October 22, 1928-- In the next-to-last address of
his successful campaign for the Presidency, Herbert Hoover laid down the marker for much of the rhetoric that
would be used by conservatives for the next 85 years—very much up to, and
including, the Obamacare debate. The dichotomy to which he pointed in his speech at New York’s Madison Square Garden, however—America’s “rugged
individualism” and Europe’s “state socialism”—was, and is, a false one.
Hoover was, in effect, baiting Democratic opponent
Alfred E. Smith on his home turf. Though Smith would break four years later with
Franklin Roosevelt over their clashing ambition for the White House, the two
shared a belief in a federal government that mitigated the effects of
untrammeled capitalism on society’s marginalized. They knew all too well about
this issue, as New York’s Triangle shirtwaist factory fire of 1911 had
served as an object lesson in the need for at least some regulation.
Smith, as much as FDR, was a joyous campaigner, and
had he been chosen for the Presidency we would probably recall more of his
words than we do Hoover’s. The Secretary of Commerce had never held elective
office, but now here he was, with an overwhelming victory only weeks away, telling
Americans what they had gained in eight years of Republican governance—and how
it was all at stake now:
“When the war closed, the most vital of all
issues both in our own country and throughout the world was whether Governments
should continue their wartime ownership and operation of many instrumentalities
of production and distribution. We were challenged with a peace-time choice
between the American system of rugged individualism and a European philosophy
of diametrically opposed doctrines—doctrines of paternalism and state
socialism. The acceptance of these ideas would have meant the destruction of
self-government through centralization of government. It would have meant the
undermining of the individual initiative and enterprise through which our
people have grown to unparalleled greatness.”
But Hoover could not begin to conceive of the damage
his party had done by taking the brakes off the economy. A few months before,
he predicted to delegates at the Republican National Convention an outcome
that, to countless Americans over the next decade, would sound unintentionally
hilarious: “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty
than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from
among us.”
Within a year, “the poorhouse” would vanish, all
right—to be replaced by entire Hoovervilles of sprawling, desperate
privation, all over America. Hoover’s “American system” of intense voluntary
economic cooperation on the part of big business could not have had less in
common with Henry Clay’s “American System” of furthering the growth and
cohesion of America through government action (a tariff, a national bank, and
such “internal improvements” as canals).
When the Great Crash hit in October 1929, Hoover was
blind to the serious flaws in the Republican-inspired prosperity he had hailed, including wage increases not matching industry productivity gains
and farmers already plunged into a depression several years before the
rest of the country followed suit. His dismay over worsening conditions was not
dissimilar to Alan Greenspan’s surprise, in 2008, that deregulation would
not encourage market corrections that would avoid a recession (“Those of us who
have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect
shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” the former Federal Reserve chair lamented).
The resulting Great Depression might have occurred
on Hoover’s watch, but it did happened more through a lack of imagination
than a lack of empathy. The Midwest orphan farmboy who had survived countless
medical mishaps in childhood to become a millionaire mining engineer—and a
humanitarian savior during Europe’s refugee crisis during WWI—could not
conceive that the problems facing America were no longer amenable to the
individual will. "The man who had fed Europe had become a symbol of
hunger, the brilliant administrator a symbol of disaster," wrote Richard
Hofstadter in The American Political
Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948)
I don’t know if Hoover coined the term “rugged
individualism,” but he did much to spread notions of self-improvement that had
been around since Benjamin Franklin and Ralph Waldo Emerson. This, despite the
overwhelming tone of pomposity and self-righteousness that permeated this and
other speeches by the Republican Presidential nominee.
Hoover aides Theodore Joslin, French Strother and
Gertrude Lane were the “most hapless martyrs” in the history of speechwriting, writes blogger Eugene Finerman.
Yet even they had their moments of glory, and one of them had a field day in
cleverly combining “rugged” with “individualism.” That adjective evoked not
just Theodore Roosevelt’s “Strenuous Life” and Abraham Lincoln’s Rail-Splitter,
but also frontiersmen who had opened up interior spaces in the U.S. such as
Hoover’s native Iowa. The phrase was potent enough that it even survived the
abuse rained on it four years later by F.D.R.
Perhaps even more potent as a scare tactic has been
the use of the term “state socialism.” The phrase’s silliness begins, but does
not end, with the fact that it is redundant (socialism is, by definition, state ownership or control of private resources).
It also has become a default fallback position against any recourse to
change, no matter how necessary--and has even been turned around against its own users.
Newt Gingrich’s 2012 campaign manifesto, for
instance, was called To Save America:
Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine. The former Speaker of the House’s
adoption of the epithet “Socialist,” however, did not preclude use of the term
by his Republican primary opponent, Michelle Bachmann, who referred to him as
a “frugal socialist” for his support for the Medicare Part D prescription drug
entitlement program.”
Over the years, the damage to the American economy
by Republicans when they hold power from the ‘20s and ‘30s has been overcome.
But the poison introduced to the
American body politic with the phrase “rugged individualism” has been far more difficult to eradicate.
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