The problem was
1) Smuggling
2) The US had a slave population that grew over time
Phase out of slavery in New York followed the formula nerd mentioned.
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The problem was
1) Smuggling
2) The US had a slave population that grew over time
Phase out of slavery in New York followed the formula nerd mentioned.
The original basis for slavery, as I understand it, was that some crops (sugar cane, rice, hemp, cotton) required a lot of labor and were profitable if farmed by slave labor, whereas it was almost impossible to get and keep enough paid labor to do the work. Once the cotton 'gin made it possible to get the seeds out of cotton fibers rapidly and cheaply, cotton cultivation exploded. There is a correlation between the increase in cotton cultivation, the development of millionaire planters and a hardening of attitudes toward slavery. Whole regions of the South that had been neutral or in favor of emancipation moved steadily toward seeing slavery as a positive good for whites and slaves alike. So, yes, money - and racism, and class-ism, and fears that slaves (or freed slaves) would take jobs away from whites, and so on and on.
Worst President? James Buchanan, the man who saw the Civil War coming, said he could do nothing about it and waited with folded hands while the country came apart. And second on the list would be Herbert Hoover. A fine businessman and a terrific organizer and manager who would have been an acceptable President in other times, but who took bad advice - and kept taking it - until he nearly wrecked the country.
Worst President? James Buchanan, the man who saw the Civil War coming, said he could do nothing about it and waited with folded hands while the country came apart. And second on the list would be Herbert Hoover. A fine businessman and a terrific organizer and manager who would have been an acceptable President in other times, but who took bad advice - and kept taking it - until he nearly wrecked the country.
Herbert Hoover steadily escalated federal spending during the Depression. I'm not sure how you can blame him for not immediately treating the Great Depression as unique and not like the last several ones.
Increasing the total amount of spending is not the same thing as Keynesian economics. And the reason why one would think the Great Depression was worse then previous recessions like the Long Depression was because every economic statistic was worse.
I dont know how much Hoover could have done but I imagine that a more interventionist president could have averted a lot of the bank failures and prevented a lot of the secondary effects. A more interventionist president could have abandoned the gold standard to inject liquidity into the market. It's hard to say what he could have done because he tried so little. But look at what FDR accomplished in 100 days.
I dont know how much Hoover could have done but I imagine that a more interventionist president could have averted a lot of the bank failures and prevented a lot of the secondary effects. A more interventionist president could have abandoned the gold standard to inject liquidity into the market. It's hard to say what he could have done because he tried so little. But look at what FDR accomplished in 100 days.
Just when the country was beginning to recover, Hoover and the Republicans clamped down hard on the money supply (again) and threw the country back into Depression.
Hoover was a genius at many things, but persuading people - and being persuaded by unwelcome facts - were not two of them.
Hoover was a genius at many things, but persuading people - and being persuaded by unwelcome facts - were not two of them.
If you are referring to the 1937 Depression, Hoover held no political office at that time and so can't have been responsible for anything. I'm not aware of what else you could be referring to.
Nothing positive? FDR started a lot of organizations - the Alphabet Soup - but aside from some nice murals down the line, little good was accomplished, and much harm was done.
Hoover convinced business leaders not to lower their wages.
They responded strongly - and then fired millions of people.
Oh this rotten old trope again. It's just a weird concidence that the end of the bank failures coincided with the FDIC, that the unemployment rate started improving as soon as the 100 days implemented job programs and that as soon as these programs were ended the economy went straight back into recession. It's just a coincidence that taking the economy off the gold standard like FDR did had the same effect in every country that tried it. The Keynesian economists who predicted exactly what happened ahead of time just got lucky I suppose?
The country did not recover for almost 15 years.
There had been depressions before - they were spikes and then the country recovered. The entire 1930s was bad. It's not altogether incorrect to point out that the gov't reacted differently to the economic challenges in the 1930s and that this prolonged the problems.
The 1920s were a period of economic expansion. Yet, rather than keep those policies which had promoted growth, FDR went against them, to the point where he was naming the gold price over breakfast and prohibiting kosher butchers from slaughtering chickens "out of order".
Yeah, because the problems were so bad. The years of the new deal were the fastest sustained economic growth in US history as the recovery happened at a breakneck pace. Then they reversed course in '37 and the recovery stopped cold.
It is altogether incorrect. There is not a scrap of evidence in anything other than crackpot economics and the musings of people speaking outside their field of understanding. This is the equivalent of global warming or evolution denial. Calling the New Deal contractionary is like calling the ocean dry. Look at what even famous conservatives like Friedman and Bernanke have to say about the great depression.
Otherwise known as monetary policy, the foundation of the modern economic order. FDR had to resort to a cruder form because he was making shit up on the fly but the failures of the gold standard were a huge part of the depression and FDR did an enormous good when he started moving things in the right direction.
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There's no argument being made here. Do you happen to be an economist?
Socialism, capitalism, free markets and protectionism are all tools - useful tools - among many systems that governments keep in their tool kits. And like all tools, one is not right for every given problem. Some socialized solutions work quite well for certain problems; others, for different issues, not. Government control of some functions is good and for some it is inefficient and counter-productive. Capitalism can do great things; unchecked and unregulated it is a devouring monster. So please don't bandy the word socialism about as if we were supposed to quake and hide under the bed when it is pronounced - it is a tool, not a gris-gris.
The great lesson of the Hoover administration is that they were absolutely positive that their solution was correct and when it failed they doubled down and tried more of it despite the empirical evidence to the contrary - dogma trumped facts. The great lesson of the Franklin Roosevelt administration is that when something didn't work - and a lot didn't - they tried something different until they made some progress; facts overruled dogma. Hoover was undeniably a genius at administration and a disaster at public relations and sales. Roosevelt was a master of sales and PR, and a lot of what he supplied was the hope that someone would do something to help people who were broke, homeless, jobless and desperate. And if government is not supposed to intervene in that sort of great crisis, to improve the lot of people who are suffering through no fault of their own, then what in heaven and hell is it for?
The great test here is that Hoover failed of re-election and failed badly; the issue was decided even before the conventions. Roosevelt, despite serious and substantial challenges from other candidates, was re-elected over and over again. In a 'Delphi' experiment (invented by the Rand Corporation I think), instead of asking experts for their opinions - which are often wrong - you get better results from taking the opinions of many experts and averaging them. This is the essence of democracy - the averaged wisdom of many people, who may not be experts but who have first-hand knowledge of what is working and what is not. And that wisdom threw Hoover out and repeatedly elected Roosevelt, which should tell you how the American people rated the effectiveness of their respective efforts.
Dinglehoff, I am not an economist and I suspect no-one in this thread is unless it's keynes. That does not mean we have no knowledge of economics and no right to an opinion. But progress is made from looking at facts and drawing conclusions, not from taking a conclusion and discarding facts to fit the preconception. By objective standards - including the ultimate test of election - Roosevelt's solutions beat Hoover's all out.
The great lesson of the Hoover administration is that they were absolutely positive that their solution was correct and when it failed they doubled down and tried more of it despite the empirical evidence to the contrary - dogma trumped facts. The great lesson of the Franklin Roosevelt administration is that when something didn't work - and a lot didn't - they tried something different until they made some progress; facts overruled dogma. Hoover was undeniably a genius at administration and a disaster at public relations and sales. Roosevelt was a master of sales and PR, and a lot of what he supplied was the hope that someone would do something to help people who were broke, homeless, jobless and desperate. And if government is not supposed to intervene in that sort of great crisis, to improve the lot of people who are suffering through no fault of their own, then what in heaven and hell is it for?
The great test here is that Hoover failed of re-election and failed badly; the issue was decided even before the conventions. Roosevelt, despite serious and substantial challenges from other candidates, was re-elected over and over again. In a 'Delphi' experiment (invented by the Rand Corporation I think), instead of asking experts for their opinions - which are often wrong - you get better results from taking the opinions of many experts and averaging them. This is the essence of democracy - the averaged wisdom of many people, who may not be experts but who have first-hand knowledge of what is working and what is not. And that wisdom threw Hoover out and repeatedly elected Roosevelt, which should tell you how the American people rated the effectiveness of their respective efforts.
Dinglehoff, I am not an economist and I suspect no-one in this thread is unless it's keynes. That does not mean we have no knowledge of economics and no right to an opinion. But progress is made from looking at facts and drawing conclusions, not from taking a conclusion and discarding facts to fit the preconception. By objective standards - including the ultimate test of election - Roosevelt's solutions beat Hoover's all out.
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Herbert Hoover was attack by FDR because of how much deficit spending he was engaging in.
"In the 1932 presidential election, therefore, economic and political considerations induced Democratic candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt to promise that his administration would balance the budget."
http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/whic/Ref...om_ando&jsid=b2814c4dd90c43ea922c5af1102bb0eb
Why do you think it is called the Hoover Dam? You think the FBI engages in construction work?
You do realize the issue that got FDR elected the first time was Prohibition? Hoover was a dry, FDR a wet.
'raises hand'
Undergraduate degree
...
Well I suppose you would want a drink after seeing one in five workers go unemployed.
Well yes but it would be stupid to appeal to authority (unless someone really wants to know about the effects of algae on property values
) and this name predates my grad degree by years. I actually got it because I was planning to do an AAR for Vicky 2 under state capitalism the whole game. But it turned out that in Vicky 2 even when you are communist you are still laissez faire capitalist.
I agree completely. Argue whatever opinion you want. I asked because Keynes2.0 dismissed a contrary opinion out of hand; citing no scrap of evidence, himself as an arbiter of credibility, and name dropping some famous people with secret economist knowledge.
This was about whether Roosevelt's solutions prolonged the depression. FDR did some great things like getting better consumer protections into the banking industry with the FDIC. Other things he pushed weren't so good like tax increases and production controls. Elections aren't a test of economic validation, they are a popularity contest. There are many cases where politicians win elections and they have trashed the economy.
To the original subject, you could argue that almost all the presidents from the 1820's to the 1890's were, with very few exceptions, pretty lousy. The ones bookending Lincoln's years being the cherrys on that poop pile.
It's the period where the nation has moved past the founding fathers but not moved past slavery yet. Arguably, the real weakness of this time is the extremely opposed ideologies trying to coexist and the nation's leadership is stuck in a rut trying to play too many sides. You get people like Jackson trying to buck the awful system but being an awful human being, you get really powerful men like Polk and Lincoln, and then you get a lot of pawns of that period's established system who can't or won't enact real change.
I suspect centuries from now that people will look back at the period between WWII leaders and whatever follows our current mess and call this time in American history also a string of bad leadership with few exceptions.