8. Review of Edgar Eugene Robinson, The Hoover Leadership

8. Review of Edgar Eugene Robinson, The Hoover Leadership

August 19, 1961

Mr. Kenneth S. Templeton

Mr. Kenneth S. Templeton

Dear Ken:

Edgar Eugene Robinson’s The Hoover Leadership (unpublished ms.) is yet another exercise in Hoover hagiography. It is, therefore, doubly worthless; for not only is it a simple apologia for all the works of Hoover as president—and is therefore on the wrong side of almost every issue it takes up—but also it follows in the well-worn paths of the previous Hoover hagiographers.

Robinson adds nothing new to his predecessors, who have set “the Hoover line”: William Starr Meyers and Walter H. Newton, The Hoover Administration; Ray Lyman Wilbur and Arthur M. Hyde, The Hoover Policies; Hoover’s own Memoirs; the State Papers of Hoover, edited by Meyers; and a few subsidiary works, such as Wilbur’s recent Memoirs (edited by Robinson), Eugene Lyons’s biography, etc.

Even as a hagiographer, Robinson contributes astonishingly little. For supposedly he had access to the unpublished Hoover papers, which contain the bulk of the record of his term, and yet almost every reference in Robinson’s book is to the published accounts in Meyers and Newton, the State Papers, etc. In fact, the book is far inferior to the previous accounts: incomplete, sparse, and evidently totally lacking in understanding of the issues involved in the economic crisis, much less a sound view of the correct policies.

Once again, the hagiologic image of Hoover emerges out of the legendary mist: Hoover, possessor of every conceivable Christian and human virtue, “savior” of his people, engineer, humanitarian, whose statist and interventionist and inflationist policies to combat the Depression were not only right and proper and truly American but which worked; yes, they worked, except that circumstances beyond the Great Hero’s control (foreign intrigue and foreign financial troubles; a public propensity toward hoarding; and obstruction by Republican politicians and Democratic politicians) somehow perpetuated and deepened the Depression.

There are many gross inaccuracies here. Thus, Robinson persistently points to the obstructions placed in Hoover’s path by the Republican Senate, and yet I can find no important measure proposed by Hoover that the Congress did not pass. Hoover had his way, and no amount of juggling of the issues can obscure his patent failure.

Committed to the view that Hoover was always right, Robinson does some of his own fancy evading in trying to present Hoover’s evasive and self-contradictory views on Prohibition as being really the best position obtainable. Robinson’s assertion that, without the annoying prohibition issue, Hoover would have won reelection on his outstanding economic record seems pretty farfetched.

Every one of Hoover’s socialistic innovations is hailed by Robinson without criticism: the White House conferences, the Farm Board program (which, to Robinson, of course, “succeeded”), the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the refusal to recognize Russia or Japan’s conquest of Manchuria, the public works program, the higher taxes, et al., each is praised in turn. Not only that, but, even within this biased ideological framework, the factual discussion is hopelessly inadequate: there is virtually no mention of Hoover’s inflation program, no mention of the rise of business collectivist opinion (Swope Plan, etc.), no follow-through on the consequences of, or even details on the nature of, Hoover’s economic program, etc.

Here are some passages typifying Robinson’s hagiography and ideological bias:

• Hoover was a “scholar, statesman, prophet... savior.”
• Hoover believed in “private enterprise—fostered, aided and at all times regulated by a powerful government.”
• Hoover’s sponsoring of federal radio, merchant marine, and aviation regulation “brought cooperation” between government and business.
• Hoover’s “New Day” brought a “new epoch in conservation.”
• Hoover was a “strong executive.”
• Hoover believed in big government as an “indirect agent of economic arbitration and economic stimulation.”
• Hoover’s White House conferences (which disastrously kept up wage rates for several years) “promoted cooperation” for the “welfare... of the whole people.”
• Hoover, champion of all mankind, believed in “strengthening the economic structure of all nations.”
• There is also the usual Hooverite complaining at FDR’s lack of “cooperation” in the interregnum, and blaming the remainder of the Depression on that; actually, it is rarely pointed out that the “cooperation” would have meant cooperation in New Deal inflationist measures.

Throughout the book, Robinson, as in the case of his fellow hagiographers, virtually ignores any alternatives or criticism of the Hoover policies, except the extreme New Deal or socialist one. The fact that there were numerous and trenchant laissez-faire or quasi-laissez-faire critics of the Hoover position is almost totally ignored. In this way, Robinson and the others are permitted to obscure the fact that, in virtually every sense, Hoover, not FDR, was the true founder of the New Deal; FDR, of course, took the New Deal much further down the collectivist road, but Hoover laid all of the groundwork.

There are, in sum, no discernible merits to this manuscript whatever; neither in ideological position, nor in new factual material. An inadequate rehash of the Myers-Newton-Wilbur-Hoover line is hardly needed. It is an unfortunate commentary on this work that, while I read it eagerly looking for additional notes for my 1929 work²⁴ (since Robinson presumably had access to the Hoover papers), I found almost nothing to note.