what was president hoovers overall plan to deal with the great depression

When confronted by the crunch of the Great Depression, the American president knew that doing zilch was not an option. "That would have been utter ruin," he recalled. "Instead we met the situation with proposals to individual business concern and to the Congress of the well-nigh gigantic programme of economic defence and counterattack e'er evolved in the history of the Commonwealth."

The words may have sounded like Franklin D. Roosevelt touting his New Deal, but they were actually uttered by his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, on the campaign trail in 1932.

Herbert Hoover riding with Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the day of FDR'due south presidential inauguration, 1933.

Bettmann Annal/Getty Images

Although sometimes portrayed as a president stubbornly unwilling to intervene in the marketplace during the Smashing Depression, Hoover was never a proponent of laissez-faire economics, says Kenneth Whyte, author of Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. "Hoover entered public life during the Great State of war as Woodrow Wilson'southward head of the United States Nutrient Administration and in that position oversaw an unprecedented intervention in the American economy to ensure that the United States and its allies were sufficiently provisioned to win the war," he says. "And as president he put the government to work in ways that were inconceivable to whatsoever of his predecessors."

When he campaigned for the presidency amid a flourishing economy in 1928, Hoover pledged, "We shall soon, with the assistance of God, exist in sight of the twenty-four hours when poverty will be banished from this nation." Notwithstanding, just seven months into Hoover'southward presidency, the Stock Market Crash of 1929 marked the get-go of a long economic implosion that grew into the Neat Depression.

READ MORE: Here Are Warning Signs Investors Missed Before the 1929 Crash

Whyte says that Hoover quickly showed a willingness to tap the resources of the federal government to address the fiscal crisis. "He immediately cut taxes and introduced a counter-cyclical plan of public works spending, the get-go of its kind, to stimulate employment and recovery. He bullied the nation's largest employers into holding off on layoffs—their usual reaction to a downturn—to stabilize the economy and aid recovery, and to continue investing in new plants and equipment."

When it became articulate in 1931 that the financial tailspin was non abating, Hoover convinced Congress to accept a moratorium on the payment of international debt and enacted a serial of federal policies to stimulate the economy that some historians have referred to as the "Hoover New Deal." The new Reconstruction Finance Corporation, established in Jan 1932, lent tax dollars to bail out American banks and businesses. The Emergency Relief and Construction Human activity, enacted in July 1932, broadened the agency's lending power to include financing state and local public works projects.

Hoover also approved substantial farm subsidy increases, eased requirements for the issuing of Federal Reserve notes and established the Federal Home Loan Depository financial institution Board to support mortgages. In an attempt to pay for the new programs, Hoover signed the Revenue Human action of 1932, which doubled the manor tax, hiked corporate tax rates and increased the top personal tax rate from 25 to 63 percent.

READ MORE: How Economic Turmoil Later WWI Contributed to the Swell Low

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Although Roosevelt would oversee a dramatic expansion of the federal government himself, he attacked Hoover during the 1932 presidential campaign for engaging in "reckless and extravagant" spending and ran on a Democratic platform calling for "an immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures" by at least 25 percent. Roosevelt's running mate, John Nance Garner, went so far equally to accuse Hoover of "leading the state downwardly the path of socialism."

"This idea that Hoover was a laissez-faire president who didn't desire to do anything really wasn't the case," says Dartmouth Higher economic science professor Douglas Irwin, author of Peddling Protectionism: Smoot-Hawley and the Swell Depression. "He tried a lot of things, though not many worked."

A 1932 presidential election button pin for Herbert Hoover.

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While real federal spending rose by 48 percent during Hoover'southward presidency, unemployment also soared from 3 percent to an all-time loftier of 25 percent. More than than v,000 banks had failed past the fourth dimension he left office in 1933.

One of Hoover'southward actions that had a particularly negative effect on the economy was his signing of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which raised prices on thousands of imported goods, against the advice of more than than 1,000 economists. "In terms of the economic bear on, it had a big shock effect on trade," Irwin says. "It led to retaliation that hitting foreign exports and the wrinkle of both imports and exports. It certainly didn't cause the Nifty Low, but it was a contributing gene."

"Hoover's laissez-faire reputation is owed almost entirely to 1930s Democratic entrada rhetoric and New Bargain school of historiography," Whyte says, "both of which were determined to blame Hoover for the Depression and nowadays Franklin Roosevelt as sui generis, entirely distinct from his benighted Republican predecessors, and responsible for all of the meaningful policy innovation that emerged from the Depression."

READ MORE: Did New Bargain Programs Assist Stop the Great Low?

Subsequently leaving the White House, Hoover became a vociferous critic of Roosevelt's economic policies. He warned that the New Deal had a "pronounced odor of totalitarian regime" and attacked Roosevelt's agronomical policies as "goosestepping the people under this pinkish banner of Planned Economy."

In the optics of some, however, Hoover had laid the foundation for the subsequent economic policies he so detested.

"I once made a list of New Deal ventures begun during Hoover's years as Secretary of Commerce then as president," Roosevelt advisor Rexford Chiliad. Tugwell wrote. "I had to conclude that his policies were substantially correct. The New Bargain owed much to what he had begun."

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Source: https://www.history.com/news/great-depression-herbert-hoover-new-deal