William Leuchtenburg: Obama should keep his distance from Bush
[William E. Leuchtenburg is the author of a forthcoming biography of Herbert Hoover.]
ON election night, Nov. 8, 1932, Herbert Hoover, in the company of friends and neighbors at his home on the Stanford campus, sifted through returns that were rendering a verdict on a presidency begun so hopefully on a March day in 1929. As she observed him — his eyes bloodshot, his face ashen, his expression registering disbelief and dismay — a little girl asked, “Mommy, what do they do to a president to make a man look like Mr. Hoover does?”
The campaign had been brutal. Detroit had to call out mounted police to protect the president from the fury of jobless auto workers chanting “Hang Hoover!”
“I’ve been traveling with presidents since Theodore Roosevelt’s time, and never before have I seen one actually booed with men running out into the streets to thumb their noses at him,” said a Secret Service agent. “It’s not a pretty sight.”
Even so, the returns on election night exceeded Hoover’s worst fears. The president suffered the greatest thrashing up to that point in a two-candidate race in the history of the Republican Party, and his opponent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, became the first Democrat to enter the White House with a popular majority since Franklin Pierce 80 years earlier.
Two features made his defeat especially galling. One was that he knew the outcome was less an expression of approval for the challenger than a rejection of the incumbent. The other was that, despite being a pariah, he was expected to soldier on for nearly four more months — until March 4, 1933. The 20th Amendment, moving Inauguration Day to January, was close to being ratified but would not take effect until 1937. He was fated to be the last lame-duck president of the old order.
Hoover determined to exploit this interim to salvage his presidency. No sooner had the ballots been counted than he invited Governor Roosevelt to confer with him. The overture gave every appearance of being an exceptionally generous offer to share power with the man who had vanquished him. In fact, it was the first step of a scheme to undo the results of the election. Hoover acted, the historian Frank Freidel later wrote, “as though he felt it was his duty to save the nation, indeed the world, from the folly of the American voters.”
On Nov. 22, Hoover welcomed Roosevelt to the White House. Throughout the meeting, he treated his successor as though he were a thickheaded schoolboy who needed drilling on intransitive verbs. He sought to bully the president-elect into endorsing the administration’s policies at home and abroad, especially sustaining the gold standard at whatever cost. Alert to Hoover’s intent, Roosevelt smiled, nodded, smiled again, but made no commitment. A frustrated Hoover later vowed, “I’ll have my way with Roosevelt yet.”...
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ON election night, Nov. 8, 1932, Herbert Hoover, in the company of friends and neighbors at his home on the Stanford campus, sifted through returns that were rendering a verdict on a presidency begun so hopefully on a March day in 1929. As she observed him — his eyes bloodshot, his face ashen, his expression registering disbelief and dismay — a little girl asked, “Mommy, what do they do to a president to make a man look like Mr. Hoover does?”
The campaign had been brutal. Detroit had to call out mounted police to protect the president from the fury of jobless auto workers chanting “Hang Hoover!”
“I’ve been traveling with presidents since Theodore Roosevelt’s time, and never before have I seen one actually booed with men running out into the streets to thumb their noses at him,” said a Secret Service agent. “It’s not a pretty sight.”
Even so, the returns on election night exceeded Hoover’s worst fears. The president suffered the greatest thrashing up to that point in a two-candidate race in the history of the Republican Party, and his opponent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, became the first Democrat to enter the White House with a popular majority since Franklin Pierce 80 years earlier.
Two features made his defeat especially galling. One was that he knew the outcome was less an expression of approval for the challenger than a rejection of the incumbent. The other was that, despite being a pariah, he was expected to soldier on for nearly four more months — until March 4, 1933. The 20th Amendment, moving Inauguration Day to January, was close to being ratified but would not take effect until 1937. He was fated to be the last lame-duck president of the old order.
Hoover determined to exploit this interim to salvage his presidency. No sooner had the ballots been counted than he invited Governor Roosevelt to confer with him. The overture gave every appearance of being an exceptionally generous offer to share power with the man who had vanquished him. In fact, it was the first step of a scheme to undo the results of the election. Hoover acted, the historian Frank Freidel later wrote, “as though he felt it was his duty to save the nation, indeed the world, from the folly of the American voters.”
On Nov. 22, Hoover welcomed Roosevelt to the White House. Throughout the meeting, he treated his successor as though he were a thickheaded schoolboy who needed drilling on intransitive verbs. He sought to bully the president-elect into endorsing the administration’s policies at home and abroad, especially sustaining the gold standard at whatever cost. Alert to Hoover’s intent, Roosevelt smiled, nodded, smiled again, but made no commitment. A frustrated Hoover later vowed, “I’ll have my way with Roosevelt yet.”...