Heroes: The Humanitarian

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Of all the moments of Herbert Clark Hoover's long and illustrious life, the one best remembered was the worst.

There he was, a stolid figure in the rear of an open car, his eyes downcast, a study in dejection. He rode in dour silence to the Capitol while Presidentelect Franklin Roosevelt, sitting beside him, smiled that famous smile and waved to the cheering throngs.

This was Saturday, March 4, 1933, F.D.R.'s Inauguration Day-and the day after Hoover had stubbornly rejected urgent demands that he close all of the nation's banks. Only four years before, Hoover had been elected as the 31st President of the U.S., with 58.1% of the popular vote (still the third highest in history), over Democrat Al Smith. When he took office, he had well earned his position as the most respected man in America. Now, after having been overwhelmed for reelection, he was perhaps the most reviled; the phrase "Hoover's Depression" was current, and the nation's landscape was defaced by those tarpaper-shack communities known as "Hoovervilles."

Yet even while enduring such violent swings in public esteem, Hoover himself remained constant in character and principles. And by .the time he died last week at 90 in his Waldorf Towers apartment in Manhattan, he ranked once again as a U.S. citizen who could truly be called revered.

"The Orgy of Speculation." History's hindsight has absolved Hoover of much of the blame for the Great Depression. Indeed, he saw it coming long before he made, as one admiring biographer put it, the "most serious error of his amazing career"-that of running successfully for President.

In eight productive years as Secretary of Commerce under Presidents Harding and Coolidge (he promoted arbitration rather than litigation in trade disputes, achieved standardization of some 3,000 industrial products, championed modernization of railroads and such huge river-control projects as Hoover Dam), Hoover repeatedly warned against "the rising boom and orgy of speculation." He complained that loose monetary policies of the Federal Reserve Board would lead to an "inevitable collapse which will bring the greatest calamities upon our farmers, our workers and legitimate business." But amid Coolidge prosperity, Hoover was denounced as "a crapehanger."

As President, Hoover utilized federal power as an instrument to support the private economy far more than any President before him. At his urging, Congress created a Federal Farm Board, backed by $500 million in federal funds, which came to the aid of farm marketing cooperatives after the market crash. He sought $663 million to push public works-a figure that critics decried as excessive. He proposed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the National Credit Corporation. He secured an early agreement in which labor promised to forgo strikes and new wage demands, Big Business agreed to maintain wages and spread work to avoid layoffs. He negotiated an international moratorium on the payment of intergovernmental debts.