Hoover, a methodical and private man by nature, unfortunately failed to respond to the Depression cri-sis with the kind of leadership the American public required. He gave the public the impression of being out of touch with real conditions, unsympathetic to
the troubles of the country as a whole, and reluctant to shift course in response to events. His inability to shift his approach to the farming crisis damaged his humanitarian reputation, but it was his handling of the Veteran’s March on Washington, DC, that defini-tively sunk what remained of his reputation and most likely cost him the presidential election.
Until 1932, Hoover had enjoyed a good relation-ship with veterans. He had established the Veterans Administration on July 21, 1930, built 25 new veterans hospitals, and increased the provision of benefits to 420,000 veterans whose disabilities were not directly linked to their service.77 The summer of 1932 saw thousands of veterans marching on Washington and calling for an early payment of their bonuses. Hoover opposed early payment, but Congress authorized loans to be disbursed immediately against the bonus amounts. Their aims attained, the veterans were or-dered to disperse from the capital region. Upon be-ing given presidential instructions on July 28, 1932, to enforce an orderly dispersal, Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur exceeded his orders and participated in what appeared to be, to all witnesses, an armed rout. This was followed up with the gra-tuitous burning of the veterans’ encampment. While MacArthur’s actions were in blatant disregard of the President’s instructions, he refused to take public re-sponsibility for having done so. What is perhaps more surprising was that Hoover proved willing to buy into MacArthur’s and Secretary of Defense Hurley’s expla-nation that the action had been a justified response to a radical communist plot and publicized this expla-nation. When a Department of Justice investigation failed to find any evidence of such plot, or indeed of radical communists among the bonus-marchers, pub-lic opinion swung decisively against the President.
There is also evidence that Hoover was too quick to declare victory and to attempt a return to the familiar tenets of his retrenchment strategy of old, prematurely undermining some of the more successful steps of his renewal approach. A central tenet of classical econom-ics, Hoover believed that the most important thing he could do to restore confidence was to balance the federal budget—a central tenet of classical economics.
After trying and failing to get the Federal Reserve to lower its interest rates and inject additional liquidity into the economy, Hoover succumbed to growing do-mestic political pressure to reimpose fiscal discipline on the federal government. Over the previous 4 years, the U.S. Government had run up bills pursuing vari-ous measures to counter the impact of the depression, totaling $900 million for the 1931 fiscal year budget.78 The democrats had even made balancing the budget a central plank of the presidential election platform in 1932. While the Revenue Act of 1932 proved to be an extremely progressive tax bill, it also inarguably raised taxes at exactly the wrong time to reinforce the momentum for an economic recovery. Partly due to Hoover’s errors, we now know how difficult it is to get the timing of a return to ordinary fiscal constraints after a period of crisis: too late, and you have under-mined confidence in the long-term viability of the entire system; too early, and you have choked off the recovery. Yet for all their folly, the new tax rates were also left untouched throughout the New Deal period and for many years thereafter.
Another more portentous choice was Hoover’s decision to continue to scale back U.S. security com-mitments to focus on the economic crises at home and abroad, despite evidence of dramatic changes to key elements of the existing post-war international
securi-ty architecture. Hoover’s proposals at the World Dis-armament Conference in 1932 were viewed by con-temporaries as the product of political opportunism, and as a potentially dangerous signal of reluctance.
While Secretary of State Henry Stimson recommended a passive observational stance to an event for which few outside the disarmament activist community cherished any high ambitions, Hoover approached the World Disarmament Conference in April 1932 as an opportunity for him to contribute both toward the global good and the immediate economic relief of European and American budgets. Hoover distributed a rather audacious proposal: a one-third reduction across all armed forces with the abolition of bombers, tanks, large guns, chemical warfare, submarines and battleships, and 25 percent of aircraft carriers.79 While the proposal boosted conference morale and created a flurry of publicity and political attention, it produced little by way of material progress to the negotiations.
The disappointed Stimson observed it was:
a mistake and a proposition that cut pretty deep. . . . But, really, so far as a practical proposition is con-cerned, to me it is just a proposal from Alice in Won-derland. It is no reality, but is just as bad as it can be in its practical effect.80
While an unusual way of understanding a balance of power, many military officials and policymakers at the time viewed the credible fulfillment of treaty terms, even under conditions of general disarmament and military decline, as important. Even as the over-all numbers declined, the balance could only be pre-served if signatories were willing to build up to their treaty-protected numbers.81 Far from restraining an ambitious ship construction program, the
disarma-ment conferences under Hoover sought desperately to push other nations to accelerate their own reduc-tions as a way of minimizing the U.S. construction program. By the end of Hoover’s administration, the United States was dangerously underfulfilling its role in lowering the bar of the global balance in a stable fashion.
On September 18, 1931, some brigades of Japa-nese troops decided covertly to provoke what was later called the “Mukden Incident,” which provided the excuse for the Japanese to seize Manchuria. Tied up with fairly serious domestic problems, the United States confined itself to declaring its outrage and hop-ing for the League of Nations to prove itself equal to the occasion. However:
The Manchurian crisis had worldwide implications.
At stake was the survival of the series of postwar agreements based on principles of law and morality that successive Republican presidencies vowed would take the place of the discredited prewar system of ar-maments, secret diplomacy, and recurrent wars.82
Secretary of State Stimson promulgated a declara-tion of nonrecognideclara-tion of the belligerently acquired territory, subsequently termed the “Hoover-Stimson Doctrine.” The Japanese, not impressed by the inter-national community’s protests, seized Shanghai on January 28, 1932. Stimson recommended sanctions or a show of force. Concerned that such actions would be themselves both acts of belligerency and ineffective, Hoover disagreed. He was later persuaded to assent to a multilateral deployment of ships in the region to protect the international settlement of Shanghai.
In failing to do more, some have argued that Hoover signaled America’s lack of interest in maintaining
sta-bility in the rest of the world and opened the door to new threats from rising, revisionist powers only a few years later.
Hoover’s strategy of disarmament and economy in military expenditures was predicated on the continu-ation of the global trend of arms limitcontinu-ations, disarma-ment, and the disavowal of the use of force. For as long as these trends continued, it allowed the United States to benefit from its international influence and economic engagement without incurring messy obli-gations. However, the Mukden Incident and the sub-sequent Japanese invasion and occupation of Manchu-ria undermined these assumptions. It became more difficult to justify Hoover’s minimalist interpretation of U.S. security interests as largely being confined to the Western Hemisphere. The gap between existing American forces, and even their treaty-approved force levels, became increasingly visible. The gap between U.S. diplomatic support for international treaties, and what they were willing to do to defend them became more clearly apparent.83
While he perhaps understood it better than most other individuals at the time, it is also not clear in ret-rospect whether Hoover grasped the essential nature of the Depression crisis. Hoover’s relentless drive to try to save the gold standard at all costs in 1933 is re-velatory of this partial blindness. Defensible in terms of economic orthodoxy and even internationalism, Hoover’s vehement defense of the gold standard flew in the face of what others were rapidly learning through experience. Britain’s economy and finances had rebounded with surprising strength following their abandonment of the gold standard in 1931. Econ-omists also credit Roosevelt’s far less justifiable lapse from gold with reinvigorating the American economy
between 1933 and 1937. However, the gold stan-dard—much like the cooperative, the private relief agency, and the extra-legal agreements—was a central element of what Hoover thought had been most suc-cessful in his approach. A prisoner of his own success, Hoover was unable to turn around and recognize the gold standard as being the part of the problem, much less its source.