Hoover's Response and Roosevelt's 1932 Election

Two Presidents, Two Visions

By the summer of 1932 around 25% of Americans were unemployed and shanty towns named after the president lined the cities. Hoover insisted that recovery would come through patience, voluntary effort and the natural workings of the market. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic governor of New York, promised ‘a new deal for the American people’. The election was a referendum on the role of the federal government — and it ended a generation of Republican dominance.

Key Fact

Hoover’s main responses to the Depression were the 1930 Hawley–Smoot Tariff (which made trade worse), the 1932 Reconstruction Finance Corporation (which lent to banks but came too late) and a continued belief in rugged individualism — that recovery should come through self-reliance rather than federal aid. None convinced enough voters in 1932.

Hoover’s Worldview: Rugged Individualism

Rugged individualism was not a slogan he invented during the slump — it was the philosophy he had built his career on. As Secretary of Commerce in the 1920s he had championed voluntary cooperation between business, charity and local government. As president from March 1929 he insisted that direct federal welfare would corrupt the American character and that ‘prosperity is just around the corner’. The longer the slump lasted, the more out of touch this looked.

Hoover did act — just less, slower and later than the crisis demanded. He pressed business leaders not to cut wages or lay workers off (most ignored him after 1930). He authorised some federal public works (the Hoover Dam, formerly Boulder Dam, was begun in 1931). He set up the President’s Emergency Committee for Employment to coordinate charity. But the scale was tiny next to the scale of the slump.

The Hawley–Smoot Tariff and Its Backfire

In June 1930 Hoover signed the Hawley–Smoot Tariff, raising US import duties on over 20,000 goods to record levels. The intention was to protect American factories and farms from foreign competition. The result was the opposite. Within two years 25 trading partners had retaliated with their own tariffs. World trade halved between 1929 and 1934. American farmers, who depended on exports, lost their overseas markets even as crop prices collapsed at home. Over 1,000 economists had begged Hoover not to sign the bill; he ignored them. By 1932 it was a textbook example of a policy that worsened the problem it was meant to solve.

In January 1932 Hoover finally accepted that markets would not self-correct and signed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) into law. The RFC made $2 billion of federal loans available to banks, railroads and large businesses. It was the most direct federal intervention in the economy in peacetime. But Hoover insisted the RFC must not lend to individuals, families or municipalities — he wanted to support institutions, not people. Critics called it ‘a millionaires’ dole’. The RFC was kept by Roosevelt and became one tool of the New Deal — but in 1932 it came too late to rescue Hoover’s presidency.

Why Hoover Became So Unpopular

Hoover’s unpopularity by 1932 was not just about policy — it was about tone. He was a quiet, formal man who hated public speaking. He insisted on dressing for dinner in the White House every evening even as bread lines grew outside. When the Bonus Army was dispersed in July 1932 (Lesson 6) by federal troops with tear gas and bayonets, the newsreels were devastating: a president attacking his own war veterans. The names attached to the misery — Hoovervilles, Hoover blankets, Hoover flags — turned an economic crisis into a personal verdict.

Roosevelt’s 1932 Campaign

Franklin D. Roosevelt — FDR — was a different kind of politician. He had been struck down by polio in 1921 and could not walk unaided, but built a public image of reassuring strength. He had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Wilson and as Democratic governor of New York from 1929, where he had launched a state relief programme that became a model for federal action. His July 1932 Democratic Convention speech promised ‘a new deal for the American people’ — he flew to Chicago to deliver it in person, breaking the convention that the candidate stayed away.

Roosevelt did not run alone. His wife Eleanor Roosevelt had been a Democratic Party organiser since the early 1920s and travelled the country mobilising women voters — she would later become the most politically active First Lady to that date. Behind FDR sat the ‘Brain Trust’, a group of academics from Columbia University — Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell and Adolf Berle — who drafted policy papers and speeches throughout the 1932 campaign. Their thinking shaped the alphabet agencies of the early New Deal: federal banking regulation, public-works employment, agricultural price support and a relief programme for the unemployed. Hoover, by contrast, increasingly relied on a small inner circle that did not believe in federal welfare. The two campaigns were not just different in tone — they were different in the kind of advice each candidate sought.

Roosevelt did not yet have a fully worked-out plan in 1932. The New Deal would be improvised after he took office (Lesson 8 onwards). But his campaign offered three things Hoover could not: an explicit promise of federal action, an attack on banks and big business, and confidence in his own voice. He campaigned in 38 states by train, an exhausting routine designed to show he was physically capable of the presidency.

The November 1932 Result

Roosevelt won 472 electoral college votes to Hoover’s 59. He took 42 of the 48 states and 57% of the popular vote. The Democrats also won large majorities in both houses of Congress. The Republican grip on the federal government, unbroken since 1921, was decisively over. The four months between November 1932 and Roosevelt’s March 1933 inauguration were the longest of the slump — bank panics intensified as Americans waited — but the political verdict was clear.