I recently fired off this email to the insufferable Chris Matthews.

Mr. Matthews,

In talking about how government should respond to economic turmoil in your recent broadcast, you asked Phillip Dennis, “What did Hoover do?” You then claimed that he did “nothing.” This is simply false.

Herbert Hoover was an interventionist president who paved the way for many of the programs later seen and loudly trumpeted under FDR. Federal spending increased 57 percent in Hoover’s four-year term, according to the OMB. In fact, FDR campaigned against Hoover’s big spending, much in the way that Obama did against Bush’s, only to commit to far more himself, again as Obama has done.

The idea that Hoover was a laissez-faire president is a popular myth in liberal circles, but it has no basis in reality. Recessions came and went fairly quickly prior to Hoover, back when laissez-faire actually was the accepted policy. It was only when government began interfering that a recession became a depression. It was Hoover’s meddling that created the Great Depression, and FDR’s that made it last so long. In addition to his disastrous tariffs, Hoover implemented price controls and drastically increased government spending. UCLA professor Lee E. Ohanian recently concluded that “By keeping industrial wages too high, Hoover sharply depressed employment beyond where it otherwise would have been… His policy was the single most important event in precipitating the Great Depression.”

Here’s how Herbert Hoover described his own policies while running for reelection:

“We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic.”

And here he is again in his memoirs:

“We developed cooperation between the federal, state, and municipal governments to increase public works. We persuaded employers to “divide” time among their employees so that as many as possible would have some incomes. We organized the industries to undertake renovation, repair, and, where possible, expand construction.”

Does that sound laissez-faire to you? Or does it more closely resemble the Keynesian claptrap advocated by Barack Obama and yourself? The facts are simply not on your side. I challenge you to educate yourself, or to have on someone knowledgeable about Herbert Hoover, such as professor Ohanian, instead of ambushing people with your factually deficient accounts of history.

Regards,

Brian Garst