Things We Read Today (Conservatism Clutching from the Grave Edition)
From Sunday’s New York Times, historian William Leuchtenberg, whose one-volumer on Hoobert Heever I have been looking forward to with geeky anticipation, on the trap the outgoing Republican tried to lay for FDR:
Hoover determined to exploit this interim to salvage his presidency. No sooner had the ballots been counted than he invited Governor Roosevelt to confer with him. The overture gave every appearance of being an exceptionally generous offer to share power with the man who had vanquished him. In fact, it was the first step of a scheme to undo the results of the election… On Nov. 22, Hoover welcomed Roosevelt to the White House. Throughout the meeting, he treated his successor as though he were a thickheaded schoolboy who needed drilling on intransitive verbs. He sought to bully the president-elect into endorsing the administration’s policies at home and abroad, especially sustaining the gold standard at whatever cost. Alert to Hoover’s intent, Roosevelt smiled, nodded, smiled again, but made no commitment. A frustrated Hoover later vowed, “I’ll have my way with Roosevelt yet.”
Hoover returned to the attack in February. He sent the president-elect a hectoring 10-page handwritten letter that misspelled Roosevelt’s name (as “Roosvelt”). As a consequence of the flight of gold and runs on banks, Hoover wrote, there was “steadily degenerating confidence in the future.” His wise policies, he claimed, had brought an upturn in the summer of 1932. Since then, though, he said, there had been a sharp decline because the country was unnerved by Roosevelt’s election, for it feared that the new president would embark on radical experiments. Hoover concluded by asking Roosevelt to restore confidence by stating publicly that there would be “no tampering” with the currency and that “the budget will be unquestionably balanced, even if further taxation is necessary.”
Three days after writing this letter, Hoover told an archconservative senator that “if these declarations be made by the president-elect, he will have ratified the whole major program of the Republican administration; that is, it means the abandonment of 90 percent of the so-called new deal.” To another Republican senator, he spelled out what he demanded that his successor renounce: aid to homeowners burdened with mortgages, public works projects and plans for a Tennessee Valley Authority. He also wanted Roosevelt to raise tariff barriers and impose a national sales tax.
FDR pocket-vetoed the whole deal, which is to say that he did what he did with everyone he had no intention of satisfying: he tossed his head, smiled, chuckled, and said nothing–and then went on and did exactly what he had intended to in the first place, which was to do those things he was elected to do.
Every time you read a columnist or see some pol quoted as saying, “Despite the election, the country is conservative… Despite the calls for change, no one really wants change,” remember that these !#$#$@ers are merely the worm-ridden zombie tongues of entrenched interests, trying, like Hoover, to overturn the effects of the election by circumscribing Obama’s initiative before his administration even begins. They are to be viewed with skepticism, if not suspicion.
