Herbert the Clueless, 1928
Pres. Herbert Hoover must be credited with one of the most ironically misguided statements in American history when, during his speech accepting the nomination of the Republican Party one year before the Depression, he asserted:
"We in America today are nearer to the triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land...We have yet reached the goal, but given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation."
Herbert the Clueless, 1932
The author indicates that Pres. Herbert Hoover’s “knack for assessing situations wrong was well developed.” The beneficiary of the first modern Presidential campaign in which the candidate was marketed as a product to be sold by a management team, Hoover consistently proved to be an individual simply not suited for the job. One of those manifestations was an ironically conceived strategy to embrace an even more conservative ideology when running for re-election in 1932 against Franklin D. Roosevelt. As the author explains it, “moving to the right in 1932 put him on a collision course…with a majority of the people, who were definitely traveling in the opposite direction.”
The Ultimate Economic Irony
Economically speaking, the ultimate economic irony of the Great Depression lies in a catch-22 found in employment statistics. Estimates suggest that as many two-and-a-half million more people were part of the work force in 1937 than would have been there had there been no Depression. The irony here is that people held jobs because of a downturn in the economy who would have been forced to seek employment if the economy had been going strong.
Military Solution
Early on, the Roosevelt administration had rejected a strategy of dealing with the economic crisis that involved stimulating the economy through increasing spending on the military. When the rise of the fascist threat began to loom large in the late 1930’s, however, there was no choice but to respond with military spending at roughly the same level that had earlier been rejected. The irony is that it is widely accepted that the military preparedness resulting from this spending which allowed American to quickly enter the war after Pearl Harbor was almost single-handedly responsible for bringing the Great Depression to an end.
