Fall from Grace

The October 1929 Wall Street collapse had left the American economy in ruins. After prolonged but ineffective optimism at the White House and robust debate on whether to tax imports to protect American farmers and manufacturers, on July 17, 1930, President Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill. More than 1,000 economists had petitioned Hoover not to do so, as had the greatest industrialist of the age, Henry Ford—in person—and sages from the world of finance. “I almost went down on my knees to beg Herbert Hoover to veto the asinine Smoot-Hawley Tariff,” Thomas Lamont, a partner at J.P. Morgan, said later. “That act intensified nationalism all over the world.” Current wisdom holds that Smoot-Hawley may have put the “great” in the Great Depression, exporting Wall Street’s woes globally, and raising the question of why one of the most intelligent men ever elected president of the United States made so colossal a blunder.

Simply put, Hoover was an engineer, and when things or systems break, engineers instinctively try to fix them. Amid the 1929 collapse, Herbert Hoover did what had always worked for him: attack a problem with cold logic and characteristic implacable efficiency. But logic and efficiency aren’t always reliable tools—especially in politics. As Hoover struggled to address the crisis, which bled into his re-election campaign, his engineer’s personality, once an indomitable asset, brought on his downfall.

in West Branch, Iowa. His father, the town blacksmith, died when the boy was five; Herbert’s mother died four years later. Relatives divvied the couple’s three orphans. Herbert ended up in Oregon with an uncle whose own son recently had died. His uncle’s household was one of hard work and self-reliance—traits the youth made his own. He took up fly fishing, an immersive solitary pastime emblematic of his personality; it became a hobby for life.