The only difference between these two men was their party affiliation.
Hat tip Tea Party Patriot for bringing Herbert Hoover's 1932 acceptance speech to my attention. All my readers should study this speech to arm themselves against the lie that Hoover was a free market, limited government, hands off conservative whose heartless austerity measures to restrain spending and balance the budget (when he should have been spending like mad) turned a recession into a depression causing pain and suffering to millions. Indeed, midway through his speech the "mean, passive, inactive, do nothing" Hoover ("the cold face of Republican deficit hawks") said this about the role of government during the Depression:
"The function of the Federal Government in these times is to use its reserve powers and its strength for the protection of citizens and local governments by the support to our institutions against forces beyond their control....That it should furnish leadership to assure the coordination and unity of great existing agencies, governmental and private, for economic and humanitarian action. That where it becomes necessary to meet emergencies beyond the power of these agencies NEW INSTRUMENTALITIES MUST BE CREATED ....." He also noted how his deficit spending activist administration "prevented the failure of hundreds of banks..... and saved more than 5000 institutions;" and that his programs were "unparalleled in the history of depressions in any country and at any time......"
And so they were. Before Herbert Hoover America never had a peace time President more active, energetic, doing and engaged. It never had a leader who spent more public funds to stimulate and jump start a sick economy into recovery. In short. it never had a more progressive, big government, tax and spend President. "No man with a spark of humanity," said Hoover," can sit in my place without suffering from the picture of this country's anxieties and hardships before him day and night." My God! The "heartless," "unfeeling," "merciless" Hoover felt the nation's suffering and pain, as he once did the starvation of millions of Europeans who he fed as Woodrow Wilson's Food Czar during and after the war. How can you be a Liberal and not love this man and his policies? How can you lie about him being an unempathetic, hands off, small government Conservative who chose austerity and balanced budgets over humanitarian spending?
Indeed, what this means is that if Hoover had defeated FDR and won reelection he'd have continued expanding the role and powers of the Federal Government. He would have created new agency after agency after agency to meet every type of crisis and exigency until the Depression was over and prosperity returned. Hoover was a committed warrior against the Depression and cast the crisis in military terms seeing his programs as a "defense" and "counterattack" against the enemy of destitution, starvation, unemployment and despair-which his radical policies helped perpetuate and worsen.
In other words, Hoover's second term would have differed little from an FDR presidency. The end of Hoover's first term where he ran up a deficit of $2.7 billion (down from a surplus of $800 million four years earlier) would have been prelude to greater expenditures for "defending" America giving it bigger, bolder, more intrusive government like occurred under Roosevelt in his First 100 Days. In short, if Hoover had been reelected AMERICA WOULD HAVE GOTTEN THE NEW DEAL ALL THE SAME!
Major websites linking this piece are as follows (click and see):
The Times of India