Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Herbert Hoover
In the largest protest of the Depression, World War I veterans converged on Washington, DC seeking justice. They were met with tanks, bayonets, and tear gas.
Editor’s Note: We asked historian Paul Dickson to give us some perspective on the recent demonstrations in the nation’s capital.
American volunteers distributing food to starving Belgians witnessed the dramatic deportations, when an estimated 120,000 men were taken to factories in Germany.
We republish an essay President Hoover wrote for American Heritage in 1958 in which he recounted his experiences as an aide to Woodrow Wilson at the peace talks after World War I. This important first-person narrative candidly details the difficulties that Wilson faced in what Hoover called “the greatest drama of intellectual leadership in all history.”
Reprinted from the June 1958 issue of American Heritage.
When former President Hoover was secretary of commerce under Harding and Coolidge, he was called upon to cope with a new and perplexing activity.
For all his previous successes, President Herbert Hoover proved incapable of arresting the economic free fall of the Depression— or soothing the fears of a distressed nation.
On March 4, 1929, Herbert Hoover took the oath of office as the 31st president of the United States. America, its new leader told the rain-soaked crowd of 50,0000 around the Capitol and countless more listening on the radio, was “filled with millions of happy homes; blessed with comfort and opportunity.”
The pitfalls of protectionism
Americans won’t choose a president who chides them.
You've always heard that Harding was the worst president. Sex in the White House. Bribes on Capitol Hill. Was he really that bad?
An overheard remark sent the author off on a years-long quest to discover the truth about a man whose power to inspire both rage and reverence has only grown after his death.
And how it grew, and grew, and grew…
The federal government was still in the process of establishing itself in 1792 and did not have a good year financially. Total income was only $3,670,000, or 88 cents per capita. Outlays were $5,080,000. The budget deficit therefore amounted to fully 38 percent of revenues.
A long-time Republican-party insider and close student of its past discusses how the party has changed over the years, for better and for worse, and where it may be headed.
Jack Kemp was born in 1935 in Los Angeles; his father owned a small trucking company. He came of political age in a time and place that made it likely enough that he would become a lifelong Republican, and he did.
They’ve all had things to say about their fellow chief executives. Once in a great while, one was even flattering.
John Adams said that Thomas Jefferson’s mind was “eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed, and ignorant.” Ulysses S.
On the 20th anniversary of Watergate, a recently discovered diary reveals a similar conspiracy four decades earlier.
Lawrence O’Brien, the head of the Democratic National Committee at the time of the Watergate break-in, was not the first O’Brien burglarized on behalf of the GOP. Forty-two years earlier, James J.
Good news and bad news come hurrying on each other’s heels these days.
It depends on whose interpretation of both history and the current crisis you believe. For one of America’s most prominent supply-side economists, the answer is yes.
Jude Wanniski was among the early leaders in the revival of supply-side economic theory.
The crisis swept over France and Germany and Britain alike, and they all nearly foundered. Now more than ever, it is important to remember that it didn’t just happen here.
Back in 1955, John Kenneth Galbraith called the Great Depression of the 1930s “the most momentous economic occurrence in the history of the United States,” and 30-odd years later that judgment, recorded in Galbraith’s bestseller, The Great Crash
Starting with 30 “liberated” rifles, Augusto Sandino forced American troops out of Nicaragua in 1933.
Rear Admiral Julian L. Latimer stood on the bridge of his flagship, the USS Rochester, as it nosed into the harbor of Puerto Cabezas, on Nicaragua’s northeastern Mosquito Coast.
Only ten of our 40 presidents have written accounts of their time in the White House.
How the novelty item of 1920 became the world-straddling colossus of 1940
In 1921 Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who was charged with what meager regulation of the airwaves there was, called radio “an instrument of beauty and learning.” Waldemar Kaempffert, who, as editor of
The American Experience With Foreign Aid
Imagine a person of great wealth with a habit of giving away vast sums and lending more. In order to understand his character, we should examine how the money is dispensed and why. Who are the recipients? What does the donor expect of them in return?
New York to Los Angeles in an unheard-of 48 hours! And what a way to go—luxuriously appointed planes, meals served aloft, and a window seat for every passenger
It was midsummer of 1929, and all seemed right with the world. Herbert Hoover was in the White House, riding high on a tide of prosperity and popularity.
Few places are more unpleasant ban Washington in the summer, and the summer of 1930 was worse than most.
When up on the roof there arose such a clatter That Herbert rushed out to see what was the matter
On Christmas morning of 1929 Fire Marshal C. G. Achstetter of Washington, D.C., commenced the tedious paperwork that follows a $135,000 fire.
The American system of choosing a President has not worked out badly, far as it may be from the Founding Fathers’ vision of a natural aristocracy
By freight train, on foot, and in commandeered trucks, thousands of unemployed veterans descended on a nervous capital at the depth of the Depression—and were run out of town by Army bayonets
The great tragedy of the twenty-eighth President as witnessed by his loyal lieutenant, the thirty-first.
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