Josh Marshall writes:
It seems that every new political moment brings in its train a new menagerie of Republican pseudo-facts and finely drawn nonsense meant to confuse and obscure any actual discussion of the public policy issues of the day. So it’s time to start cataloguing them. A week or so back I heard Jonah Goldberg yakking on about how Herbert Hoover was actually a Progressive. (Which may constitute some modest advance from his earlier confusion of do-gooder grade school teachers with Nazi prison guards and SA paramilitaries.) And then today this little nugget has transmogrified through the GOP sound machine into Herbert Hoover as a closet Keynesian who apparently started the whole New Deal before Franklin Roosevelt was even elected.
I long ago found Marshall too tedious to read regularly and this strikes me as a good example why. First, he assumes the usual pose of suggesting that any argument he finds inconvenient or unpleasant must be part of a P.R. campaign of some kind (the GOP sound machine and all that). Now, let the record show, that Marshall’s site is basically an adjunct of the Democratic Party and he is nothing if not a partisan journalist for his side. (Perhaps that is why he assumes everyone acts like him?) I wouldn’t mind it except he has mastered the air of sounding like he’s better than those he criticizes for doing exactly what he has set out to do himself.
Let me also note, as a point of personal privilege, that Marshall is either lying about, or ignorant of, what my book actually says. But who cares, as he’s carrying water for his side and that is what I would expect him to say.
Anyway, it’s also worth noting that Marshall takes back the suggestion that there’s no validity to my point that that Hoover was, indeed, a Progressive. He writes:
Like most sophistries, there’s an element of truth in this one — but much of it is based on semantic evolution. Hoover was part of the 1912 Progressive party and he was in key respects a Republican Progressive in the early 20th century meaning of the term — which is to say he was a technocrat who believed in scientific management and things like that. It is also true that as the Depression deepened Hoover did take some very limited steps in the direction of government intervention in the economy, though ones that were dwarfed by Roosevelt’s subsequent spending programs and regulatory innovations.
Rather than rehash all the points made in Ilya Somin’s Volokh Conspiracy post Mark mentions below (or in my own book) on this point, let me just add a few others. First, FDR and Hoover weren’t always enemies (and, remember, enemy is not synonymous with opposite). FDR deeply admired Hoover and desperately wanted to serve as his running mate on the 1920 ticket, as Democrats. One reason Hoover hated Roosevelt is that Roosevelt was perfectly fine with letting the economy get worse rather than work with Hoover. In this regard, we should congratulate Barack Obama for not being like St. Roosevelt.
The notion that Hoover’s progressivism was a semantic issue and nothing more is absurd, given his record not only in the Progressive Party but as Wilson’s Food Czar. Marshall is right that Hoover was a technocrat, but he’s wrong to make it sound as if this is what distinguished Republican Progressives from Democratic ones. Many Progressive Republicans, starting with TR, were hardly mere technocrats. Nor was party affiliation necessarily the most telling distinction between different progressive politicians.
The idea that Hoover was a do-nothing president has been roundly rejected by historians for years. Don’t take my word for it, or Amity Shlaes, or Ilya Somin’s, take the word of the Dean of FDR historians, William Leuchtenburg. Or, if you must, Michael Lind, who recently dubbed Hoover a “public-spirited Progressive, in an otherwise absurd essay.
Indeed, Marshall is again, either ignorant or dishonest, when he pretends that the conservative push back on Hoover is superficial and of a recent vintage on the Right (or among historians generally). Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman and countless others have been making this argument for years. Maybe Marshall hasn’t heard it before because it hasn’t been particularly relevant outside specialists. Or maybe he doesn’t care to hear views he doesn’t already agree with. Either way, now that everyone is talking about the renewed relevance of the New Deal and is once again vilifying Hoover as a do-nothing president, conservatives and libertarians think it’s worth pointing out how liberals like Marshall are wrong. I’m sorry Marshall can’t grasp that someone might be saying these things in good faith.
One area where he is right, is when he says FDR was a much bigger statist than Hoover. Nobody I know disputes this, me included. I don’t mind the strawman Marshall creates for his convenience so much as I mind the idea that Marshall thinks this fact serves as an indictment of Hoover — and not FDR.
Correction: Last night I wrote “commerce secretary” when I meant Food Czar.