I believe that four more years of Hoover would have, indeed, been better. Hoover at least felt bound by the Constitution, so he probably would not have pushed for such boondoggles as the National Recovery Administration (NRA) regulations on business, which strangled the economy until the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional.
In any case, I doubt that Hoover could have done much worse than FDR. By 1940, seven years into his presidency, the unemployment rate was still in double digits, while the Dow Jones Industrial average was half of what it was just before the stock market crash of 1929.
Good post, Fiji. I concur. Hoover was a damn good man and the fact that he didn’t have all that wonderful “charisma” didn’t make him any less so. He just never had the chance to make anything work.
My parents came of age in the depression. For them, it was no different than the years before. My father wrote two autobiographical books. I don’t think he ever used the word “Depression” in either of them. But he sure did hate FDR and it’s easy to see why. He graduated from high school in 1937. They got their first automobiles during the depression.
If you haven’t read “Hard Times” by Studs Terkel, you should.
I disagree. When I was in High School back in the 60's, as a project my class spent a year collecting oral histories of the Depression, kind of like they did with the Slave Narratives. We talked to parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, city people and farmers, and in the overwhelming majority of the cases these people described the election of Roosevelt as if someone had opened a shade and let sun in. After 4 years of Hoover, with the depression growing worse week by week, month by month, they were beaten. They were desperate, and wanted someone, anyone to do something different. Almost without exception they were totally contemptuous of Hoover, and remember Roosevelt and his speeches the way people 30 years later would talk about Kennedy. We can speculate 80 years later what Hoover would have done and if he might have been successful, and maybe he would. But it's equally likely that the U.S. may have drifted into a socialist or facist state.