Herbert Hoover: The New Deal and European Collectivism

▪ Primary Source

      

      The address by ex-President Hoover, from which the following selection is taken, was delivered to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on June 10, 1936. Although Hoover was still the dominant figure in the Party — as the wild and prolonged demonstration touched off by his appearance attested — the Republicans nominated the only Republican governor to be reelected in 1934, Alfred M. Landon of Kansas. Landon referred to himself as a "constitutional liberal," but Hoover succeeded in blunting Landon's liberal edge by injecting much of his own philosophy into the subsequent election campaign. Uncompromising opponents of the New Deal such as Hoover constantly compared the rise of Roosevelt in America to the rise of dictatorships abroad.

      In this room rests the greatest responsibility that has come to a body of Americans in three generations. In the lesser sense this is a convention of a great political party. But in the larger sense it is a convention of Americans to determine the fate of those ideals for which this nation was founded. That far transcends all partisanship.

      There are elemental currents which make or break the fate of nations. There is a moral purpose in the universe. Those forces which affect the vitality and the soul of a people will control their destinies. The sum of years of public service in these currents is the overwhelming conviction of their transcendent importance over the more transitory, even though difficult, issues of national life.

      I have given about four years to research into the New Deal, trying to determine what its ultimate objectives were, what sort of a system it is imposing on this country.

      To some people it appears to be a strange interlude in American history in that it has no philosophy, that it is sheer opportunism, that it is a muddle of a spoils system, of emotional economics, of reckless adventure, of unctuous claims to a monopoly of human sympathy, of greed for power, of a desire for popular acclaim and an aspiration to make the front pages of the newspapers. That is the most charitable view.

      To other people it appears to be a cold-blooded attempt by starry-eyed boys to infect the American people by a mixture of European ideas, flavored with our native predilection to get something for nothing.

      You can choose either one you like best. But the first is the road of chaos which leads to the second. Both of these roads lead over the same grim precipice that is the crippling and possibly the destruction of the freedom of men. Which of these interpretations is accurate is even disputed by alumni of the New Deal who have graduated for conscience's sake or have graduated by request.

      In central Europe the march of Socialist or Fascist dictatorships and their destruction of liberty did not set out with guns and armies. Dictators began their ascent to the seats of power through the elections provided by liberal institutions. Their weapons were promise and hate. They offered the mirage of Utopia to those in distress. They flung the poison of class hatred. They may not have maimed the bodies of men, but they maimed their souls.

      The 1932 campaign was a pretty good imitation of this first stage of European tactics. You may recall the promises of the abundant life, the propaganda of hate.

      Once seated in office, the first demand of these European despotisms was for power and "action." Legislatures were told they "must" delegate their authorities. Their free debate was suppressed. The powers demanded are always the same pattern. They all adopt planned economy. They regimented industry and agriculture. They put the government into business. They engaged in gigantic government expenditures. They created vast organizations of spoils henchmen and subsidized dependents. They corrupted currency and credit. They drugged the thinking of the people with propaganda at the people's expense.

      If there are any items in this stage in the march of European collectivism that the New Deal has not imitated it must have been an oversight.

      But at this point this parallel with Europe halts — at least for the present. The American people should thank Almighty God for the Constitution and the Supreme Court. They should be grateful to a courageous press.

      You might contemplate what would have happened if Mr. Roosevelt could have appointed enough Supreme Court justices in the first year of his administration. Suppose these New Deal acts had remained upon the statute books. We would have been a regimented people. Have you any assurance that he will not have the appointments if he is reelected? . . .

      So much for the evidence that the New Deal is a definite attempt to replace the American system of freedom with some sort of European planned existence. But let us assume that the explanation is simply hit-and-run opportunism, spoils system, and muddle.

      We can well take a moment to explore the prospects of American ideals of liberty and self-government under that philosophy. We may take only seven short examples:

      The Supreme Court has reversed some ten or twelve of the New Deal major enactments. Many of these acts were a violation of the rights of men and of self-government. Despite the sworn duty of the Executive and Congress to defend these rights, they have sought to take them into their own hands. That is an attack on the foundations of freedom.

      More than this, the independence of the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Executive are pillars at the door of liberty. For three years the word "must" has invaded the independence of Congress. And the Congress has abandoned its responsibility to check even the expenditures of money. They have turned open appropriations into personal power. These are destructions of the very safeguards of free people.

      We have seen these gigantic expenditures and this torrent of waste pile up a national debt which two generations cannot repay. One time I told a Democratic Congress that "You cannot spend yourselves into prosperity." You recall that advice did not take then. It hasn't taken yet.

      Billions have been spent to prime the economic pump. It did employ a horde of paid officials upon the pump handle. We have seen the frantic attempts to find new taxes on the rich. Yet three-quarters of the bill will be sent to the average man and the poor. He and his wife and his grandchildren will be giving a quarter of all their working days to pay taxes. Freedom to work for himself is changed into a slavery of work for the follies of government.

      We have seen an explosive inflation of bank credits by this government borrowing. We have seen varied steps toward currency inflation that have already enriched the speculator and deprived the poor. If this is to continue, the end result is the tears and anguish of universal bankruptcy and distress. No democracy in history has survived the final stages of inflation.

      We have seen the building up of a horde of political officials. We have seen the pressures upon the helpless and destitute to trade political support for relief. Both are a pollution of the very fountains of liberty.

      We have seen the most elemental violation of economic law and experience. The New Deal forgets it is solely by production of more goods and more varieties of goods and services that we advance the standard of living and security of men. If we constantly decrease costs and prices and keep up earnings, the production of plenty will be more and more widely distributed. These laws may be restitched in new phrases but they are the very shoes of human progress.

      We had so triumphed in this long climb of mankind toward plenty that we had reached Mount Pisgah, where we looked over the promised land of abolished poverty. Then men began to quarrel over the division of the goods. The depression produced by war destruction temporarily checked our march toward the promised land.

      Then came the little prophets of the New Deal. They announce the striking solution that the way out is to produce less and to increase prices so that people can buy less. They have kept on providing some new restriction or burden or fright down to a week ago.

      At least it has enabled the New Deal to take a few hundred thousand earnest party workers to the promised land. It takes the rest of us for a ride into the wilderness of unemployment.

      Can democracy stand the strain of Mother Hubbard economics for long? Will there be anything left in the economic cupboard but a bone? . . .

      The New Deal may be a revolutionary design to replace the American system with despotism. It may be the dream stuff of a false liberalism. It may be the valor of muddle. Their relationship to each other, however, is exactly the sistership of the witches who brewed the caldron of powerful trouble for Macbeth. Their product is the poisoning of Americanism.

      The President has constantly reiterated that he will not retreat. For months, to be sure, there has been a strange quiet. Just as the last campaign was fought on promises that have been broken, so apparently this campaign is to be slipped through by evasion.

      But the American people have the right to know now, while they still have power to act. What is going to be done after election with these measures which the Constitution forbids and the people by their votes have never authorized? What do the New Dealers propose to do with these unstable currencies, unbalanced budgets, debts and taxes? Fifty words would make it clear. Surely the propaganda agencies which emit half a million words a day could find room for these 50. I noticed they recently spent 300 words on how to choose a hat. It is slightly more important to know the fate of a nation. . . .

      The Republican Party must achieve true social betterment. But we must produce measures that will not work confusion and disappointment. We must propose a real approach to social evils, not the prescription for them, by quacks, of poison in place of remedy.

      We must achieve freedom in the economic field. We have grave problems in relation of government to agriculture and business. Monopoly is only one of them. The Republican Party is against the greed for power of the wanton boys who waste the people's savings. But it must be equally adamant against the greed for power and exploitation in the seekers of special privilege. At one time I said: "We can no more have economic power without checks and balances than we can have political power without checks and balances. Either one leads to tyranny."

      The Republican Party must be a party that accepts the challenge of each new day. The last word in human accomplishment has not been spoken. The last step in human progress has not been made. We welcome change when it will produce a fairer, more just, and satisfying civilization. But change which destroys the safeguards of free men and women are only apples of Sodom.

      Great calamities have come to the whole world. These forces have reached into every calling and every cottage. They have brought tragedy and suffering to millions of firesides. I have great sympathy for those who honestly reach for short cuts to the immensity of our problems.

      While design of the structure of betterment for the common man must be inspired by the human heart, it can only be achieved by the intellect. It can only be builded by using the mold of justice, by laying brick upon brick from the materials of scientific research; by the painstaking sifting of truth from the collection of fact and experience. Any other mold is distorted; any other bricks are without straw; any other foundations are sand. That great structure of human progress can be built only by free men and women.

      The gravest task which confronts the party is to regenerate these freedoms.

      There are principles which neither tricks of organization, nor the rigors of depression, nor the march of time, nor New Dealers, nor Socialists, nor Fascists can change. There are some principles which came into the universe along with the shooting stars of which worlds are made, and they have always been and ever will be true. Such are the laws of mathematics, the law of gravitation, the existence of God and the ceaseless struggle of humankind to be free.

      Throughout the centuries of history, man's vigil and his quest have been to be free. For this, the best and bravest of earth have fought and died. To embody human liberty in workable government, America was born. Shall we keep that faith? Must we condemn the unborn generations to fight again and to die for the right to be free?

      There are some principles that cannot be compromised. Either we shall have a society based upon ordered liberty and the initiative of the individual, or we shall have a planned society that means dictation, no matter what you call it or who does it. There is no halfway ground. They cannot be mixed. Government must either release the powers of the individual for honest achievement or the very forces it creates will drive it inexorably to lay its paralyzing hand more and more heavily upon individual effort.

      Less than twenty years ago we accepted those ideals as the air we breathed. We fought a great war for their protection. We took upon ourselves obligations of billions. We buried our sons in foreign soil. But in this score of years we have seen the advance of collectivism and its inevitable tyranny in more than half the civilized world. In this thundering era of world crisis distracted America stands confused and uncertain.

Source: Herbert Hoover, American Ideals Versus the New Deal, 1936, pp. 4-12.

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