Herbert Hoover, Rugged Individualism

“Rugged individualism” gets thrown around like a simple definition of Herbert Hoover, but the real story is far stranger and far more useful. We start with the parts of Hoover’s life that don’t fit the usual caricature: an Iowa orphan who makes it into Stanford, becomes a brilliant mining engineer, builds a global career, and earns a reputation for competence by coordinating World War I food relief that helps prevent mass starvation.

Then we dig into the 1928 rugged individualism speech itself and the political problem Hoover is trying to solve. Running against Al Smith and reading a country that still admires Calvin Coolidge, Hoover wants to sound like the safe heir to conservative instincts while still defending the Progressive Era belief that government can promote the public good. That’s why the speech can feel like it’s doing two things at once: praising private ownership and markets, warning against “paternalism” and “state socialism,” and also explicitly rejecting laissez faire while endorsing aggressive regulation and government cooperation with business.

Finally, we connect those ideas to the Great Depression arguments that still divide historians: was Hoover too constrained by constitutional scruples and opposition to direct transfer payments, or did he act more than people remember through spending, coordination, and policies some call proto-Keynesian? If you care about U.S. political history, presidential leadership, and how campaign rhetoric becomes historical memory, this conversation helps you read primary sources with sharper eyes. Subscribe for more, share this with a fellow history nerd, and leave a review with your take: does Hoover deserve his reputation?

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Transcript

Why Hoover Gets A Bad Rap

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Welcome back to Civics in the Year. I am really excited to talk about this president because Herbert Hoover is my birthday buddy. We share a birthday. We were both born in the great state of Iowa. And that is just really where our similarities end. Because from what I know of Herbert Hoover and what I learned as a student, I think of things like Hooverville's and just the Great Depression and this not so great presidency. So Dr. Sean Beyenberg is with us. And Dr. Beyenberg, today we're talking specifically about Herbert Hoover and his rugged individualism speech that he gave in 1928. So let's talk about again, my birthday buddy, Herbert Hoover.

SPEAKER_01 1:34

So a little bit of backstory on him. So he is, he has a sad life, actually, as in youth. I want to say my can't remember exactly when he's like orphaned effectively, but he ends up as effectively a scholarship kid in the first class of folks at Stanford.

SPEAKER_00 1:51

He was nine when he was orphaned. Again, random things I know about my birthday buddy.

Engineering Fame And Wartime Food Relief

Progressive Reputation And Party Choice

Coolidge’s Grudges And 1928 Politics

What Rugged Individualism Actually Says

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Right. And my my my memory is he's a sort of middling student as well, he's at Stanford, but he's trained as an engineer and actually becomes a brilliant engineer. And he's traveling around the world for a few years and he becomes just fabulously rich, like basically building mines and extracting gold for a while. So he's in Australia for a while. He's he's very, very clever as a sort of mining engineer. And he becomes well known in American in America as like somebody who's competent getting things done, which is why he is actually appointed to be the coordinator of the food distribution after World War I. And there, you can find some fun quotes about this, but or maybe fun's the wrong word. But by all accounts, Cool Hoover is absolutely magnificent at this in making sure there is not mass starvation. Like there are people who've credited his talents with making sure like millions of people do not die. Um, so he he's pretty thought of as pretty competent in that sense. And so he becomes kind of famous. And there is an effort to recruit him into politics. Now, sort of jumping ahead, Coolidge, or I keep saying Coolidge, Hoover is you know often thought of as this very, very conservative person. And this fact that the most famous line from the speech is rugged individualism gives rise to that. But Hoover is actually thought of as basically kind of progressive era talent of somebody who thinks that you can use this the state or the government to basically like well-administered advance the public good. Uh, in fact, FDR is initially quite close to Hoover and begs Hoover to run for president as a Democrat in 1920, back when Hoover, yeah. So he wants, he thinks Hoover's very close to him ideologically. But Hoover, depending on what you whether Hoover decides he's a Republican and he runs for maybe this is because he thinks that the Republicans are just doing better because Wilson is so unpopular. Maybe he's closer to them ideologically. Again, it's unkind of clear. But he ends up, he loses in the primary to Harding, and he ends up in the cabinet as commerce secretary. Harding obviously dies very quickly, and so now he's basically Coolidge's Secretary of Commerce. Coolidge does not like him very much. There are Coolidge doesn't say much, but we have quite a few pretty pithy critiques of Hoover from him. Coolidge apparently sarcastically always calls him the boy wonder for Hoover's like gigantic ego and thinking he can step in and like solve problems for people. There are jokes that he is the secretary of commerce and the self-appointed under-secretary of everything else, since he is like running around solving problem thinking he can solve problems for other people. And then there's what's the other Coolidge line? Like he was in my cabinet for six years and he gave me lots of unsolicited advice, all of it bad, or something along those lines. So Coolidge doesn't like him very much. And in fact, pointedly does not endorse him in the 1928 presidential primary, uh, even though everybody's sort of positioning Hoover as the heir apparent. He doesn't like explicitly critique him and he doesn't endorse like the Democrat against him, but he's clearly not like, you know, this is my successor, my third term. Hooray, hooray. So so let's let's actually, that's a good point to chance to talk to about the speech itself, the rugged, the so-called rugged individualism speech. So this is a speech he's giving near the very end of his presidential campaign in 1928. He is running against Al Smith, who is a name that keeps coming up, a largely forgotten figure today, other than the like Al Smith dinner that the Democratic presidential nominees have to go to and like nod to like New York Catholics. That's about the only time I think Al Smith comes up anymore. But Smith is the leader of the New York Democratic Party, arguably the leader of the New York Democrats. But uh the 28 election is largely about prohibition, which is true of 32 as well. Smith is a Smith is somebody who, in the spirit of Calvin Coolidge's uh ideas we talked about a couple podcasts ago, somebody who wants to have an active state government. So he's regulating a lot of safety things, he he's pushing for you know wages, hours, rules on fire codes, kind of things like that. So he he's very aggressive about that kind of thing. But Hoover also is thought of as this as well. And so the striking thing about the rugged individualism speech, who Hoover is explicitly trying to position himself as closer to Coolidge than he was generally thought at the time. Right. So Hoover was regarded as a more progressive Republican, and as president, at least Coolidge is regarded as a more conservative Republican. Again, as we talked about, that's not true when he's in state government because it was constitutional reasons. So if you look through the speech, you see kind of pieces of Hoover trying to kind of have it both ways, where he says, you know, the American system is built on rugged individualism of private ownership without price fixing, versus he says, what they have in Europe and that America had to flirt with during World War I, government operation of infrastructure, particularly railroads, which Hoover calls as paternalism and state socialism. Hoover does have some uh places in that speech and in his political thought more broadly, where he is squeamish about direct federal power in a lot of places on constitutional grounds, but it's more that the constitution is constraining what he wants to happen. And like Coolidge, he's very uneasy about what we would call a direct transfer payment to an individual. So the government sending Liz Evans or Sean Beinberg a check for something, right? So he's very much against that, like money from the treasury with your name on it. But he is not against federal spending more broadly. He is not hardcore. In fact, the rugged individualism speech explicitly disavows laissez faire and says we should have aggressive regulation. This has been what helped create American prosperity. And so he talks about the keen vision and helpful cooperation of the government uh in prosperity, and he talks about his work in the commerce department trying to coordinate plan and sort of direct parts of the business community, and not by direct regulation, because he thinks that there's places that the federal government, he's squeamish about them having uh, you know, an enumerated power for that. But he very much has the idea that he, as a sort of thoughtful engineer, can coordinate and plot things like uh things like that. So the rugged individualism speech is in some sense, I think, kind of an outlier of Hoover's thought at the time. If you look, and this we'll talk about this more when we do FDR. If you look at the 1932 election, Hoover is regarded as the progressive and FDR is regarded as the conservative. In fact, there's some even there's one newspaper that says Hoover's the radical because Hoover is more comfortable, seemingly. Again, Roosevelt's kind of all over the map, as we'll talk about, but Hoover is regarded as basically somebody who's like, ah, he's an engineer. He thinks he's smart enough to sort of coordinate and deal with this. You know, he's not having the government cut taxes and cut spending and cut activity during the depression. He, in fact, is trying to have the government act, which FDR will attack him for, interestingly enough. So Hoover then ends up becoming more conservative as the New Deal happens. So, in some sense, rugged individualism is an outlier that will sort of foreshadow more of what Hoover will actually believe in the 30s when he's critical of FDR. But it's sort of weird to like retroactively view it as like Hoover is positioning himself as the conservative against Al Smith in 28 or then against FDR in 32. It's yeah, it's it's an it's odd that that is the most famous speech of Hoover's because it's not really that representative of his political thought in a lot of ways. It's much closer to a campaign document of him saying, Did you like Calvin Coolidge? I read polls. I know you all did. So that's me too.

SPEAKER_00 10:20

Which is so interesting because again, this is a campaign speech. This is not a speech while he is president. And I mean, again, while he's president, all I know of him is that he liked to spend lavishly in the White House while people were waiting in breadlines. And I also know about him that he did not like to see his White House staff. He just very buttoned up. He had quirks, I guess you could call them.

SPEAKER_01 10:46

Yeah, he's not like Coolidge, where the staff loves Coolidge. They think he's kind of quirky and weird, but they love him. Like Hoover is they don't think heard that Hoover is quirky. So this is kind of this is kind of Coolidge's point about Boy Wonder where Hoover thinks Hoover is smart and he thinks he's smart and he tells you he's smart.

Depression Lessons And Competing Verdicts

SPEAKER_00 11:06

So they really end up well for him with you know the greatest economic crisis in American history. What can this speech then tell us about like you're talking about you know Hoover as a businessman? Is there anything in this speech that can tell us why he was so unsuccessful as president during this crisis?

How To Read Campaign Speeches

SPEAKER_01 11:35

I mean that's a loaded, so that is a very loaded question and depends on which historians you ask, right? And so that's based on basically on what sort of what policies either caused and or would have stopped the depression or alleviated it. Because you know, the the conventional sort of more progressive historian take would be Hoover is basically too squeamish about constitutionalism, and he's too squeamish about the idea of direct transfer payment. So therefore, he doesn't have the government do enough. And so, therefore, right? So, this is the sort of FDR version of history. The the other version that one sees is arguments to say, like, actually, Hoover does act and he has them do things like the Holly Smooks tariff, which is a government effort to sort of modify the economy in ways to sort of counter-cyclically spend. Hoover is a proto-Keynesian in that sense. Like he actually wants to have counter-cyclical spending or counter-cyclical policies in that sense. So I guess the regular so you I can't answer that question without a sort of this interpretation of the depression and the New Deal is correct, or that one is. But it it it it it it does encapsulate that Hoover is cautious about direct federal, about sort of direct federal spending, particularly, direct federal spending to individuals, particularly. But rugged individualism, despite, and that's not the title of the speech. That's what it gets called later. But if you read through it, it's sort of parallel, you know, it's alternating like business is awesome, you know, the the market system is awesome. Somebody like me could come from nothing and become somebody, and we don't want to destroy that. On the other hand, the old model of loisly fair is bad, and so we want to have government regulation. So it's a kind of choose your own adventure of if you want to make cool Hoover sound like basically a libertarian that wanted people starving in the streets, then you can do that. If you want to say, ah, this is Hoover saying the government can fix problems, you can do that too. So again, it's a campaign speech, and so that's why it's it's not it needs to be sort of read as such. Rather, it it's a campaign speech and not like the Coolidge speeches we've been talking about. Yeah. I would say like a work of a work of statecraft. It's a work of a campaign.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

And I think that that is an interesting thing when we look at primary sources to consider why it was written and what audience it was written for. Because again, like you just illustrated, this is not a presidential speech. This is him trying to get the office of the president. So it just kind of reads differently.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

So we'll see a lot of which we'll see a lot of when we do uh some of the Roosevelt speeches where you line them up and they are completely incompatible. Yeah. So this is not unique in that sense.

SPEAKER_00 14:31

Well, I have to say, I still am a little disappointed in Herbert as president. Overall, I don't know that again, besides sharing a birthday in home states, there's anything else for us in common. However, I will say that presidential library is on my list. So, Dr. Beinberg, thank you for kind of going over Herbert Hoover with us.