Floundering in a Crisis: Trump and Hoover

This one is a blast from the past! In preparation for our final episode of the season, the A Nazi on Wall Street Podcast crew wanted to share with you an early recording made at near the beginning of 2021. In this episode, Dr. Jay Weixelbaum and EJ Russo compare the Trump administration of 2020 with the Herbert Hoover administration. In both cases there was a spiraling crisis, which was met by mostly ineffective, haphazard action. With some hindsight, we can see just how important steady leadership is when things get chaotic in the face of a serious problem, such as a depression or a pandemic. You'll want to tune in for this one, if only to see how Jay and EJ manage to incorporate fluffernutter sandwiches into the discussion. 
See you there! 

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00

So they've cleaned it all out. And, uh, I've got two gnarly looking stitched up holes and my knee, and, uh, it's all in, but it's getting, it's improving pretty rapidly. I've been on good drugs.

Speaker 2 0:24

[inaudible]

Speaker 3 0:24

Welcome to a Nazi on wall street podcast because every time history repeats, the price goes up.

Speaker 1 0:30

I am Dr. Jason Weichselbaum. I'm a filmmaker and historian and expert in us companies doing business with Nazi Germany

Speaker 3 0:39

And I'm EGA Russo. I'm just a regular guy who got freaked out by the last administration and is just trying to figure out what the heck is really happening. Jay and I created this podcast in part to help promote his project, a Nazi on wall street, but to also discuss troubling events and give them historical context. It is a beautiful, beautiful day in central Pennsylvania today. And I see that it all sarcasm because it is just cold and wet and rainy. And it's just one of those days that you just want to curl up on the couch with socks and sweat pants and just eat any type of guilty pleasure, comfort food. Right now, I am jonesing on any weird Asian confectionary. I can find a Costco. I am, I am super into mochi right now. Oh yeah. But I remember when, when you and I were in college living together, there were some weird things that we would kind of make up in that kitchen. I remember, I think at one point we made fluffernutters. Do you remember fluffernutters Jay stores? So anyone doesn't understand what a fluffer Nutter is? It is two slices of, I mean, it's gotta be wonder bread. I mean, you got to go cheap and as not healthy as possible, all

Speaker 1 1:51

The empty calories at once.

Speaker 3 1:53

So you have two slices of wonder bread and peanut butter, and it looks like you're moving towards the making of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but instead of using jelly, you use fluff it's marshmallow fluff. It is literally a marshmallow spread that comes out of a jar just in case you don't have this, where you're from. It is the greatest slash most horrific slash greatest thing. Again, thing in the world. I mean, we just slathered that on

Speaker 1 2:22

Thinking about confections that I wanted to go back to. Moki just for a minute, there's this amazing ice cream company, just a Baltimore based where I live and they make an ice cream with Moki in it. It's called matcha Moki ice cream. And it's super cool. Cause a to Harker brothers is the name of the company. They specifically work with formerly incarcerated people of color to make this ice cream. So you're like helping a good cause. And it's like this gourmet ridiculous, super good. It's like green tea, ice cream with Mokey bits chunks in it. And, uh, Sarah and I always fight over that one.

Speaker 3 2:54

Awesome. I love companies that do that. I always, that's why I usually try to buy Dave's killer bread. So Dave's killer bread is, I mean, it's an amazing bread. You can get at any, any supermarket, but, uh, it's been around for a little while, Dave, uh, hires, I believe ex-convicts or people who have just been released from prison who were having a lot of trouble finding work simply because they have a prison record. And so I think that that's super cool. Like there's a cause behind the people that he staffs,

Speaker 1 3:23

It's got a bunch of stuff like that. Good stuff, good stuff, justice and good things.

Speaker 3 3:28

So today I wanted to bring up the idea of Trump being a complete empty suit during the last year of his presidency. What I'm specifically referring to is his inability to show any type of leadership during a major crisis. And he had two on his plate, the first being the COVID 19 pandemic and the second being the George Floyd black lives matter protests that were going on all around the country, the basic resurgence of civil rights that were going around. And it really was a Testament to his ego because right off the bat, once we discovered that COVID 19 was going to be coming to the states or it was already found in the United States, his whole response was it's not going to be a big deal. It'll go away on its own. It's going to kill a couple of people. And then it's going to go away. By the way. Did you see what Joe Biden did with the Ebola and the swine flu? I mean, he bought that whole thing. This is, this is nothing. And then when it started to become more of an issue, he started claiming that the Democrats blaming me for not preparing us is just a Democrat hope. He didn't say that the COVID 19 disease or the virus was a hoax. He never said that. That's what people say that he said, especially around the Twittersphere. They said, oh, you know, Trump said that the virus was a hoax. He never said that the virus was a hoax.

Speaker 1 4:55

It's weird because it's like, you know, all things Trump, it takes on a life of its own. Right? So even though he didn't say it, then like a bunch of his followers would go and repeat this in that neck, you know, it goes viral. And then that becomes the party line, which, because it's post-truth, it could be anything crazy, including that the virus isn't real, don't wear masks, yell at people who are wearing masks. And then of course things get much worse, which is what happened.

Speaker 3 5:21

That's one thing that I will never miss about the Trump presidency is the lack of cohesiveness in a agenda, because he'll say something or most likely he would tweet something. And you know, the rest of the talking heads on Fox news and in the Senate and in Congress, they took that as a talking point to move forward with. And then as they're talking about this and they're trying to push that message along how ever crazy or whatever it was, he would tweet something else. Or he would be questioned at the white house and completely changed the message. And sometimes on air in real time, a tweet would come out while a pundant or someone was on CNN or on Fox news. And their, their reaction on camera was just frustratingly amazing because they had to figure out at that minute, how they can change their message to suit what Trump was now tweeting and not look like an idiot at the same time,

Speaker 1 6:24

You have a stronger stomach than I do. I don't think I get actually watched any of that. What I did unfortunately watch because it was carried widely, was the press conferences on display, the total incoherence and literal insanity on display? I think, uh, probably one of the most memorable moments is when Trump told people to inject bleach or take chemicals that are commonly used to clean aquariums. And to the point that, uh, you know, like I think the state of Oklahoma bought a bunch of this stuff using taxpayer money, and then couldn't use it like the sheer insanity of like Trump, just making stuff up. And then it actually translating to real policy. One thing I did want to point out though, the history of presidents flailing around in a crisis was that there's good stuff and there's bad stuff. Trump is so horrendous personally. And the damage that he did as being such a poor leader in a crisis that it's, it overshadows stuff. You know, I didn't really want to give credit where credit's due. Um, Congress did pass a big relief package in the spring last year. And I think that helped kind of stop the bleeding a little bit. Of course, they needed to keep doing that. And then they dragged their feet in, in December, which was not good. Um, and then now we've got another one coming out just in time. Then also the operation warp speed using the power of the federal government to support vaccine research. It's a miracle that we have three now viable vaccines in less than a year. I, there was a lot of fear and despair in my circles that, you know, we were going to be in this pandemic for years and yes, there's going to be a lot to dig out for a while, but the fact that we got it done, so, and that was the Trump administration. So we have to give some credit it's obviously popular and even satisfying to criticize the Trump administration for real failures, but helping to develop the vaccines that the us federal government wasn't an important part of that. And it could have actually been worse than it was not all presidents can really deal with major crises, even competent ones.

Speaker 3 8:18

Yeah. So th that makes me curious as to what has happened in the past, because I refuse to believe that Trump has just been the first person to be completely inept at being the president. I mean, you can say what you want about the previous 40 years. You know, there were some people that are critical of Carter and Reagan and Clinton and Bush and Bush and Obama. I feel that Trump really just set the bar so low. So I'm actually curious if, if it's okay with you, because I know that we've discussed this before, I'm curious as to find out what Herbert Hoover was doing in the last years of his presidency during the crisis and the great depression that occurred under his watch and what he was doing, because obviously he was kicked out and FDR was put in and FDR did the new deal. And so what I'd like to know is what were the similarities and the differences between Herbert Hoover's presidency leading up to, and including the great depression and Trump's presidency during his ineptitude handling the COVID 19 pandemic and a black lives matter protest.

Speaker 1 9:27

There are some, uh, some parallels there. Herbert Hoover really is like one of the symbols that archetypes of like a running America, like a business, the businessman Republican candidate, he's kind of one of the original businessman, Republican politicians, just a little background on him. He was, um, an engineer. I had a geology and chemistry background and got into mining.

Speaker 3 9:49

That's right. You said that he was super smart and had a very scientific mind, correct?

Speaker 1 9:55

Yeah. Yeah. And I think I told you in another conversation that, you know, I spent a few years working as a research assistant on a big project for national academy of sciences. Uh, Herbert Hoover. I was surprised cause I didn't know that much about Hoover. My area's kind of FDR on words, uh, that he was very involved in the, in the scientific community and that us geological survey in particular, at which makes sense, you know, if he he's becoming a big kind of mining magnate, of course, he's going to have connections to those individual societies, as you know, new techniques, new technology came about in the twenties, which was a big time for all kinds of technological innovation mining, including. So he became a pretty wealthy, uh, influential person. And, uh, that led him to become secretary of commerce in the twenties. Just a reminder to anybody listening. You know, the 1920s was a period of time where there were three Republican administrations in a row. It was a very kind of a period in us politics, at least kind of dominated by the Republican party. You had Warren Harding, then Calvin Coolidge and then, um, Hoover all three in a row. So they really had the opportunity in the twenties to really, uh, implement and realize Republican economic policy. And Hoover of course, was, was a major part of that as secretary of commerce through successive administrations, not just the Harding he stayed in, um, on for the Coolidge administration, the same role

Speaker 3 11:18

Congress doing it, that it was it's owned by the Republicans as well, or was there a democratic Congress

Speaker 1 11:26

I'd have to go back and look the democratic party really like it took a long time for them to kind of come out of the wilderness of the, uh, the reconstruction period. The civil war was such a massive political event, of course, after 1877, when, um, there was this, uh, deal to pull federal troops out of the south, the democratic party kind of rose again, mainly with their power in the south previous Confederate people. They became kind of this, this base of, of leadership. And then of course, things really started to shift when Woodrow Wilson became president and there was, there was more power. If I remember correctly in Congress, the Republicans really dominated because just from the policies and the judges, they confirm the Supreme court says, this is a very conservative period in 1924, there was this brutal kind of immigration law passed. That was very nativist setting up quotas. It was a conservative time. I think it's safe to say that this is a long way of saying, I think Republicans were fairly dominant in all levels of government, but yeah, again, Hoover kind of loom large as kind of this business, this businessman archetype. So he had some good press, some good things that he did. Yeah. One of the things that really boosted him to political prominence was that after world war one, because he was a big businessman and he had a lot of resources as disposal ships and so forth and new people and connections, he helped sponsor relief effort in Europe after world war one. So shipments of food, not just that he was shipping books over, he was trying to support the scientific community in Europe. I wrote a little bit about that for the national academy of sciences, sending out over journals, like kind of trying to rebuild. I mean, world war one was so devastating in Europe. So that is a point in, in Hoover's favor of things that he, that he did.

Speaker 3 13:12

Yeah. Uh, the U S food administration and, and the post-war relief for were huge. I didn't know about that.

Speaker 1 13:18

Um, and so, yeah, so then he, um, he was, uh, secretary of commerce through the twenties and, and, you know, again, we, you know, we have this image of the roaring twenties as some of it was, uh, it was quite good economically. It's just that it was built on an unsure, uh, landscape

Speaker 3 13:34

As a secretary of commerce do to those who are listening, who have no idea when he was the secretary of commerce between 1921 and 1928, what was he actually doing? Okay.

Speaker 1 13:46

An office generally speaking, they, uh, the realm of the secretary of commerce is to promote business growth and advocate for businesses. And that includes both promotion and regulation. You know, businesses want, don't want a lot of regulation. This is kind of a notorious period of, for lack of regulation. There's this thing called the Lochner era and a us legal history, which based on Lochner versus New York, a important Supreme court case that basically without getting into the details said it limited the government's ability to regulate business quite a bit is very laissez Faire, very kind of open free lib libertarians, uh, should, should study the Lochner area. I haven't met any who have, but they should because it's actually, uh, what they want the irony is that, uh, even the most conservative justices today call it one of the worst decisions in us, legal history leading to lots of probably like John Roberts, chief justice, and even Robert Bork famously, uh, was, uh, was rejected. And the Supreme court confirmation for being very, right-wing all believe this, this kind of era was not good for us business, but that was, that was the landscape in which Hoover was operating and,

Speaker 3 14:58

And get an electoral map for the election of 1928. And it is astonishing to me how red this map is. We're talking about every state except for the Dixiecrats in Louisiana to South Carolina and the only Northern state, which was Massachusetts to, to, to go blue. And that was it. Everything was red, including Florida, Texas, California, everything, except for those 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Southern states and Massachusetts. That is absolutely ridiculous.

Speaker 1 15:38

[inaudible], it's, it's funny because it's, as they say, an advertising, uh, this story will surprise you as to why that that occurred, because it has really nothing to do with the business policy that we were talking about. Do you know who Al Smith is?

Speaker 3 15:51

Uh, was he a quarterback for the 49ers?

Speaker 1 15:53

I know he was a Hoover's opponent, uh, in 1928. He was on the losing side of that big red map you're looking at. And the question is why, why did he get his butt kicked so much in that election? And it's not about policy at all. In fact, uh, I hope we get Alan Lichtman who tells a story much more colorfully than I do, essentially Hoover decided to dispense with, uh, any kind of policy conversation and focus mainly on Al Smith's Catholicism. Bigotry is what caused that red map. Hoover was very effective at making Al Smith into the other, a Catholic somebody behold into the Vatican, somebody who was going to, uh, corrupt American politics and turn America into a theocracy and just highlighting every kind of real and imagined evil. The Catholic church would inflict upon the us. And it was highly effective in this. I already told you this kind of nativist landscape, so Alan Smith got it destroyed and that election,

Speaker 3 16:55

So he was telling the truth then because Catholics were awful people.

Speaker 1 17:01

Well it's, you know, it was really amazing to me is to go back to current events, is that it was still a pretty big deal for JFK who ultimately became the first Catholic president that the beholden to the Vatican line came up. Nixon tried to use that again. It probably hurt JFK a little bit, but then when we get to Joseph R Biden, the second Catholic president, it was not much of an issue at all by, you know, in that really is a, it's a Testament to the cultural change in the U S

Speaker 3 17:26

I voted for Biden so we can become a Catholic theocracy. I don't know about you. I was kind of hoping that,

Speaker 1 17:35

Uh, are you sure you're a narrow constituency, but who knows? I mean, maybe he's got a secret Vatican phone in his office. Maybe that's what replaced the diet Coke button on the desk

Speaker 3 17:46

To the Vatican.

Speaker 1 17:48

He presses a button and the Pope, he rises up out of the floor. I mean, and maybe that was, you know, this 1928 election really was whoever was a victim of that success because instead of actually digging into what policies he would implement, that might've, uh, that might've helped voters understand what happened next, because literally a year later, the crash happens in 1929 that fall. So that's bad timing for a new president. So,

Speaker 3 18:13

So w the crash is probably going to happen regardless of Herbert Hoover was the president or not. This is a case of bad timing and bad luck for Herbert Hoover. And he was dealt an outrageously bad hand.

Speaker 1 18:28

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you were paying attention, one of the big warning signs was coming out of Europe. A lot of the financial power in Europe is centered around banks that invested in industries, particularly railroads in central Europe. So we're talking about Germany and Austria in particular, this is where you get the, all the child conspiracy theories, by the way. Cause the Rothschilds were that family were also big investors.

Speaker 3 18:51

Were they big investors in space lasers?

Speaker 1 18:54

Yes, no. And they were, uh, they were mostly if that's just in railroads, but also, uh, you know, lots of other related industries and, and yeah,

Speaker 3 19:03

So space lasers

Speaker 1 19:05

Since it's, so Spacely exactly, exactly. And the boom and bust period, you know, you needed somebody to blame and, and blaming Jewish people is, is a popular pastime in Europe and in your related countries, including the U S so, but what was happening in, in 1928 was that there's one of the biggest European banks, Austrian bank called credit. And Stalts was collapsing. It's a little bit different today with federal systems and, and backstops, mostly from lessons learned during this period that when there's that big collapse, it basically creates like, it's like a domino effect creates a lot of other collapses of, of banks and related businesses and, and the businesses they invest in and so on. So the warning signs were there already in 1928, that things were not looking good and that the contagion of bank collapses, it was only really a matter of time kind of like

Speaker 3 19:55

The housing crisis in 2007 that led to the financial crisis of 2008. Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 1 20:02

Yeah. So, um, I think that's a, that's a fair analogy. I mean, there's the, we're talking about different kinds of businesses, but yeah. Overall, I think, yeah, I think that's, it, that's easy for, for people to understand is, is that kind of relationship. And so, so then the crash happened and things got pretty bad pretty quickly because this is pre FTR. There were, there was no federal reserve system. There were runs on banks and business closures, and then eventually homeless encampments and pretty quickly Hoover really was getting a very bad reputation. The homeless encampments people called them. Hoovervilles if you put newspaper in your shoes because you have holes in them because you're poor, you got Hoover leather.

Speaker 3 20:43

And what kind of policies did he try to enforce in the early onset as a reaction to the great depression. And then I'm assuming he later tried to correct that blew up in his face. What did he try to do to correct this

Speaker 1 20:57

The biggest thing the most, at least for me, and I'm sure there are others, but the most memorable thing you did was the thing a lot of countries were doing that actually made the crisis so much worse. And it's, uh, it's now notorious. He raised tariffs specifically. He pushed this tariff called the Smoot Hawley tariff. And essentially what that, what that did was I think I, we were talking about this before. What really made the great depression, terrible worldwide was that money and credit need to circulate to keep this system going. That banks need to be able to lend each other. There needs to be kind of, there needs to be kind of a loop of investment. And that loop was broken during the great depression. And instead of rebuilding that loop, which is what eventually, what brought us out that an ed giant worldwide war, but, uh, um, people broke it further. So the Smoot Holly tariff was building walls up. Economic nationalism was causing things to Cirque money and investment between nations, even less, a lot of what was traded back then too was food. And so, uh, you know, Smoot-Hawley tariff, was it raised food prices I believe, and ended up causing even more damage. And then of course, the problem is is that when one country does this and another country has to follow suit, it's kind of like this arms race, where then it's like, well, the UK is going to put up their tariff and Germany is going to put up their tariff. So you have kind of multiple Tom and effects where this is like exacerbating problems where money's supply is becoming even less investment is shrinking even more and more and more people are losing their jobs and it's spiraling out of control.

Speaker 3 22:30

So what were they hoping to accomplish with the Smoot-Hawley tariff act? Why was there this huge push to become more nationalists?

Speaker 1 22:38

Uh, cause I don't think they had a good understanding of the type of economic cooperation is a very kind of right-wing view of things is that, you know, America first, which is actually kind of what came out of this era. One of the things that came out of this era is that like, we just have to protect our own and deal with our own and screw everybody else. And this is a way for us to kind of circle the wagons and build up the walls so that we can fix this problem by ourselves. The problem is, is that we live in a connected world and it had been a connected world for a very long time, much longer than the thirties, a globalized economy going back several centuries. It, depending on which historian you ask may be more so trying to kind of reflectively go back and create some sort of bubble. It was not really possible, but it was a reaction and it was something that could be done. And it was something that Hoover had support in Congress to pass. And so that happened

Speaker 3 23:31

The first really great idea was the Smoot Hawley tariff act. And then the second really awesome idea was prohibition.

Speaker 1 23:38

Yeah. Yeah. So that was, um, what's funny. Cause then in turn, uh, it's something we don't think about a lot, but uh, when, uh, the reason FDR was also very popular was he to overturned all that and say, illegalized beer, like thank you, Lisa, for suffering, we can drink.

Speaker 3 23:56

So, so, so basically what I'm getting from all of this is that if I have a time machine never go to the thirties,

Speaker 1 24:03

Well, I mean, I'm Jewish, so hell no, but, but, uh, there's a lot of great art. There's a lot of great culture. I mean, we're talking about, uh, so many interesting things, but I mean, yeah, it, politically things were very scary right now. We're talking about kind of the opening of the thirties. This is still like a late twenties. Uh, Hoover. The other big thing I wanted to mention was the bonus riots. I think it's an often missed, but in pretty important piece of history to that also reflects on whoever you can see already. There's kind of this reactionary vibe, which is, you know, it's right wing. I've been told so many times I'm the businessman only I can do it. And then when he finally gets to that moment, well guess what, he's not doing it. The bonus riot episode, it's a little bit, I kind of I've thought about it a bit during occupy wall street, this, this a situation where there was kind of this huge, their encampments homeless, and it's all over the place, but this was kind of a more political encampment veterans of world war one. The backstory is veterans of world war one were supposed to be given like these bonus payments, these kind of pseudo pension payments. But as, as the economy got worse, the U S government basically broke that promise to veterans. So they came from all over the United States to basically set up this huge encampment on the mall to protest and to demand these payments. And they needed them. They, this families who were, who were in desperate, desperate times, Hoover's response was less than charitable. It was, it was pretty bad. They sent in military to disperse the people. They ended up having to shoot people. They burned, uh, some of these accountants down, it was just an awful episode to go into this place where people were already desperate and starving and believed they were owed this thing that they were promised for fighting world war one, Hoover just, just destroyed them.

Speaker 3 25:57

I mean, this is just a major grapes of wrath that we're dealing with right now. I can only imagine. I can only assume that the idea of socialism and maybe communism was festering at this point, because what other alternative would these people have? Their families are starving. They were let down by their, their own government. I, I, unless I'm completely wrong. I would see that this would be a promotion for communism to take hold within these people that are suffering.

Speaker 1 26:28

Yeah. I mean, absolutely. This was a prime recruiting time for communism and socialism. I mean, you already had had elections with Eugene Debs. Who's probably one of the most famous socialists in us political history. He was arrested for sedition for criticizing United States, but it was during the election and he still got over a million votes while being in prison kind of makes me think about what might happen in 2024. Hopefully not. There was already kind of bubbling up this. A lot of people seeing communism and socialism as attractive, although just as big and just like today, a backlash calling them evil.

Speaker 3 27:04

I think before you have to worry about Trump winning any election in prison, I think that you would probably have to have the Republicans win a popular vote once in a while.

Speaker 1 27:15

Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of people, uh, it still, it still shocks me that it's not a major conversation point that the last time the Republican party won a popular vote nationwide was in 2004. And prior to that was what? 19, uh, 1988.

Speaker 3 27:32

Yeah. That was once, once since Bush one the first time. Yeah.

Speaker 1 27:36

Yeah. And uh, I mean the game plan, and this is a different conversation. And then, you know, the game plan now is, is just to suppress the vote entirely to just stop people from voting. That's actually a front page of the Sunday edition in New York times. I'm glad they're using stronger language now to talk about it. Uh, you know, they say based on fraudulent ideas, untrue ideas about election fraud, which have not been born out by the facts, they are all over the United States and several states, uh, Republican controlled legislatures are making it passing legislation to make it harder to vote.

Speaker 3 28:09

That's a, that's a whole separate episode right there.

Speaker 1 28:12

Yes, indeed. It is. Yeah. So, uh, Hoover, Hoover overall, it was a, it was a lot of reactionary kind of policies and actions. I think the bonus riot and the Smoot-Hawley tariff are the ones that I would probably put on a test for undergrads as the two kind of major points. And then FDR emerges from kind of being powerful in New York politics as this person who could, you know, right. The, the ship of America and, and sit it on a, on a different path

Speaker 3 28:40

Because I'm looking now at a 1932 electoral map and the entire country saved for Pennsylvania and some specks of new England. It's all blue. Yeah. I mean, that is absolutely ridiculous. What did Hoover, besides being the president and, and making some really boneheaded mistakes, what was his campaign like? I mean, what was his reelection campaigns?

Speaker 1 29:08

Uh, his message was, give me another chance to fix this. We're just getting started. We've got all these ideas. That campaign was a little weird because usually, I mean, in modern campaigns, we, yeah, we think about campaigns as a message, but really the, just the attitude of people just really hating Hoover and really wanting something new just really took over. Cause the Democrats, their messaging was kind of not great during the campaign. They, they were trying to, uh, I think during the convention, they were trying to blame Hoover for spending too much money, uh, you know, to try to try to, um, do all these different things for, for relief efforts, which is, you know, it's funny because then FDR is actually the one who's known for, for the Keynesian economics where you spend in, in a crisis. Uh, even though that seems counterintuitive, you know, right-wing political, like, uh, economic theory is, uh, austerity and cutting, cutting more in a crisis, which of course we know it doesn't, it doesn't work.

Speaker 3 30:06

It's almost like Republicans complaining now about the national debt. Right,

Speaker 1 30:10

Right, right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Th th the Democrat messaging was Hoover spending too much money. FDR really Biden has really taken a lot of these cues. It was kind of speaking more in emotional terms to people. I think that really resonated like, uh, like we were talking about before, the only thing to fear is fear itself that we can do this, that America has these great resources and power to, to fix things. So,

Speaker 3 30:35

So in your perspective, do you feel that the 1932 election was people were voting more for FDR while they were upset with Hoover? Or was it almost a unanimous vote against Hoover? Because the way that I saw the 2020 election, wasn't a huge surge to vote Biden end. There wasn't a hell of a lot of pro Biden voters out there. There was a huge surge of anti-Trump voters that got Biden in. So how do you see the 1932 election? Was it more of an anti hate, you know, like just a hatred to, to, to get Hoover out, or did people genuinely believe that FDR could bring prosperity?

Speaker 1 31:18

Yeah. I think the parallels are pretty, are pretty strong there just as you've laid out. Those is really anti status quo election in both cases with 2020 and 1932, I think that's yet another reason why Biden is paying close attention to FDR taking cues from him and said, yeah, people were just really, really fed up with how bad things were and, and wanted to change. And these so-called wave elections. They are predictable Alan Lichtman, who, who has the great Al Smith story hits a whole system called the 13 keys of the white house, where he talks about like all the different factors that can cause, uh, this wave, this shift where the party holding the white house changes. That's a little bit of a side topic, but, uh, what was really interesting about, uh, FDR and, and maybe for Biden as well in 2020 is we're, we're really starting to see a shifting in the electorate that new political, new electoral coalitions were forming. You know, I mentioned that the democratic party was kind of the party of the south with the exception of, uh, Woodrow Wilson coming in. You know, the Democrats were really for a very long, most of American history up to that point were really, you know, focused on, on that region. We were very conservative, but then you have FDR coming out of New York city, and he's really talking a lot more about immigrants and immigrant communities were a big part of getting FDR through. There's a great book. It's, um, it's by Elizabeth Cohen, it's called the making of the new deal. And it's all about immigrant communities because see, especially with the huge waves of immigrants that came in between say like 1880 and, and the period we're talking about these huge communities formed up and there was no kind of government safety net, right? This is the laissez Faire period, but immigrant community has kind of created their own safety nets. Right. And you think of, you know, historic community, Irish, Italian communities in New York, Jewish communities. These are groups that kind of, we're used to, and kind of created their own like mutual aid society as a childcare healthcare pension, like the mafia, right. And that's the kind of the dark side of it. But a lot of it, you know, was just, it was just people surviving through these kind of tight-knit communities. And they saw FDR as how, as being able to provide help to put a floor under that. So they weren't just on their own. And so for the first time you see these are urban dwellers, these are like your Southern kind of agrarian patriarchs. Uh, this is a whole different group of people being brought into this, um, electoral coalition. And so that really started to shift because, uh, you know, the twenties with Republicans, you know, became, like I said, became kind of very, very racist, you know, they had passed the, uh, the 1924 national origins act. And so the immigrant communities, obviously weren't terribly happy that they were being targeted by Republican. So they were going to go with the democratic party. And then of course, in a 30 year period between FDR and, and a LBJ and Nixon, you have kind of this complete shift from the Democrats becoming kind of this, this white party of the south to a multiethnic party that has, that has a black people in it because of the civil rights acts and so on. And that the Republicans become kind of the party of the south. All these people switched their party affiliations and, and by 1968 and the Southern strategy of getting those people into affirm electoral law.

Speaker 3 34:36

I know people that I've had serious conversations with that refuse to believe that the Southern strategy was a thing that the, there was no switch that the Democrats have always been and will always be about subjugating and keeping minorities in their control to manipulate them for the betterment of the country.

Speaker 1 34:59

That is a deliberate right-wing. And I dare say, fascist talking point that I've witnessed throughout the internet and the social discourse. It is, it is pushed specifically by kind of well-known, uh, right right-wing mouthpieces. And then of course, parroted by people who are just repeating what they've heard, it is imperative that they erase that very important history of the electoral coalition shifting between the 1930 and 1960, because otherwise it doesn't their, their point that that Democrats are racist it's is ridiculous. This history very clearly in very, very many ways shows that, uh, the Democrats, uh, became between 1930 and 1970, a party of racial justice. And that the Republicans very clearly used racism to gain political power. That is an argument they need to avoid at all costs. So they have to make up this fantasy by omitting a whole 40 year, pretty crucial 40 year period of us political history in order to make it work.

Speaker 3 36:01

So what you're saying is Herbert Hoover and Trump versus Biden and FDR, and that Biden, if he's going to succeed should just follow FDRs playbook. And so we can expect now some major federal policy to come into play over the next two years.

Speaker 1 36:23

Absolutely. Yeah. And you're starting to see a little bit of that. I mean, the, um, we were talking about AMA RNA research, right? The really exciting thing about MRMA research, which we're going to hear a lot more about is that it can help cancer and they are calling it the cancer moonshot that we've already got a model now for investing in this type of research right. In this crisis where currently in, so the idea is push it further, expand it and maybe cure some cancer. Uh, that would be pretty exciting. Well, that's

Speaker 3 36:54

Pretty amazing, which kind of leads me to, I guess my last question, what actual benefit did Hoover create? What do we owe Hoover posthumously, I guess now that we have for foresight of being in the future and what can we thank Hoover for accomplishing, as opposed to thinking that he just did everything wrong?

Speaker 1 37:18

There's a few ways to frame this. Um, I mean, I think, you know, if we're in kind of a growth mindset, mistakes can be, can be some of the best things that can happen to us, right? Because we learn from them and a big, the bigger, the mistake, the bigger the lesson, uh, if we learn from it. So we could say, you know, Hoover, Hoover doing a lot of things wrong and kind of flailing as a leader in that. And that crucial moment gave us the opportunity to learn that lesson and say, okay, let's instead of building up walls, let's engage with the world. Let's not be reactionary. Let's think about problems. FDR famously invited all these, all these smart people, often people who did not agree with each other and this team of rivals kind of situation. I mean, he was looking back at Abraham Lincoln, I think a little bit, uh, as building up brain trust of people. So that was very different than the Republican ideology of like me and, and my businessmen friends know best. And we don't need to mess around, even though Hoover, you know, Hoover was a scientist and did talk to other scientists. So, so the, yeah, they, they kind of mistakes can be a gift, right. And that, and that we need to engage. And, and that FDR then became, you know, the such a dominant figure, uh, in part, because America was learning from the mistake and it wasn't, you know, Hoover gets a lot of the blame. It wasn't just this whole period of the 20th sees three Republican administrations in a row who put in Republican judges who kind of upheld the system, this twin system of really a corporate office. Laissez-faire dare I say, futilistic kind of approach to managing modernizing economies was not a good idea resulted in, in crisis. Now in hindsight, we could see it coming and now we have that lesson. So we really shouldn't be making the same mistakes, even though Republicans seem to believe that if we just do it again, we're not going to have the same results. So, yeah. So I feel like those were important lessons for our country to learn

Speaker 3 39:16

Fool me once shame on you right now, the point is we can't get fooled again. See, that was, that was my poor attempt to add a George W. Bush impression.

Speaker 1 39:31

I think that was quick.

Speaker 3 39:33

So then I guess your point is he made mistakes that we could learn from that was the big benefit that, that Hoover gave us. So can you say the same thing about Trump?

Speaker 1 39:46

Well, yeah, absolutely. Um, I mean, I feel like that is, that is a major narrative right now, right? That, um, it's exposed the weaknesses in our system. We have to be concerned about our mail, our us postal service. We have to be concerned about legislators, legislate legislatures, excuse me, uh, that could fight to overturn elections that, uh, our, uh, our election officials, our secretaries of state are actually really, really important to maintain the integrity of our elections. And, and we have some examples of some Republicans who, who really stood up in the moment I'm thinking of, you know, Raffa, Roseburg and Georgia, particularly, and also in Pennsylvania, people that, that did their jobs in Arizona to despite literally armed crowds of angry people, literally on the other side of the tour yelling crazy stuff. Um,

Speaker 3 40:34

This is my being, being threatened by the president and his cronies.

Speaker 1 40:40

Yeah. And then, you know, going further back into the bigger picture, you know, um, we probably should see a president's taxes. We've been relying a lot of norms. And now what we need to do is codify norms. And why do we have this department of justice directive that a president can't be prosecuted? There's some definitely weaknesses in our system that I think have been exposed by the Trump era. And now the challenge is going to be to try to fix those. The problem is, is that right now the Republican party, and I'm sure you have many things to say on this is it's still, they, they have they're operating as if none of this has happened is if Trump is still president, they're still acting in this kind of completely just off the grid off the rails. Totally anti-democratic mentality. They're still, they're still essentially like acting as an enemy of American democracy rather than a participant in it. And the big question will be how this plays out with Trump's fortunes that, you know, there major cracks in the Republican coalition that if bad things do happen to Trump and he can't remain with an iron grip on the party, that then there's going to be kind of a bajur internal struggle within the GOP. And that does give the Democrats an opportunity to explain it that struggle, to gain a little more power and leverage to put in some of these statey guards to help address some of those weaknesses. And this is another whole discussion, but fascists, uh, need to dominate. And when they don't win, when there's weakness with the leader and the leader finally goes down, it is ugly within fascist organizations, groups, policies, whatever word you want to use, because it's a vicious struggle for who's going to be the next leader. If that weakens them, that gives us an opening, just kind of fix some stuff. So I guess

Speaker 3 42:18

That helps me conclude my perspective of all of this, and, uh, allows me to appreciate Hoover on another level specifically, because after FDR was elected, Hoover went away. And for that, I am grateful.