Chapter 03
Roosevelt’s Election: A Blessing in Disguise

III. Roosevelt usurped Hoover’s achievements

Revolutions devouring their own founders and pioneers is hardly a rare phenomenon. As the revolutionary tide accelerates, early leaders often withdraw from the logical consequences of the very movements they helped initiate. Herbert Hoover was just such a figure.

Hoover had devoted his life to corporatism, yet he had always preferred to cloak its coercive elements in the soft language of voluntarism. He consistently sought and applied force through the velvet glove of traditional voluntarist rhetoric. But now, his old allies and colleagues — such as his longtime aide and Chamber of Commerce leader Julius Barnes, railway magnate Daniel Willard, and industrialist Gerard Swope — were urging him to shed voluntarism altogether and embrace a full-blown, overtly coercive corporatist economy.

Hoover could not go that far. When he recognized the direction in which things were heading, he began to resist the trend, though he never renounced any of his earlier positions. He simply moved too slowly. And so, Hoover, once a pioneering progressive corporatist, came to be seen as a timid moderate — a relic outpaced by a fast-moving ideological wave. The man who was once a leader and shaper of public opinion had now become a bystander.

Hoover began to fight back, insisting that a certain proportion of individualism and a degree of the old “American system” must be preserved. He criticized the Swope Plan and other similar proposals as measures that would lead to complete industrial monopolization, the creation of a vast government bureaucracy, and the homogenization of society. In short, as Hoover angrily told Henry Harriman, the Swope–Chamber of Commerce plan was nothing less than “fascism.” Herbert Hoover had finally glimpsed the abyss of extreme centralization — but he had no way to stop it.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt had no such reservations. Hoover’s decision had crucial political consequences. At the start of the 1932 presidential campaign, Henry Harriman bluntly told Hoover that Franklin Roosevelt had embraced the Swope Plan — and that he would soon prove it with the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). Harriman warned that if Hoover remained stubborn, the business community, especially big business, would throw its support behind Roosevelt. Hoover flatly refused, and business leaders carried out their threat.

That was Herbert Hoover’s finest hour. With the arrival of Roosevelt’s New Deal, America’s corporatist liberals had found their Holy Grail. They would never forgive Hoover, nor would they ever forget his reluctance at the threshold of the “Promised Land.” To the angry corporatists, Hoover’s caution looked a lot like old-fashioned laissez-faire. As a result, the image of Herbert Hoover as a staunch defender of free-market individualism became deeply ingrained in the public mind. Ironically, this image was the exact opposite of Hoover’s legacy — as one of the great pioneers of American corporatist statism. It was a bitterly ironic conclusion to his career.

Yet this gave Roosevelt the opportunity to seize credit and claim the glory for policies that were not originally his. From then on, the propaganda of the “Roosevelt New Deal” would bury the legacy of the “Hoover New Deal.” In this way, a lie came to obscure the truth of history.

Zhong Wen remarked: Roosevelt turned disaster into political fortune through the election — and from that point, America set foot on a path of no return.