After a long hiatus, I will hopefully be returning to frequent posting again, and what better way to start than with our most tendentious feature: comparing Bush to America’s most grotesque Presidential failures. Just in case we have retained a reader, and that reader has forgotten, here’s the list so far:
10. John Adams
9. Ronald Reagan
8. John Tyler
7. George W. Bush
Can Bush keep chuggin’ on down the list? This week’s challenger: Herbert Hoover!
It’s kind of sad that Hoover was such a godawful President, because he was a pretty good guy. He made his name in World War I getting food to victims. When accused of aiding Bolshevism through food-relief, he said, "Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!", which is awesome. But man, the Great Depression. He royally screwed the pooch on that one. So we’ll add an economy category to this one.
Domestic: Some good. He added 3 million acres to national parks, proposed creating the Dept. of Education, and got Hoover Dam going. He doubled the number of veteran hospitals, although he’s net bad for veterans’ affairs because of the Bonus Army thing, where a bunch of WWI vets asked for their money, so Hoover sent the U.S. Army to attack its own veterans, first with a cavalry charge, then with a fucking bayonet charge. Patton was in charge of the tanks, because evidently they used tanks. To be fair, Hoover didn’t expect MacArthur to send bayonets after impoverished veterans—no one knew that guy was insane yet.*
Did Bush Do Something Worse? I don’t think any one thing is comparable to attacking the army with the army. But Hoover did have some good moves, and MacArthur really was a terrifying lunatic, and Bush has had many more terrible moves (worse education policy, Katrina, domestic wiretapping, etc.). To the extent you can separate this stuff from the economy (not much), Bush is pretty significantly worse.
Economy: Hoo boy. Wikipedia says his stance on the economy was “largely based on volunteerism”, which is exactly as brilliant as it sounds. He essentially took a Buchanan approach to economic disaster, sitting around while the whole world spiraled into a hellish maelstrom of failure. He avoided legislative solutions for years; the major legislation he signed was the Smoot-Hawley tariff, widely considered a primary catalyst for deepening depressions worldwide. Guys like Milton Friedman and Ben Bernanke think that his contractionary monetary policy was the biggest problem, and guys like Keynes think it was his refusal to spend government money, but they all agree: he ruined everything. Of course, he inherited a lot of his problems, but he had been an extremely powerful Commerce Secretary for most of the 1920’s, so he largely inherited them from himself. Oh sure, he tried things like the National Credit Corporation, which could have saved banks, but it was based on volunteerism (i.e. the opposite of capitalism), so it failed horribly. Unemployment hit 24.9%, a preposterous number.
DBDSW?: No. Of course, when I started this series, I thought it would be Bush’s basket of failures against Hoover’s one big gun, but then I took a few weeks off and Bush came back with a competing economic tailspin. It’s hard to say how much worse our economy will get, but it’s very likely the worst since Hoover, and Bush is quite blameworthy (lax regulations plus corruption plus generally not knowing anything about the economy equals oh shit). So although Hoover easily wins this category, it’s not nearly by the margin I would have thought at this time in August.
Foreign Policy: It seems good: Solid foreign relations, more or less ending the Roosevelt corollary, asking for the “Hoover Moratorium” so Germany wouldn’t have to keep starving by paying France make-believe money. But then you remember that he oversaw the collapse of the world financial system, which among other things, led to the rise of the Nazis and set the stage for WWII.
DBDSW? Well, he’s trying. Iceland might be finished with its little independence experiment, for example. But he’s less to blame than Hoover on the economic side. On the other hand, the Iraq War, the squandering of U.S. goodwill abroad, the failure to win in Afghanistan, the blundering attempts to provoke China, Russia and Iran into power struggles, and the many war crimes represent a much more proactively terrible policy. Hoover was wrong, but he simply did not actively, maliciously create problems like Bush has. Call it a tie.
Civil Rights: Hoover was pretty solid for his time on Native American rights. He was not much worse than average for his time on black rights, which is to say, he ignored them completely as people were lynched everywhere. The Depression was not kind to minorities. He also supported the Mexican Repatriation, which sent over 500,000 people of Mexican descent back to Mexico, even though many (a majority by most counts I’m seeing) were U.S. citizens.
DBDSW? I’d say Bush is worse compared to his contemporaries, but Hoover’s contemporaries were such assholes that Hoover wins this one. It’s not the salient category this time, though.
Corruption: Hoover was not especially corrupt.
DBDSW? Ha ha! Ah, yes.
Value of Replacement Player: This category is turning out to be a real bummer for Bush. Say what you will about Clinton, there’s no doubt America did well under him. Hoover followed Coolidge and Harding, two of our worst Presidents. Bush has the misfortune (kind of) to follow one of our few non-dismal-failure Presidents, so instead of handling a terrible situation very poorly, like Hoover, he took a good situation, turned it into a terrible situation, and then handled it very poorly. Bush wins this one in a landslide.
Verdict: We’re getting into the tough entries here. The Great Depression is far worse than anything Bush has done, but he’s doing his damndest to catch up on economics alone, and by God if he isn’t making an impressive show of it. Even if the economy recovers, it’s clear that Bush was a remarkably terrible steward of it, and I think that when you add in his despicable cowardly militarism (Hoover was maybe the least war-criminal of any of our Presidents), immense corruption, and squandering of the Clinton successes, he still takes the prize.
*Bonus Fun Fact: FDR had to deal with the same pissed off WWI vets, so he sent Eleanor to smooth-talk them over some coffee. Somehow she convinced them they really wanted to volunteer to labor on the federal highway system in Florida, where 258 of them died in a hurricane.
Links to come later.
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