That’s because the ones who actually study the Hoover adminstration know that he was a statist. According to an article on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal, leftist historians now “want to give him a little more credit for paving the way for [Franklin] Roosevelt’s expanded government intervention . . . ”
Economists understand that FDR’s interventions made the Great Depression longer and more severe, but the history profession is oblivious to this, and doesn’t even seem to care to learn anything about it. Their ironclad criterion for ranking presidents is statism: the more the better. Thus, Hoover biographer Joan Hoff gushes that the realization that Hoover was a statist (See Murray Rothbard, America’s Great Depression, for the facts) will probably “get him to bump up a few places” in the history profession’s presidential rankings. “Many of the things that are said about Hoover today, particularly that he was an apostle of laissez faire . . . are simply untrue,” says historian William Leuchtenburg. That should definitely “bump” Hoover up in the rankings quite significantly.
6:46 am on November 4, 2008
