Conservatism Has Been Destroyed for a Generation. We Just Don't See It Yet.
When Herbert Hoover's reforms proved ineffectual during the Great Depression, he destroyed American conservatism for 50 years. Today, Donald Trump has done something similar.
(The New York Stock Exchange on October 24, 1929, later called “Black Thursday.” Image courtesy of Britannica.com)
The stock market crash of 1929 was not the first sign of trouble in the American economy. The Panic of 1873, followed by the Long Depression, which lasted until 1879 (or 1896, depending on the source), was caused in part by the Coinage Act of 1873, in part by extraordinarily long work weeks with decreasing pay, in part by political corruption, and in part by continued racism in the south excluding a significant part of its population from participating in a meaningful way in the local economies there.
After 1873, a depression, two recessions, and one panic followed until the Panic of 1896. The Panic of 1907 was caused by a run on Knickerbocker Trust Company, which led lawmakers to create the Federal Reserve System in order to stabilize American economic activity. The Fed, created in 1913, didn’t prevent a recession after World War I, caused in part by a great many economic participants in America and Europe having died on battlefields of various kinds.
Nor did it prevent the Great Depression caused by banking runs and an over-commitment to gold as a reserve currency. The economy of 1929 was a credit economy, with too many people owing too much money, and no real way for lenders to recoup their losses except by claiming assets owned by the borrowers.
During the Dust Bowl days of the Great Depression, that is exactly what happened. John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath describes the Joad Family moving out to California to seek employment, which eventually leads to the family becoming fractured and split apart. One chapter describes a man with firearm defending his property from those who wish to take ownership of it- a battle he was doomed to lose.
A third of all American farmers lost their land between 1929 and 1933 through foreclosures. Many farmers needed credit every year just to produce crops on their property. Some were saddled with unsustainable debt. Crop prices continued to decrease. Farmers weren’t making money. With less discretionary income, they could no longer deposit money in banks at rates they had once done. Many local banks went out of business for a lack of deposits.
In answer to this problem, Herbert Hoover created the Federal Farm Board, a bureaucracy designed to help farmers in distress. The Board was established in June 1929, several months before the crash leading up to Great Depression. The Board’s creation, however well-intentioned, did not solve fundamental problems plaguing the nation’s farmers.
Without internet or television, there was no way for the executive to tell the nation about what he had been doing or who he was except through newspaper and radio. News reporting determined a president’s reputation more than his speeches, actions, or intentions. Reports before and after the 1929 crash regarding farmers were not good: the American farmer was in trouble.
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, put in place to ameliorate effects of the Great Depression, by then already eight months underway, did more harm than good. This was the second protectionist trade tariff law within eight years: the previous one had been the Ford-McCumber Act of 1922. American businessmen asked for tariffs on foreign goods so consumers would be induced to buy from them when they offered lower prices. The two tariffs, as well as those adopted by other countries in what were called “beggar-thy-neighbor” duties decreased international trade. The tariffs only caused the Great Depression, already an exigent crisis, to deepen.
In October 1930, Hoover created the President’s Emergency Committee for Unemployment with the aim of increasing employment rates. The program failed to meet expectations. In 1931, the Committee was changed into the President’s Organization on Unemployment Relief. Despite the program’s existence, unemployment continued to rise. In 1932, he created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation with the aim of supporting businesses in danger of collapse through loans. He also created wanted to use federal loans to help people who already had outstanding debt to keep their homes.
By the time of the 1929 crash and subsequent Great Depression, socialist and communist sentiment in the country was rising. Socialist Eugene Debs, previously a propagandist for railroad unions, ran for president as a fourth-party candidate in the 1912 presidential election. He garnered six percent of the popular vote, close to one million. Progressive Party candidate Theodore Roosevelt finished second.
The Sacco and Vanzetti trial of 1921, which saw Italian migrants and left-leaning anarchists Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco condemned to death, sparked the national imagination, and brought socialist ideas to the forefront in a way that hadn’t been done before. The trial kicked off the career of Eugene Lyons, who would later spend several years in Soviet Russia, become the first journalist to interview Josef Stalin, and who would write Assignment in Utopia, an autobiographical account of his time there.
Socialist and communist groups were everywhere. The ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, encapsulated in their work The Communist Manifesto, were taking hold across America. Soviet Russia was seen as a utopia- despite growing evidence to the contrary- in which the average citizen was could live without fear of losing their residence or employment.
By contrast, Hoover’s America, much of which he inherited from other administrations, was a place where, he believed, one simply had to work at a job to overcome all difficulties. Other than continued pushes for investments in public infrastructure, his notion of solving the Great Depression was putting people to work. The solution wasn’t viable when less and less people had the money to pay workers for their wages.
Hoover’s unpopularity led to him becoming a one-term president. By contrast, Franklin Roosevelt’s popularity led to him becoming a three-term president, the only person in American history to be elected three times. Many of Roosevelt’s programs were borrowed from communist administrative thought; some didn’t work. Others, such as unemployment funding, social security (an idea inspired by Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice), and FDIC insurance proved incredibly popular.
While Roosevelt’s programs didn’t prevent further recessions in later years, he was seen as a president who was at least trying to help his constituents, while Hoover appeared to be a man who was giving everyone a kick in the pants to get them going. Farmers in America never forgot it was Roosevelt’s programs who helped them more than Hoover’s. They never forgot it was a Democrat who took action, even if some actions didn’t work, to help them out of their misery. They never forgot, as well, that a Democratic president had won the largest war in the nation’s history while Hoover was there at the beginning of the nation’s largest economic crisis.
Despite occasional Republican presidential wins- Dwight Eisenhower would be center-left by today’s standards- Republicans lost control of government for a generation. They lost control of the Supreme Court when Earl Warren took his position as Chief Justice. They lost control of the House and Senate- especially after Republican Joseph McCarthy ended up embarrassing himself on a national stage by hunting for communist influences in a U.S. Army base- and would not regain anything resembling real legislative authority until 250 conservatives contributed to a document between 1979 and 1980 called A Mandate for Leadership.
The Mandate laid out a strategy for how Republicans would win back voters they had previously alienated. Many decades had passed since voters had seen first-hand the comparison between Hoover and Roosevelt. Now, they had seen first-hand the failures of Jimmy Carter in regards to foreign policy. Conservative actor and governor of California Ronald Reagan was catapulted into the spotlight.
Although Reagan’s policies were terrible across the board, and had disastrous consequences for decades to come, he was, at the time, viewed as a kind, charismatic old man who was doing his best for the country. That was the key ingredient conservatism had been missing under Hoover, under McCarthy, and under George Wallace’s overtly racist tirades against black people going to school with white people: a perception of trying to do one’s best for all citizens of the country.
This year, Donald Trump’s Republican Party makes no attempt to present this image to the public. As a convicted felon, a failed businessman, a narcissist, sociopath, pathological liar, and overall terrible human being, Trump has spent much of his time alienating American voters in the same way Herbert Hoover alienated American farm owners who had lost everything in the Great Depression.
Female voters feel increasingly under attack from legislatures who care more about the appearance of ideological purity than saving the life of a mother who experiences pregnancy complications. Doctors and nurses have become increasingly aware that Republican politicians are inserting themselves into offices where medicine is practiced. Latino citizens have become aware of a growing movement to deport even those people who are U.S. citizens. Black people cannot have forgotten what they learned the last time Trump was president: police officers, emboldened by racist rhetoric, all too often hurt and/or kill black citizens in violations of habeas corpus and the right of due process. Union members, most of them (with the exception of the Teamsters’s current president), have become aware that Trump wants people who try to go on strike to be fired on the spot- in violation of federal law. Environmental rights activists are aware that Trump did nothing to halt climate change, and perhaps made it worse. Medical professionals, if they think of Trump at all, cannot have forgotten his suggestion to inject disinfectant into one’s veins to cure the COVID-19 virus.
Young people voting for the first time see a lower standard of living for themselves than what their parents enjoyed. They see buying a house as an unattainable goal, and renting an apartment as a difficult prospect, at best. They see employer-employee relations becoming increasingly strained. They see rich Republicans such as Elon Musk behaving in increasingly unhinged ways. They see social media influencers acting as unregistered foreign agents. They see Republican-aligned individuals making bomb threats to schools, hospitals, and government buildings. They see attacks on public schools and libraries time and again from Trump-aligned Republicans. They see school-shooters with easy access to firearms killing their friends while Republicans refuse to take any measure to restrict access to those same firearms.
All of these things either affect them personally, or affect people in their age bracket personally, in negative ways. When given the chance to vote for a candidate who has yet to make an impact on their lives (Democrat) or one who already has in notable deleterious ways (Republican), young people will support a Democrat.
The only group of people who continue to support Trump are those who are distinctly unaware, who choose to blind themselves by substituting the commands of authority for the wisdom of expertise. For these voters, no matter how much Trump’s policies and actions threaten to harm them, they will not change. They will simply call criticism of him “misinformation” and refuse to admit they were wrong- a central tenet of today’s Trumpist movement.
There were those who continued to vote Republican even after Herbert Hoover. It wasn’t as though the Republican Party went away completely. However, the number of high information voters outnumbered the number of low-information voters in those days; between 1928 and 1981, the public largely held that Democrats governed better than Republicans.
Voters often go to the polls with single-issue concerns in mind (ie, firearm enthusiasts voting for Republicans so they can keep their guns). Voters are swayed by issues which affect them directly. Over the past decade, when he first began taking politics seriously, Donald Trump has been on the wrong side of too many issues directly affecting voters in America.
Like Herbert Hoover, the current generation of voters is not going to forget how they have been personally affected anytime soon. What’s more, the Republican Party of today is distinctly more unhinged than the Party of Herbert Hoover’s day. At the moment, they seem unable to make a course correction, despite their latest Mandate for Leadership (ie, Project 2025) offering guidelines for policy changes to favor current Republican agendas.
Trumpism is a losing movement. It’s a movement which, month after month, year after year, alienates more and more voters. The alienation Trumpism has done to voters has not been from one single issue- an economic failure such as the Great Depression- but has, through a variety of piecemeal efforts, reached just as many people.
The harm he has done to his own party and his own movement could last a generation- or longer. Several generations passed before Germany, following Adolf Hitler’s disastrous Nazi Party, was ready to try far-right politics again. Without significant immediate changes to American conservatism, its adherents might have to wait until the next century before they find themselves as a dominant political force again.
Such changes would have to take the personal interests of every voter into account, while at the same time doing away with the idea that some demographics can serve as necessary legislative sacrifices to achieve political goals. The farmers of Hoover’s day didn’t appreciate having their interests sacrificed to the system while an ineffectual executive failed time and again. Today’s citizens, spread across varying groups though they are, also don’t appreciate having their interests sacrificed to the system while a corrupt and ineffectual leader party fails time and again.
“Would you persuade, speak of interest, not of reason.” -Benjamin Franklin
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