------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (September 2008)
Vincent Gaddis, _Herbert Hoover, Unemployment, and the Public Sphere: A
Conceptual History, 1919-1933_. Lanham, MD: University Press of America,
2005. xxix + 180 pp. $36 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-7618-3235-5.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Patrick D. Reagan, Department of History,
Tennessee Technological University.
In this suggestive, yet flawed, study Benedictine University historian
Vincent Gaddis calls for reexamination of the unemployment policies of
Herbert C. Hoover, Secretary of Commerce and President of the United
States, between 1921 and 1933. Using the theoretical approach of German
scholar Jurgen Habermas, Gaddis argues that Hoover manipulated the role
of the American public in this period to impose his view of a limited
voluntarist state on the broader society through the intermediate
institutions of municipal government, business, labor, and urban
charities in response to the depression of 1920-1921.
Gaddis deploys an abundance of research from the wealth of materials in
the Secretary of Commerce and presidential papers at the Hoover Library
in West Branch, Iowa to put Hoover at center stage in the public policy
formulations of the 1920?s. In a brief introductory chapter on the
conceptual challenge of making sense of Hoover?s ideas, Gaddis stresses
the interrelationship among Hoover?s ideological values of individual
virtue, preservation of liberty through a limited state, and the
significance of voluntary action by local governments and private sector
actors for public policy making implemented through the work of the
President?s Conference on Unemployment of 1921.
In the wake of what this reviewer has termed ?the forgotten depression
of 1920-1921,? newly-appointed Secretary of Commerce Hoover created a
series of follow up committees to investigate the issues of
unemployment, the business cycle, seasonal unemployment in the
construction industries, and industrial disputes.[1] Gaddis summarizes
the work and impact of the conference, Hoover?s voluntarist views of
political economy, and Hoover?s efforts to stabilize the coal industry
in the 1920?s in separate chapters. In chapters 4 through 6, the most
insightful and thoroughly research section of the work, Gaddis presents
a sophisticated historical narrative focused on the work of the
municipal committees on unemployment in the three key Midwestern cities
of Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit. Gaddis draws on research in personal
manuscript collections, municipal records, local and state historical
societies, printed autobiographies and biographies, and city newspapers
to fill in the picture of how the Hooverian response to the immediate
crisis of unemployment in 1921 played out on the local level. Following
recommendations of the Unemployment Conference for local and
private-sector based responses to rising unemployment in 1921-1922,
Republican machine mayor ?Big Bill? Thompson and Democratic successor
William Dever in Chicago, socialist mayor Daniel Hoan in Milwaukee, and
progressive Republican mayor James Couzens of Detroit roughly adhered to
Hoover?s voluntarist policies in attempting to bring relief to the
unemployed.
Yet, once the Great Depression of 1929-1941 began, voluntarism proved
much too little and way too late. Traditional sources of local funding
for relief such as food, housing subsidies, and limited health care were
used up quickly. Little direct relief in the form of cash, known as ?the
dole,? was available. Between 1929 and 1933, President Hoover
desperately sought to hold on to voluntarist precepts through the work
of the President?s Emergency Committee for Employment (1930-1931), the
President?s Organization for Unemployment Relief (1931-1932), and,
reluctantly, the new Reconstruction Finance Corporation (1932). During
the same period, mayors Anton Cermak in Chicago, Daniel Hoan in
Milwaukee, and Democrat Frank Murphy in Detroit mouthed voluntarist
rhetoric while moving toward increasingly statist policies such as
unemployment insurance and federal and direct relief as local charities,
businesses, and municipal relief committees experienced a growing gap
between their resources and the number and needs of the unemployed. In
the penultimate and final chapters, Gaddis traces in detail Hoover?s
growing divergence from socioeconomic reality and the city mayors?
pragmatic moves toward the post-1933 social welfare state.
Unfortunately, the work is riddled with mistakes in grammar, spelling,
and footnote citations that distract the reader?s attention from an
otherwise valuable contribution to the historical literature on Hoover
as Secretary of Commerce, public policy making in the
Republican-dominated 1920?s, and the Hoover presidency. Throughout the
text, conjunctions and prepositions that should appear remain missing.
Some names appear in two spellings (e.g. Otto Mallery and Otto Mallory).
Footnote numbers appear in mixed formats as regular, italicized, and
superscript types. Two footnotes numbered 16 appear on pages xxiv and
xxv. Chapter 3 with forty-nine footnotes at the end contains only one
numbered footnote in the text (p. 53). One footnote on page 108 refers
to notes 1 and 2 simultaneously. Whether through poor proofreading or
lack of copy editing, this work reflects poorly on the author?s detailed
research and careful thinking of an important topic in need of clarity
and historical perspective. Production values, while not uppermost in a
reader?s mind, do count.
More significantly, Gaddis appears unaware of key works such as Evan
Metcalf?s study of Hooverian macroeconomic policy making, Ellis Hawley?s
studies of Hoover?s coal stabilization work and Hoover?s use of the
National Bureau of Economic Research, Guy Alchon?s Habermas-influenced
analysis of Hoover?s policies throughout the period, and this author?s
explication of the Hooverian committee and conference system bolstered
by the work of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the
financial support of national philanthropic foundations.[2] While Gaddis
finally ties together many of his insights in the conclusion, this final
chapter should have served as the introduction. Not only did Hoover and
members of the newly reorganized Department of Commerce engage in a host
of policy making ventures in the 1920?s, other people and institutions
participated as well such as business groups including the National
Civic Federation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and local business
associations. So too did the Taylor Society, locally-grounded firms, and
individual New Era business leaders some have termed ?corporate
liberals.?[3] Aware of the role of organized philanthropy in the
Hooverian networks emerging from the Unemployment Conference of 1921,
Gaddis points to the work of the Russell Sage Foundation, which played a
minor part, while he ignores significant funding by the Laura Spelman
Rockefeller Memorial, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Rockefeller
Foundation. Rich primary sources exist for study of the part these
second-generation philanthropies took in the Hooverian planning efforts
throughout the decade as well as the capstone, landmark studies on
Recent Economic Changes (1927) and Recent Social Trends (1933).[4]
Unlike other revisionist works on Hoover?s ideology of voluntarism, his
leadership of the President?s Conference on Unemployment of 1921 and its
ensuing committee system, and the failure of President Hoover?s relief
policies in the early 1930?s, Gaddis?s research shows us how and why the
voluntarist response to the postwar crisis of 1921 set the tone,
example, and model for Hoover?s later responses to the Great Depression.
While the forgotten depression of 1920-1921 proved to be the sharpest
economic downturn since the emergence of the business cycle in the early
nineteenth century, it also was one of the shortest reversals. Hoover
and his disciples along with city mayors, local business leaders, and
local charities thought their response to rising unemployment worked in
1921-1922, so they quite understandably tried to use it again in the
1929-1933 period. In what Boston business leader and Hoover supporter
Henry S. Dennison called ?the slowly sucking maelstrom? of the
Depression, voluntarism reached its limits. The American people turned
to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the statist-oriented New Deal, leaving
Herbert Clark Hoover and the voluntarist New Era behind. Still, when
Franklin Roosevelt appointed the only national planning agency in U.S.
history in July 1933, all of its members were veterans of the Hooverian
experiments of the 1920?s.
Notes:
1. Patrick D. Reagan, ?From Depression to Depression: Hooverian National
Planning, 1921?1933,? _Mid-America_ 70 (1988): 35-60.
2. Evan Metcalf, ?Secretary Hoover and the Emergence of Macroecoomic
Management,? _Business History Review_ 49 (1975): 60-80; Ellis W.
Hawley, ?Secretary Hoover and the Bituminous Coal Problem, 1921-1928,?
_Business History Review_ 42 (1968): 247-270; Ellis W. Hawley, ?Economic
Inquiry and the State in New Era America: Anti-Statist Corporatism and
Positive Statism in Uneasy Coexistence,? in _The State and Economic
Knowledge: The American and British Experiences_, eds. Mary O. Furner
and Barry Supple (New York: Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars and Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 287-324; Guy Alchon,
_The Invisible Hand of Planning: Capitalism, Social Science, and the
State in the 1920?s_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985);
Patrick D. Reagan, _Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal
Planning, 1890-1943_ (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000);
and Michael A. Bernstein, _A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public
Purpose in Twentieth-Century America_ (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2001), pp. 53-58.
3. Ellis W. Hawley, ?The Discovery and Study of a ?Corporate
Liberalism?,? _Business History Review_ 52 (1978): 309-20; Robert F.
Himmelberg, _The Origins of the National Recovery Administration:
Business, Government, and the Trade Association Issue, 1921-1933 (New
York: Fordham University Press, 1976); Robert F. Himmelberg, ?Government
and Business, 1917-1932: The Triumph of Corporate Liberalism?? in
_Business and Government: Essays in Twentieth-Century Cooperation and
Conflict_, eds. Joseph R. Frese and Jacob Judd (Tarrytown, NY: Sleepy
Hollow Press, 1985), 1-23; and _Essays in Business-Government
Cooperation, 1917?1932 : The Rise of Corporatist Policies_, ed. Robert
F. Himmelberg (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), Volume 5 in
_Business and Government in America Since 1870: A Twelve
Volume-Anthology of Scholarly Articles_.
4. For a sampling of works based on philanthropic records, see Barry D.
Karl and Stanley N. Katz, ?The American Private Philanthropic Foundation
and the Public Sphere, 1890?1930,? _Minerva_ 18 (Summer 1981): 236-270;
Robert Arnove, ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The
Foundations at Home and Abroad (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980); Jack Salzman,
ed., _Philanthropy and American Society: Selected Papers_ (New York
Columbia University Press/Center for American Studies, 1987); Donald
Fisher, _Fundamental Development of the Social Sciences: Rockefeller
Philanthropy and the United States Social Science Research Council_ (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); and Ellen Condliffe
Lagemann, ed., _Philanthropic Foundations: New Scholarship, New
Possibilities_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999) .
Patrick D. Reagan is author of _Designing a New America: The Origins of
New Deal Planning, 1890-1943_ (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2000); _American Journey: World War I and the Jazz Age_
(Farmington Hills, MI: The Gale Group/ Primary Source Microfilm, 2000);
editor of and contributor to _Voluntarism, Planning, and the State: The
American Planning Experience, 1914-1946_ (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1988); and contributor of essays on planning and several economists in
_Encyclopedia of the Great Depression_, ed. Robert S. McElvaine (New
York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2003), 2 volumes.
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