Donald Trump is not a student of history. Perhaps that is why he has chosen to follow the failed example set by Herbert Hoover as the U.S. slid into the Great Depression.Instead of taking action to save Americans from another depression (as unemployment numbers start to rival those of the Great Depression), he has chosen to follow failed GOP policies of the past.
The result in 1930 led the country to disaster, and Trump's action (or lack of action) will likely also result in economic disaster.
Here's what Jamelle Bouie had to say in The New York Times:
Additional economic assistance is the only thing that can keep the U.S. economy from falling into a second Great Depression, and with interest rates near zero, the government has all the fiscal capacity it needs to borrow the trillions necessary to relieve the pain. But Congress, or rather congressional Republicans, won’t budge. After backing the $2 trillion CARES Act in March, they believe they’ve done enough for now. . . .
And President Trump appears unmoved by the prospect of economic devastation, except insofar as it affects his chances for re-election. The White House halted talks with Congress over any further stimulus.
All of this — the passivity, the indifference, the refusal to embrace the tools at hand for ideological reasons — is reminiscent of Herbert Hoover, who also presided over a catastrophic economic downturn, the mismanagement of which plunged the United States into a crisis that tore at the seams of American society.
Popular memory of the Great Depression is that Hoover did little to avert catastrophe or prevent suffering, a view captured at the time by Senator Robert Wagner of New York, who claimed the president had “clung to the timeworn Republican policy: to do nothing and when the pressure becomes irresistible to do as little as possible.”. . .
Hoover was a staunch conservative, who opposed government intervention on principle. The historian Joan Hoff Wilson reports that after reluctantly backing a modest public works and relief program (“$2 billion for public works and $300 million for direct loans to the states ‘to be used in furnishing relief and work relief to needy and distressed people in relieving the hardships resulting from unemployment.’”), Hoover told a friendthat all such emergency legislation had to be repealed to prevent the country from being “plunged into socialism and collectivism with its destruction of human liberty which pursuance of those measures are bringing.”
The American people, Hoover insisted, didn’t need aid. They needed confidence. The day after the stock market crash, he told reporters that “The fundamental business of the country, that is the production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis.” The next month, he declared that “Any lack of confidence in the economic future or basic strength of business in the United States is foolish. Our national capacity for hard work and intelligent cooperation is ample guarantee of the future.”
The next year, as joblessness began to rise into double digits, Hoover would insist that “The income of a large part of our people is not reduced by the depression” but “is affected by unnecessary fears and pessimism.” And on the anniversary of the stock market crash, the historian Eric Rauchway points out, Hoover would reject calls to take action against unemployment. “No special session is necessary to deal with employment,” he said. “The sense of voluntary organization and community spirit in the American people have not vanished.”
By 1931, Hoover was telling reporters that “We cannot legislate ourselves out of a world economic depression” and rebuking Congress for its attempts to pass relief. “We cannot thus squander ourselves into prosperity,” he said. . . .
Hoover was not without tools; he could have taken steps to cushion the blow of the crash and relieve suffering for millions of Americans. But he refused, captive to a rigid, unyielding view of the world around him.
What was true then is true now. The Republican Party seems ready to let the country descend into depression rather than do what’s needed, from aid to families to help for states, to sustain the economy as the country struggles against a deadly disease. The plan, such that it exists, is to “reopen” the economy — justified with Hoover-esque rhetoric about the “American way of life” — and immunize employers against legal action should their employees fall ill.
It would be nearly four years after the stock market crash in 1929 before the federal government, under Roosevelt’s administration, began to do anything to meaningfully alleviate the pain of the Great Depression. By then, nearly a quarter of working Americans were unemployed and tens of millions of people struggled to find food and shelter.
Not only are we not that far gone, but we have a chance to remove our modern-day Hoovers before they can lead the country to further disaster. With luck, we’ll make good on that opportunity in November.
