St. Lawrence University’s Steve Horwitz points me in the direction of new evidence (it is totally new to me) that historians “with no particular love for free markets, like FDR scholar David Kennedy but also Hoover biographers like Joan Hoff Wilson, understand that president Hoover was an interventionist and FDR didn’t save us from the Great Depression.” And while the idea that Hoover was a statist isn’t new in free-market circles, it needs to be repeated ad nauseum so people know it, even on the Left.

In his paper, “Great Apprehensions, Prolonged Depressions: Gaugi Eggertsson on the 1930s,” Horwitz writes:

Historian David Kennedy (1999, 48) describes Hoover’s activism this way: “No previous administration had moved so purposefully and so creatively in the face of an economic downturn. Hoover had definitively made the point that government should not stand by idly when confronted with economic difficulty” (see also Vedder and Gallaway 1993, 67-68).
In the 1920s, Hoover used his position as Secretary of Commerce to call for a number of government interventions into the recession, all of which were rejected by Harding and the rest of his Administration. As Commerce Secretary, Hoover also stepped into a number of labor relations issues, trying here also to use the power of government to resolve various disputes. Thus, the ideal of small government was neither “Hoover’s” nor “almost universally accepted.” Powerful government actors along with many leaders of private industry boosted for American forays in fascism, which was often openly admired.

Read the entire piece here, it’s really interesting. You can also listen to a great conversation on the topic here.