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.
A facist state? Would that be a state preoccupied with saving face or putting its best face forward?
Hoover, who was called the Great Humanitarian or the Napoleon of Mercy, probably saved more lives than anyone else in history, and so it is ironic that his Democratic opponents succeeded in portraying him as not caring about the victims of the Depression.