CAMPAIGN: Symbol

• Share

(4 of 6)

Republicans eager to steal the New Deal's thunder minimized the Hoover prestige, magnified the Hoover unpopularity. They dismissed Hoover's county organizations, said it was just the ex-President going round and round in little circles. And in California, even Hoover aides and allies indignantly denied that the ex-President's activities were political, pictured him as the intellectual leader of a cause. As for thunder-stealing, said they, the New Deal's thunder was now a low faint rumble far over the hills. But everybody recognized that, whether talking politics or philosophy, the ex-President was spending his time these days with sturdy, middle-of-the-road Republicans—the Homer Bunkers, Frank Fetzers, Art Priaulxs —who seemed to stand not for big business ideas or reform, but for fishing, making money, listening to Herbert Hoover, and voting for the G. O. P.

Philosophy. Time was when listening to Herbert Hoover was a role for the intellectuals and the economists. In his devastating The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Economist John Maynard Keynes had harsh judgments to make on most of the public men of the post-War days. But of Herbert Hoover he wrote: "This complex personality . . . with his habitual air of an exhausted prizefighter . . . imported into the Councils of Paris . . . precisely that atmosphere of reality, knowledge, magnanimity and disinterestedness which, if they had been found in other quarters as well, would have given us the Good Peace."

But by the time Herbert Hoover's Challenge to Liberty appeared in 1934, intellectuals by & large dismissed it as little more than an ex-President's attempt to defend his administration. That it incorporated Herbert Hoover's articulation of an intelligible theory of government, that his theory was deeply rooted in U. S. traditions, made little difference. Unlike other theoreticians and politicians who balked at this or that aspect of the New Deal, criticized methods, personalities, mistakes, costs, the ex-President made a flat issue of the New Deal's fundamental philosophy. It was not merely mistaken, said he. It was wrong. Said Herbert Hoover:

"Throughout the world the whole philosophy of individual liberty is under attack. In haste to bring under control the sweeping social forces unleashed ... by the World War, by the tremendous advances in productive technology during the last quarter century, by the failure to march with a growing sense of justice, peoples and governments are blindly wounding . . . those fundamental human liberties which have been the foundation and inspiration of progress."

The issue, said he, was not whether abuses could be remedied, and new productive forces organized. It was whether the job could be done by free men. Through history the U. S. system of government, and the rights guaranteed by it, have been invaded by "economic agencies" on one hand, and by greed for bureaucratic and governmental power on the other. Battles against business exploitation proved that the U. S. had no system of laissez faire; battles like that against the spoils system demonstrated the American system's "live sense of opposition to the subtle approach of political tyranny."