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Those of us who track academic bias have long been plagued by a nagging question: when did it start? From the recently published memoirs of one-term president Herbert Hoover, we learn that it’s at least as old as Clint Eastwood. “One day at Stanford, after I left the White House, I asked Professor Roninson, Dean of the History Department, to send me a list of books of required reading by all students in a course on ‘Citizenship,’” Hoover wrote. “I found about one hundred books listed, of which some thirty were objective descriptives of the machinery of our civil government...

Ninety years ago today, on August 2, 1923, President Warren G. Harding died at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, California. It was sudden, shocking, and has been fodder for conspiracy theorists ever since. His wife, Florence—described derisively by some as “The Duchess”—didn’t allow an autopsy, so we’ll never know exactly what caused the demise of the 29th President of the United States. It might have been congestive heart failure, or food poisoning, or even something more sinister. Seen in retrospect, through the prism of the scandals associated with his White House tenure, Harding is usually ranked well toward the...

In the "Mining and Scientific Press", March 20th, 1920 a section titled "Two Famous Letters From Mr. Hoover", this a paragraph from the second letter: (page 423) First I am an independent progressive in the issues before us today. I think that at this time the issues before the country transcend partisanship. It is well known that I was a Progressive Republican before the war and, I think rightly, a non-partisan during my war service. The issues confronting us are new and the alignment upon them has not yet been made by the great parties. I still object as much...

On front page of website, no registration required.Shockingly, neither Carter nor the present occupant of the White House are choices...

In October 1914, over 5 million Belgians faced starvation. The German Army had invaded on August 4 and swept across the country in three weeks. Revisionist historians would later snicker about "atrocities" invented by the British, but the Kaiser's troops executed over 5,500 Belgians, women and children as well as men, though there was no civilian resistance to the invasion. Over 2 million refugees fled to Holland, France, and Britain. The Germans requisitioned all grain, flour, livestock, fruit, and vegetables. They seized the railroads, canals, all motor vehicles, and telegraph and telephone lines, and removed machinery from factories. The economy...

CNBC just broke in and told the audience that the President has requested airtime and will speak to the nation at 1300hrs EST (12 noon central, 10 AM PST) on the US national debt downgrade.Developing...

Calvin Coolidge oversaw one of the greatest expansions in the history of the US economy. When Coolidge took office, he believed tax rates were too high. With top rates at over 70% following World War I and facing a protracted recession, Coolidge believed it was time to take serious actions. The combined top marginal normal and surtax rate fell from 73 percent to 58 percent in 1922, and then to 50 percent in 1923 (for incomes over $200,000). In 1924, the top tax rate fell to 46 percent (for incomes over $500,000). The top rate was just 25 percent (for...

Barack Obama has been compared to almost every American President of the last hundred years--favorably to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan; and unfavorably to Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. I want to put another name in the hat: Herbert Hoover. It might seem ludicrous, or unfair, to compare Obama to one of the most vilified presidents of the last century, but that’s because Hoover’s reputation is largely, or at least somewhat, undeserved--the product of Democratic attacks and Hoover’s own strident responses to these attacks. To his contemporaries, Hoover had been the American most suited to be...

How Barack Obama and Ben Bernanke are destroying the dollar — and perhaps ushering in the amero First under the Bush Administration and even more so under President Obama, the federal government has been seizing power and spending money as it hasn’t done since World War II. But as bold as the Executive Branch has been during this financial crisis, the innovations of Fed chairman Ben Bernanke have been literally unprecedented. Indeed, it is entirely plausible that before Obama leaves office, Americans will be using a new currency. Bush and Obama have engaged in record peacetime deficit spending; so too...

... The Great Depression was caused by misguided government policies adopted to avoid the "unsatisfactory conditions" signaled by the crash. The run-of-the-mill recession that ought to have followed the crash was magnified by the policies of the federal government during the administration of Herbert Hoover. In a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research published last August, Lee E. Ohanian examines a continuing mistake during the Hoover administration that helped transform difficulty into calamity. An economics professor at UCLA, Ohanian has written numerous papers on the Depression. In one earlier paper, he pinned the persistence of high unemployment on...

A great and dangerous myth exists that Herbert Hoover was a do nothing president and that his laissez faire attitude toward the economy resulted in the prolonging of the Great Depression. The myth continues that it was the activist policies of Franklin Roosevelt that finally turned the economy around. This myth is so prevalent that the current President, in his inaugural address, touched on the myth as a source of inspiration during the current downturn. "[We] saw a nation [during the FDR era] conquer fear itself, and a New Deal, new jobs, a new sense of common purpose. Yes we...

Who killed the U.S. auto industry? To hear the media tell it, arrogant corporate chiefs failed to foresee the demand for small, fuel-efficient cars and made gas-guzzling road-hog SUVs no one wanted, while the clever, far-sighted Japanese, Germans and Koreans prepared and built for the future. I dissent. What killed Detroit was Washington, the government of the United States, politicians, journalists and muckrakers who have long harbored a deep animus against the manufacturing class that ran the smokestack industries that won World War II. As far back as the 1950s, an intellectual elite that produces mostly methane had its knives...

"That man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad." So said President Calvin Coolidge of Herbert Hoover, his Republican successor. Coolidge derided Hoover as "Wonderboy," according to biographer Robert Sobel, "because he always seemed to want to change things." Silent Cal, who presided over a legendary golden age of economic growth that featured unemployment levels dropped to the two's and one percent range, had a dim view of what he saw as Hoover's propensity for intervention in all manner of things, including the economy. Coolidge died two months before the 1933 inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt,...

As everyone knows the Wall Street crash of 1929 ushered in a period of profound and unprecedented hardship for the American people. Then president of the United States, Herbert Hoover fought valiantly to keep the government from wading into the financial crisis tried in vain to let the markets self-correct. For his efforts, Hoover was castigated as a do-nothing president, a failed leader, a man who allowed his nation to wither for the sake of ideological purity and a lack of compassion. Unemployment soared, commerce ground to a halt, and thousands of Americans found themselves waiting in soup lines and...

By Herb Denenberg, The Bulletin 09/23/2008 We've all met Barack "Neville Chamberlain" Obama and Barack "Rev. God Damn America" Obama, so now let me introduce you to a third face: Barack "Herbert Hoover" Obama. Just as Sen. Obama learned nothing from Chamberlain and his talks with Hitler, and so proposes to talk without preconditions to Amadinejad, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and the rest of the axis of evil, by like token, he's learned nothing from the lessons of Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression. Hoover was long the great nemesis of the Democratic Party, but that was perhaps before Sen....

It seems like a no-brainer: Raising taxes is bad. It's a shame that Barron's is one of the few outlets to pick up on it. An economic plan floated out by Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama, Ill., would raise taxes on incomes above $250,000 - with the highest rate at 39.6 percent - and redistribute the wealth to the poor and middle-class. But that would be a big mistake, according to an article by Jim McTague in the August 25 issue of Barron's. "It's almost as if Obama wants to repeat the mistakes of Herbert Hoover," McTague wrote. "During...

What I Found in Mr. Hoover's Papers By Robert Service Herbert Hoover understood that history is to be discovered not just in official documents but in the little details of the past. By Robert Service. Herbert Hoover had several careers of importance long before he became U.S. president. His exceptional ability as mining engineer, investor, and food-relief administrator is well attested to and widely known. He had a vision of a peaceful world where people could live in freedom from oppression and material want, and he understood better than any contemporary that, if that better world were going to be...

With Eliot Spitzer gone, Chuck Schumer moves to the head of the list of self-righteously bloviating New York pols. So it was particularly satisfying to see Sen. Jon Kyl [R-AZ] put Schumer is his place on today's This Week. A guest with Kyl for purposes of discussing the economy, Schumer clearly came in with a game plan: to analogize President Bush to the man who presided over the beginning of the Great Depression: Herbert Hoover. After he tried it twice, Kyl had had enough and unleashed a riposte that was as reasoned as it was devastating.

It's questionable whether Herbert Hoover ever really promised to put "a chicken in every pot." But even if Hoover did, he was a mere piker compared to Hillary Clinton. She's not just going to pick up the check. No, vote for Clinton and she'll personally provide for all your needs. Check out her remarks in a campaign spot today, as aired on this afternoon's Hardball. HILLARY CLINTON: Over the years, you've heard plenty of promises, from plenty of people in plenty of speeches. And some of those speeches were probably pretty good. But speeches don't put food on the table....

Herbert Hoover and Media by: Jeremy Hempel, February 04, 2008 President Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) had some encouraging words for discouraged citizens plagued by today’s one-sided approach to media. A Republican who rose from son of a blacksmith to become the president of the Unites States, his administration faced the Great Depression. The former president warned of the dangers that a mass communication system controlled by one way of thinking would sway the nation into “untruth”. The 31st president wrote to the book The Challenge to Liberty in 1934 saying: “Bureaucracy has already developed a vast ramifying propaganda subtly designed to...