families had a total income equal to that of the bottom 42 percent”, and the fact that “those who had money had bought what they needed; those without could not afford to enjoy consumer goods that stacked up in showrooms and warehouses,” (McElvaine “Great Depression In The United States”: 3) (Depression America Vol. 1: 85). In a decade, almost everything about any age group changed dramatically. Far less children were being born during the depression for fear of another mouth to feed, another body to carry and clothe and protect. Adults were wandering around aimlessly trying to find anything at all. Teenagers, however, were still in search of a great adventure. During the 1920s they were dancing to jazz, driving the car to campgrounds, and watching movies- in the 1930s however, “more than 250,000 teenagers were living as hobos. They left poverty and family problems behind and set off in search of what often seemed, at first, a great adventure” (Depression America Vol. 2: 66). It is fair to say that the Great Depression will not be forgotten easily.
Herbert Hoover was not given a fair fight in the presidential elections of 1932, he was not given nearly as much of a chance as Roosevelt did, and often goes down as one of the worst presidents in the United States’ history, following Harding. This unfair throne he sits on may stay eternal, as we can not go back in time and argue what might have been. We may only take the facts in from all sides, and try to equalize these opportunities in the future.