In
1959 I entered a dark elevator in a Manhattan, NY apartment house, taking me up
to the penthouse residence of Herbert Hoover, the 31st President of
the United States. The purpose was to meet President Hoover and have my picture
taken with him as I had been given the totally arbitrary distinction of being the
1959-60 poster boy for the Boy’s Clubs of
America.
At age 9 I had little sense for the
history behind Herbert Hoover or for that matter the organization of Boy’s Clubs,
other than being a member and occasionally using their facilities. The Boy’s
Clubs of America, under that name, began during Hoover’s first year in
office. Four years after he left office
he became Chairman of the BCA and was credited with its national expansion. By
the time I met him he was 85 years old and his designation as “Chairman” had
long since been prefixed with “Honorary”.
I grew from that time with a
fondness for Herbert, and why not. My picture with him (a handwritten note to me and signature on
the photo) was always on a wall in my father’s house and, after some years of
storage, eventually made it to one of my walls, although somewhat ignominiously
on a wall of an outbuilding we call “the studio”.
In the past I never looked too deeply into
Hoover’s responsibility for the turbulence that erupted during his Administration.
I have looked of late because of some
important similarities I believe I see with what is clearly a turbulent time
this country is currently facing. The details between the two periods are
vastly different, but the common broad realities are severely compelling.
One of the major differences was in
character of leadership. Hoover was self-made, worth hundreds of millions of
dollars (in 2019 dollars) by the time he took office. His father was an Iowan
blacksmith. Given the handle “The Engineer”, he had honored himself in both
business and post-WWI public service. Though smart and highly educated, his
world view was nearly etched in stone by his business acumen, nationalistic fervor,
and the nature of post-war excesses. An unbalanced economic class structure had evolved
and neither Hoover nor his Conservative Republican Party and any desire to
disassemble it, but rather, in fact, to reinforce it.
That world view limited their
ability to deal with the crisis that began in late 1929, but I believe it would
have limited them regardless of what crisis they may have faced. A major change
had to take place, and it eventually did at the ballot box.
In 1932 Hoover, a decent and respectable American, lost every state but
five in the Presidential election of that year. A reversal of only 114 thousand
votes and he would have lost every state. Coming into office Hoover had Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. In 1930 he lost the House, but the Senate
remained barely Republican. In 1932 the House turned 72% Democratic and the
Senate 62% Democratic. A seismic shift had taken place. The United States began
a path to make it the preeminent nation on Earth, politically, economically, and socially.
Ignoring the reprehensible character
and personality of Donald Trump (really the antithesis of Hoover), it not hard
to see that he and the Republican Party have brought us to a similar precipice.
The
gross inequality of wealth (which will be exponentially magnified by the
CoViD-19 Pandemic), the authoritarian assault on Democracy, the undermining of
truth, the exploitation of social divisions, the international isolationism,
the disregarding of science, the acceptance of incompetency, and the
manipulation of religious belief for political gain (to name a few) have pushed
this Country to the point where confronting a crisis like a pandemic is
tragically problematic.
Donald Trump needs to be removed
from Office, just as Hoover did. The Republican Party, with all their tools of
conspiracies and fear mongering of social change, need to be removed from power
as well. However, the change needs to reflect what the American People saw in
1932. A message needs to be delivered to the World that the narcissism and the self-interest of a few is not the rich tradition that made American leadership
the stable center of free democracies.
Trump, Trumpism, and the Republican
Party’s self-interest need to be defeated as Hoover and the Republicans were in
1932...totally. It is critical for another seismic change to take place. In
1932 Hoover still received 40% of the vote. In 2016 Trump received 46% of the
vote. After four years of Trump and McConnell it may be that only 6% of the
American electorate is what we need to retain Democracy as we know it.
