There are those who have recently looked back to Hoover’s strategy of cooperative individualism and independent internationalism and to the retrench-ment strategy of the 1920s as a source of inspiration.
The approach, after all, embodied a radically different vision of the relationship of the federal government with both American society and the larger global com-munity. Hoover’s starting point was an extraordinari-ly rich, participatory community life—a community life which many work toward today through their participation in what many term “civil society”: those forms of nongovernment activity and social organiza-tion, professional associations built around values and self-regulation, the propagation of new codes of social responsibility. There are also those who also more recently might applaud his critique of international interventionism, if not his skepticism of collective se-curity and his unshakable belief in disarmament.
The Depression crisis of 1929-33 is not necessarily a fair test of Hoover’s strategy, but it nonetheless re-mains an important test. It is not fair because the crisis was unprecedented in both scale and intensity at the time, and remains so with the perspective of history.
It is also important to remember how primitive and
emergent the state of economic knowledge was at the time. Yet, we must also understand that the objective of the retrenchment strategy of the 1920s was not the husbanding of resources in anticipation of a cyclical change in conditions or taking up the matter of renew-ing America’s global position at some future date. The objective of the Republican retrenchment strategy of the 1920s was small government, full stop. By 1928, that objective had largely been attained. A key factor in the failure of the federal government’s response to the Great Depression between 1929 and 1933 was a sheer lack of wherewithal in its budget, structure, and capabilities to influence, much less counter, the melt-down of the economy and society occurring around it. In short, small government proved insufficient to this most terrible of tests.84 While Hoover himself envisioned a more dynamic government response to the natural cycles of the economy, he believed that a more cooperative society of private endeavor, backed with public support, would provide the necessary re-silience to these cycles and changes in fortune. This cooperative society did exist to an impressive degree in 1928, but this too failed most spectacularly under the extraordinary pressure of the crisis.
Finally, the aspiration of “independent interna-tionalism” had its dark side as well. While the Good Neighbor Policy highlights the positive elements of international respect and disengagement, Hoover’s trade policies ultimately sacrificed internationalism for the sake of independence. His embrace of pro-tectionism, as a means of enhancing domestic self-sufficiency, growth, and lessening U.S. dependence, backfired by providing the excuse other governments, economically threatened by the growth of American trade in the long-term and the Depression in the near
term, to abandon economic liberalism.85 The fragmen-tation of world trade into regional, national, and im-perial blocs had a significant effect on the length and speed of America’s economic recovery. Furthermore, in focusing to such a degree on preserving indepen-dence of action, Hoover failed to make a positive case to the American public as to why internationalism re-mained important.
By 1933, the bargain struck by the Republican re-trenchment strategy of the 1920s and by Hoover had crumbled under the force of the economic crisis. In the years that followed, the United States (and indeed most of the developed world) would follow a path of more complete withdrawal, a retrenchment far more radical than almost any experienced before, turning inwards to focus on competing strategies for domes-tic renewal. In the same period, the balance between disarmament, diplomacy, and the use of force, having weakened dramatically through neglect, would come unglued entirely, leaving the field open for pow-ers whose strategies of domestic renewal required aggressive expansion. It was only after conflict had been joined by these revisionist forces that America returned to take up a more active role in the interna-tional community, sending first money, then equip-ment, and finally soldiers down the paths blazed and across the global networks built by an earlier genera-tion of American businessmen and nongovernmental organizations.
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