[This has been in my pipeline for about a month, but I didn't have time to research the body until now.]
I attended, don't stone me--"Hooverfest", the annual, uh, celebration of the life and times of Herbert Hoover. "Hooverfest" You see, Hoover was born in the small town of West Branch, Iowa, five miles from where I live (Iowa City), and to get to West Branch, you can either take the interstate or the "Herbert Hoover Highway," a bucolic six-mile stretch of two lane road that seems to mock his public works record.
Like Carter, Hoover was actually a fine humanitarian and a superb ex-president. And you know what? He's no longer our worst president. But, my friends, Herbert Hoover's philosophy of governance and politics finds its analog not in Carter, or even in Bush, but rather in the career and outlook of a one John Sydney Eldon Smith McCain.
More below the fold.
(Those in the midwest might also share my constant amusement when I travel the "Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway" that spans Interstate 88 through northern Illinois. It's a great middle-finger to the man who once uttered, "If it moves, tax it...")
I thought of Carter because while Hoover may not be the best president, at least as of 2001, he hasn't been the worst. And like Carter and (we pray) Obama after him, Hoover inherited Coolidge's overextended Republican economy and yes, it got worse during the years of his presidency. But Hoover, and here's the shocking part, seems downright liberal today compared to even many blue-dog dems. How did a philanthropic micro-manager, who believed in--even typified--the power of government intervention become a shorthand for crippling incompetence?
Well, Hoover wasn't fundamentally a bad guy. He never called his wife the "C" word, and he amassed a record of accomplishments as a private citizen, and--get this--as a legendary bureaucrat.
You see, when the United States of America finally entered WWI in 1917, she was a young country and not yet inuredto the horrors of war. Young Hoover was a celebrity, a truly rich man who typified the bootstraps narrative, from a one-room house in rural Iowa* to Stanford, where he became a surveyor and traveled the far reaches of the world, from Australia to the far east, becoming a millionaire by discovering prime locations for mines. Hoover was a get-er-done kind of guy, and when Wilson asked him to serve as the U.S. Food Administrator.
From the Hoover Digital Archive (aptly addressed at ecommode.com)
America declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917 and President Wilson called Herbert Hoover home to take charge of food organization in America. Hoover was appointed U.S. Food Administrator. America had to provide food for her ownFood Administrator Drawing armies and the other Allies, for the Allied peoples and for the American people at home. Herbert Hoover saw the effort as a willingness of the people to serve the nation voluntarily. He called his program food conservation, but many Americans called it "Hooverizing." There were wheatless Wednesdays and meatless Mondays, as examples.
Hoover had faith that the American people would exhibit voluntary cooperation in the matter for food conservation. He didn't want laws to regulate food in America. Hoover's plan was that American homes would have to eat in such a way as to leave more food to be shipped abroad. He appealed to housewives to conserve food and eliminate waste. Signs and posters proclaimed, "Food Will Win the War." Hoover's program reduced domestic consumption of food by 15% without rationing. For the farmer there was "fair price" for agricultural products and guaranteed markets for surplus. The result was that U.S. food shipments tripled. He kept the American armies fed and was able to build up surplus stores of food to prevent a post-war famine in Europe.
At the war's end President Wilson sent Herbert Hoover to Europe to survey how much food would be needed to fight off starvation. The ARC (American Relief Administration) would shortly become the major source of food for 300 million people from 21 countries in Europe and the Middle East. Hoover could not convince the allied powers that food should be provided for Germany, even with the sound argument that stunted bodies and deformed minds in the next generation would be a poor foundation on which to rebuild civilization. Many months were lost before the Allies could come to an agreement to allow the Germans to be fed.
The ARA officially ended on June 30, 1919, but it was evident to Herbert Hoover that the children would still suffer, so he devised the ARA European Children's Fund as a private charitable organization. It fed the children through the summer of 1921. The European Children's Fund was supported by American donations and by sale of Food Draft Packets. This was the origin of CARE packs.
What Republican would ask for sacrifice, for a decline in consumption? This is an idea that did not find its time until Carter, and Carter--to this day--gets laughed through the GOP echo chamber for his humble assertion that GDP is just one indicator of many, and that a steadily growing GDP requires a citizenry not shackled to debt and irresponsible credit. And when Barack Obama talked about inflating tires, I thought nothing of it--like I think nothing of the Dept. of Energy commercials that come on during Cubs games reminding me to do the same thing. But when John McCain somehow expressed his moral indignation at the notion that proper car maintenance might curve wasteful "pork-barrel" spending by American families, then I got to thinking, and went out to buy a tire gauge. Then I bought new tires, because the tread on mine--my car's at 35K miles on its factory tires--had worn down in the bad winter.
I'm going to save on my fuel prices, be safer on the road and prevent a possible fatality due to spin-out, AND I pumped $500 into the economy with the purchase of American-made tires from a local mom and pop shop. John McCain might laugh at me, but this is because McCain is a man of the past, a Carter-era Republican. He has absolutely no sense of the dangers that lie ahead.
The greatest moral failure of the Bush presidency, IMHO, is his failure to link the very real challenge of Islamic fundamentalism and post-colonial anti-occupation movements to a positive agenda of domestic and international change short of coining theocratic ideological slogans cast in the language of the past ("axis of evil," conflating WWII and the Cold War) and promoting privatization at home and abroad in irresponsible corporate giveaways, from the bonanza that was the oil services industry to the pharmaceutical giveaways. And that little thing--what is that again?--infrastructure falls by the wayside.
The Iraq War, as wrongheaded as it was at every stage of its conception and execution, led to no sort of conservation initiatives, food or otherwise. When we have thousands of tanks on the ground, what better time to declare oil a precious resource? What better way to take the war to the people, to let us participate, to let us crash the gate and do our part to support the war effort? There was no common cause. Even the cause of "privatization"--the so-called "ownership society"--faltered because it was not coupled to any positive agenda of responsibility.
Let's say, over our dead bodies, Dubya had somehow succeeded in his mission to privatize social security. The next thing he'd do would be to give a press conference asking us to keep our investments liquid.
As president, Hoover supported modest-to-large public works projects like the dam that bears his name, but still had a fundamental belief: that people themselves could alter the landscape of America, that people themselves could overcome what he would never quite recognize: systemic economic injustice. Bush had no essential belief.
In an earlier diary, I mentioned that I have just read a great book that any historically minded progressive (or, hell, any historically minded America) should put on the bookshelf: Nick Taylor's American Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA, When FDR Put the Nation To Work.
The book is well-cited, but it's not an academic read, and the chapters are manageable and short. Taylor's portrait of Hoover avoids cheap-shots and instead draws a sketch of an American hero whose time had come and gone. Hoover was, during the post-Gilded Age, a capable public servant, but was not a man of the future. He could not sense the stampede of history at his back, and did not recognize the many being trampled in front of him. He lacked a framework for how the Ordinary Man or woman related to the large abstractions that govern the U.S. and its government, or the relationship between a farmer, famine, his lease, his mortgage payment, a bank, and the bank's holding of his neighbor's money.
When on the day of FDR's inaugural Hoover asked the new president to support him in finally exercising the powers of oversight and join him by declaring a "bank holiday," FDR demurred. FDR did not demur because a banking holiday was a bad idea--it would have been a splendid idea, a year earlier--but because FDR saw the American future laid out before him, a wondrous panorama of hopes, fears, dangers, and possibilities. I have never seen that from a politician again, until Obama's grand unified theory of a speech at Invesco last week.
The speech connected the dots between poverty, responsibility, social policy, global terror, conservation, humanitarianism, and job creation. It was a plan, and not a slogan. It summed up the way we live now, and how we can live tomorrow. And what does John McCain give us? Guerrilla politics, a new tactic every week.
Finally, a word of respect for John McCain: pre-2003, he wasn't an awful senator. Sure, in the comments you might list for me all his fingerprints in the banking committee cookie jar, and you'll be right. You'll talk about his incongruous support of experimental, outsourced, Wing-nut military projects and his fantastical claim to be a "deficit talk." You'll talk about his cynically pro-life voting record, and his erratic, opportunistic environmental record. But do you know what? He wasn't a very bad senator, in the same way that even a Wingnut can appreciate Ted Kennedy: he solved incremental problems on issues that needed compromise.
If we are to agree, though, that there are two Americas, perhaps we can also agree that McCain and Kennedy are sorts of evil twins: McCain is the finest Senator the "first America" has, when it comes to giveaways and the like, and Kennedy is the finest the rest of us--toiling underneath eroded labor laws and social opportunity--have. And the tide is turning. McCain, like Hoover, has done some good in his days as a public servant, but the stakes are much too high to give him the keys to the White House and hope he doesn't crash it. It's running out of gas, we're running out of gas, and the agendas of liberalism and conservatism have splintered into incoherent sets of interest groups and policy planks. After all, wasn't it George W. Bush who was elected with the help of Grover Norquist's "Leave us alone" coalition, and then went on to create the largest police state yet belonging to an industrial democracy, and didn't he also run against, ahem, "nation-building?"
It's not John McCain's fault that he doesn't get it, and it's not John McCain's fault that his policy planks don't make any sense side by side. The Reagan coalition, like the Coolidge coalition, rose to meet the excesses of the corrupted twilight of the New Deal-era. It never was very coherent, answered to many gods at once, and has been splintering at an alarming rate because nobody can articulate what a conservative is anymore. And like Bob Dole, we're supposed to believe that he's earned it. Maverick? McCain was made by the competing and even incoherent forces at work within his own party. Like Hoover, McCain stands at the twilight of an excessive era and hopes it's too dark for us to see his face.
And as Obama's day dawns like his logo so indicates, it's incumbent upon all of us progressives to really set out a unified vision of what the world is going to look like during this next era--this next twenty years that we ourselves our creating, right now, with our own bare hands.
*Am I the only history buff who remains wholly underwhelmed by birthplaces and gravesites?