Fund Your Utopia Without Me.™

02 March 2013

Who Said This?


 
 The ideas embodied in the New Deal Legislation were a compilation of those which had come to maturity under Herbert Hoover’s aegis. We all of us owed much to Hoover.”

- Rexford Tugwell, economic adviser to and member of FDR's Brain Trust, 1946




A. “We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put it into action...”

B. “No government in Washington has hitherto considered that it held so broad a responsibility for leadership in such times. . . . For the first time in the history of depression, dividends, profits, and the cost of living, have been reduced before wages have suffered.”

C. “Some of the reactionary economists urged that we should allow the liquidation to take its course until we had found bottom..."

D. "We determined that we would not follow the advice of the bitter-end liquidationists and see the whole body of debtors of the United States brought to bankruptcy and the savings of our people brought to destruction.”

E. “They were maintained until the cost of living had decreased and the profits had practically vanished. They are now the highest real wages in the world.”

F. "Creating new jobs and giving to the whole system a new breath of life; nothing has ever been devised in our history which has done more for . . . 'the common run of men and women.’”

G. "An immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures by abolishing useless commissions and offices, consolidating departments and bureaus, and eliminating  extravagance to accomplish a saving of not less than 25% in the cost of the Federal Government."

H. "[His] "reckless and extravagant" spending, [thinking] that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible, and [of presiding over] the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history [should be denounced]."

I. "[He is] leading the country down the path of socialism."

J. "We favor maintenance of the national credit by a Federal budget annually balanced on the basis of accurate Federal estimate within revenue."

K. "....[A] sound currency to be preserved at all hazards." 

L. "[We support] the removal of government from all fields of private enterprise except where necessary to develop public works and natural resources in the common interest."

M. "Equal rights to all; special privilege to none."

N. "[We support] a low tariff."





Answers:

A. Herbert Hoover, 11 August 1932

B. Herbert Hoover, 11 August 1932

C. Herbert Hoover, 4 October 1932

D. Herbert Hoover, 4 October 1932

E. Herbert Hoover, 5 November 1932

F. Herbert Hoover, 22 October 1932

G. FDR's 1932 Democratic Platform

H. FDR, 1932

I. John Nance Garner, FDR's 1932 running mate, on Hoover

J. FDR's 1932 Democratic Platform

K. FDR's 1932 Democratic Platform

L. FDR's 1932 Democratic Platform

M. FDR's 1932 Democratic Platform






"Hoover was part of the 1912 Progressive party and he was in key respects a Republican Progressive in the early 20th century meaning of the term -- which is to say he was a technocrat who believed in scientific management and things like that. It is also true that as the Depression deepened Hoover did take steps in the direction of government intervention in the economy...The straw-man version of Hoover's presidency, in which he sat back and did nothing for four years, waiting on the market to correct itself is a caricature."

- Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo





 
Boy, that Hoover sure sounded like a disciple of Austrian economics! 



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