Hoover And The Historians
09/22/2010
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This is from a Mental Floss item on presidential biographies, via CNN:

Longest takedown of FDR ...Herbert Hoover doesn't get much love from historians, but he certainly stood up for himself. After leaving office in 1933 after what's generally agreed was a fairly disastrous stint, Hoover needed 18 years to crank out the first tome of his mammoth three-volume memoir.

His main goal? Explaining why his presidency wasn't really a failure and bashing the policies of his successor, Franklin Roosevelt. Among Hoover's most memorable smears of FDR: "The effort to crossbreed some features of Fascism and Socialism with our American free system speedily developed in the Roosevelt administration."

Take that, New Deal!

https://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/9781684220335_p0_v2_s550x406.jpgWell, yes, the that's the point. The Fascist and Socialist roots of the New Deal were remarked on at the time, not only by Republican critics, but New Deal officials. See John T. Flynn's The Roosevelt Myth, or more recently, Jonah Goldberg's book Liberal Fascism.

You can read all of Hoover's 1952 biography online [PDF, 5MB] but to grasp the failure of the New Deal to get America out of the Depression, all you need is the title: Memoirs: The great depression, 1929-1941.

What's my point? My point is that the world is full of people who know no history at all. It never occurred to the author of that item that the reason that Hoover doesn't get much "love from historians" is that most such  historians are New Deal Democrats themselves.

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