The first is you have to have a legitimate government you cant have these powersharing agreements very at peac people n government are there to enrich their clan and there has to be a lot more people sen people cento there has to be some point where people are allowed to vote to select their own leaders and have a lot better situation. The second thing is to reduce the amount of violence. The main priority is if youre into violence in somalia you can have some Political Development and Economic Development as well. With guest host author mac of the forgotten man. This week Herbert Hoover expert in his latest 1933 to 1955. The Hoover Institution represents what is referred to as the missing link in the memoir he provides the 31st philosophy and a analysis of the depression he was blamed for and the sentrys most historic conflict. This program is about an hour. Hello. The book is the crusade years. The editor is the most esteemed scholar of Herbert Hoover today. Herbert hoover from 1929 to 1933 which means he saw the worst years of the depression ended the Great Depression was so bad that a lot of our modern history is about assigning blame for it and figuring out whose fault that depression was. Many people blame hoover and down the decades increasingly so. The president of the United States was ranked 37 out of 43 in the recent u. S. News poll magazine wrote. He was known as a poor communicator that exacerbated the depression. So not only those on the left but some on the right assigned the blame and we are here today to talk about that specifically. At president hoovers on and i was us and work that blames other people as well including his successor Franklin Roosevelt and his predecessor Calvin Coolidge. So, we want to welcome the viewers to this revision. Hes a frequent guest on this channel and Richard Norton smith introduced him and interviewed him for another book and this time we are going to give license to this depression subject. We are going to break the hour into three parts. The first is to remind ourselves who hoover was and to talk about the production of this tremendous book and its many pages and much editing and a detailed and the third part would be to talk about why it matters. What about the Great Depression and todays cspan viewers, welcome. Hoovers identity really began in college and you have written a whole book about that. Where did hoover go to college and how did it affect him . He was born in 1874 as the son of quakers and a blacksmith and he was orphaned before he was ten. Eventually with an uncle in oregon he never had more than a middle School Education and then applied for entrance into the newly formed Stanford University in the summer of 1891 and got admission and was told to take some additional tutoring with the help of which he passe passf his entrance exams. He was literally the first at the Stanford University in the fall of 91 getting his dormitory rooroom ahead of anyone else and that became his alma mater. You have to remember he was trying to make it in the world. He was only 17 when he entered college and was rather shy but he blossomed in college and became the treasurer. About 25 years or so after that after world war i, hoover literally built his own home on the stanford campus. And thats a fair as the official residence of the president of the university. Host what did he do with his education that he got when he studied engineering . Guest his official nature was geology and he had an interest that quickly became his career after he graduated in the class of 1985 and after a year or two in the United States he got a break and was hired as the mining firm that was preeminent in the world at the time and he was sent as a very young man to australia and before he left at the age of 23 he was already manager of one of the great gold lines of the gold rush and it was from there he got married to a stanford women who also was a geology major and possibly the first such woman in the United States to have that nature, but she was certainly the pioneer and they went to china for a couple of years and eventually hoover used london as the space during the mining engineering career that took him up to world war i. He became very successful, took it all over the world to live in places like burma, australia and so forth and had a Great Success in that career. Host imagine you have a son or daughter and he goes to college and that being the world needs most at that point getting minerals out of the ground into the growing economy needs minerals especially when its on a Gold Standard and george is the best educated in that area who studied with his masters and he is also the most able. So hoover was the best paid man of his generation and certainly one of the most successful. He was into just any. Guest youre quite right. He became the outstanding engineer of his time and was recognized for that. He was earning probably in excess of 100,000 a year which was a lot of money and it was before income tax. He didnt want to stop there. By the time he was 40 he was probably a modest millionaire. Im not a rockefeller but he punted to do more with his life. Having done well in his profession he wanted to do something more creative to give back in the circumstances that led to the second career as a cemetery in. Host thats right. And professor nash has written about these early days of his life. First wartime to getting americans back to the u. S. In world war i and defend a great rescue to the people of belgium and then to also be the food administrator; is that not right . That was the beginning of american politics. Guest yes. Hoover was in world war i during the month of his 40th birthday he already had these notions he was going to return to the United States and get back in public life in a big way. I think that he thought he would become a newspaper owner. But at any rate, circumstances turned his life in a different direction and as you pointed out, he had american tourists stranded in europe and then was asked to organize what was a temporary emergency Relief Mission to help the distressed people of belgium who had just been overrun by the german army at the start of the war. They didnt have enough food and that turned into something that was without precedent in the history of humanity feeding an entire occupied nation of several Million People almost over 9 Million People if you count the couple million in northern france that fell into that sphere. That made hoover an International Hero and a symbol of force of american benevolence here was the new world coming to help the old and its tribulations. Hoover was doing this not by conducting war but fight dealing with the problem of war as a humanitarian. That made him as i say an International Hero. It made him an American Hero as well and he entered the administration and became the food administrator. Now hes kind of a World Authority on food and food relief, humanitarian relief. Himself the accolade of the great humanitarian he was called the master of emergencies come of the napoleon of mercy, and at the end of the war he went back on will sends instructions to organize relief in europe, many countries over 20 countries received Food Assistance that hoover orchestrated and facilitated and truly tens of millions of people were dependent. Host at that time he had the opportunity to form opinions about the revolution going on in europe whether it was germany or russia. Tell us a little bit about russia because he had investments and he saw what happened in the russian revolution. Guest hoover as an american traveled all over the world and was a very perceptive observer and was constantly comparing the america that he knew with these other social systems many of which were failing and as you mentioned there was a great turmoil in the aftermath of world war i and the communists had taken over russia in the pol polls show that revolution of 1917 and hoover had basically pulled out of the russian mining interests before these revolutions. But he lost a prospective fortune when they came in and seized the minds and general chaos ensued and he saw one of the great lessons from that wartime and postwar experience he saw what he regarded as the failure of the control the economy is as we would say he used the word socialism and so forth. Especially in russia. And he saw that as a great failure but also as a great challenges of philosophically to the americans way of doing things. So after his humanitarian episode, which probably resulted in saving more lives than any person that ever lived thats been said of him as a remarkable achievement. After that he returned to the United States and and heard American Public life. Host thats right. And we are going to move for his career very quickly just to brief the reader so that we can get the listeners so we can get to the controversy. He was such a success that both parties vied for his affection. Guest yes indeed. Host at the end he went republican. He was commerce secretary to president harding and president coolidge. He didnt get along very well with president coolidge, did he . Guest eventually he did but it became a tense relationship partly for reasons of temperament and partly hoover was much more aggressive in terms of wanting to build public work expenditures and so on and that graded against coolidges more fiscal conservatism, so there were tensions but they were both Party Loyalists and so coolidge did endorse hoover ultimately in 28 and again when hoover ran for the re election so its a complicated story but youre right it became a tense relationship underneath. Host thats right. So coolidge was no longer president. Hoover was president and as hoover becomes president , within a year of the stock market crashes, so hoover is stuck with the albatross of a downturn, and this is why theres so much emphasis and focus. What did hoover do in the depression. A as president in his first year; find out the highlights. Guest hoover didnt believe in the philosophy a lot philosophy of laws a fair. By the historic standards of the president s he was an activist at the start. What he tried to do is bring in the leaders of industry, the laborers and bankers and so forth and have a kind of cooperative approach that would hopefully stimulate recovery through the Greater Public works spending and the like. There were phases to what hoover did and he did some things hes been criticized by conservatives like agreeing to the smoothawley tariff for example. Host there was a great tariff which he signed a call to smoothawley. Some of us have seen a little scene about it Ferris Buellers day off. That was at the time the business could ill afford it. Guest hoover was reluctant to sign it but it was through something his party stood for historically, the high tariffs of the Republican Party. And he did hope that in the law as written, he could turn into a better advantage by setting up the Tariff Commission that would presumably be more impartial and perhaps lower as well as raise the terrorist so we had a hope that scientifically things would work out better. But that was probably a forlorn hope. Host what about wages . Guest the leaders in the industry had the view that they should remain where they were. The argument being that this would create a purchasing power for people who were stumbling. Perhaps the unemployed and so forth. That has been much deviated. Host hes not alone. Henry ford believed in paying high and buy back the car. So it isnt keynesianism because keynes wasnt around in this way that its an idea that is very popular now. Consumer spending is good for the economy. Guest and hoover was kind of a keynesian at that point in the sense that he deleted in stimulating the economy through a countercyclical Public Expenditure on public work. Remember hoover was an engineer so he had a certain interest in that kind of thing so that was a part of his early policy. I think what happens to hoover as the depression deepens and people know it wasnt the Great Depression on day number one they thought it was a typical cyclical event. But when the pattern didnt hold and the depression deepened, he then found himself facing increasing pressure from the left for the greater expenditures and intervention on the economy and hes started to hold the line against that and became very much a fiscal conservative balance the budget save the Gold Standard republican in the last year or two of his life and that perceived rigidity on his part is part of the reason that he got attacked as supposedly not doing anything. He was activist in his time including some of the policies that might not have been all that effective and on the other hand he was valiantly struggling against a total statist term such as he saw coming in the new deal. Host there are so many cliches about hoover but they are so different. Some people blame him for being too active and some people blame him for doing nothing. Laissezfaire and neither is entirely correct. And this is why your writings about hoover are so important. There is a thirdrate measure. It often discussed which is they had an enormous tax increase in the later part of hoovers time. And i often think what do you think doctor nash said its kind of blamed wrongfully because in todays terms to go to a very high tax like in the 60 range from the 25 or 24 that they had when he started seems like a watch that he walock that he waa Gold Standard world, and in the Gold Standard world washington must balance its budget or the rest of the world does it and the recession upon taking the gold away. What do you think about this tax increase and whether he is wrongly blamed . Guest there was a consensus among economists and politicians of both parties in late 31 and early 32. It was deficit spending that there had to be tax increases to balance the budget because as you say, balancing the budget was presented to be critical to recovery. The question was do you have a National Sales tax were a lot of miscellaneous taxes were the income tax. They favored but was caugh whatt the time the manufacturer sales tax. But eventually what happened is that there was a whole bunch of taxes. But the census of the economic thinking of the time is that this is a wise idea. This isnt something that he placed it onto the congress. There was a bipartisan consens consensus. If you look at the results of the tax increase even after the raids were raised people didnt pay the income taxes. And i am inclined to think whether it was a good idea or bad idea if it wasnt a catastrophic explanatory idea for the late phase of the depression and some on the right would say. So i tend to think that the tax increase while as a mistake by our understanding of the policy was and as merelwasnt as merelr in that context you might say what choice did they have . So i think that hoover has too much criticism on that. Guest postcode you think of that sort of in an emotional arc. The stock market went down in the 40s to 3. 81. The country is very angry. So who had they chosen to blamed . He is the most blamed president and elway. Quickly to move on a little bit before we talk about your book in his own, the work of a biographer and editor, hes out in 33 kind of help on his rear end unfortunately. It goes back to california, and you had said he invente have sae ex presidency because he lived very long after the presidency and held a record until jimmy carter surpassed him with more than three decades. Can you tell us what he did in that postpresidency. Go . Guest he was a pariah when he left office and hated as much as any person in American History that he didn but he diy away. He did two went to california where he stayed out of sight for about a year and a half so he gave roosevelt a chance. Hoover didnt just want to start about roosevelt at the very start. He wanted to permit a genuine change of administration. That hoover then became partly for reasons of temperament and the desire to vindicate himself and because he saw a great threat in merging he became very active as an expresident. Its been said maybe Theodore Roosevelt had some inclinations along that line. Hoover became really the leader of the opposition. He fought back and he wrote a book in 1944 which is kind of his return of the scene called the challenge to liberty. Perhaps we will talk about that in a minute. He ended up becoming a vigorous critic of the new deal. He actually really i think wanted to be president again and there is considerable evidence that in 1940 he was angling for and hoping for the republican nomination so he wanted to return to stay in public life of a visit he was the influential leader of the Republican Party during the perco from 1943 until the end of eisenhowers Administration Return of republican presidency in 1953. And then in a period, hoover became a man of the right because even though he saw himself as a sort of aggressive republican and historical liberal he was battling against what he saw as a greater challenge from the left and that pushed him towards the right. During all these years he is writing books, hes doing all sorts of philanthropic work. People forget for almost 30 years he was the chair of the boys Club Movement and he made it into a major philanthropy for urban boys and he did a huge