Hoover did anything but stand idly by after the onset of the Depression. There are several major examples that one can point to where Hoover extended the size and scope of the federal government in order to fight the rapidly worsening Depression. To set the stage for those, I start with a quick look at the overall level of federal government spending during his presidency. The 1929 budget was $3.1 billion, and Hoover’s first budget in 1930 had $3.3 billion in spending, followed by $3.6 billion, $4.7 billion, and $4.6 billion over the following three years. In nominal terms, he increased spending 48 percent over the last budget of the previous administration. However, this period was one of significant deflation, so if we adjust for the approximately 10 percent per year fall in prices over that period, the real size of government spending in 1933 was almost double that of 1929.
The budget deficits of 1931 and 1932 represented 52.5 percent and 43.3 percent of total federal expenditures. No year between 1933 and 1941 under Roosevelt had a deficit that large. It is hard to reconcile those data with the claim that Hoover was a defender of “austerity” and “budget cutting” in the name of laissez faire. In the immediate aftermath of the stock market crash in October of 1929, Hoover extended federal control over agriculture by expanding the reach of the Federal Farm Board (FFB), which had been created a few months earlier, as well as calling for public works expenditures. The idea behind the FFB was to make government-funded loans to farm cooperatives and create “stabilization corporations” to keep farm prices up and deal with surpluses. In other words, it was a cartel plan. That fall, Hoover pushed the FFB into full action, lending to farmers all over the country and otherwise subsidizing farming in an attempt to keep prices up. As is the case with such arrangements, it failed miserably, as subsidies only encouraged farmers to grow more crops. That exacerbate farm commodities surpluses, and eventually drove prices way down, sending more farms into dire circumstances. Hoover responded by proposing the further anti-market policy of paying farmers not to grow crops. Hoover also quickly proposed an expansion of public-works projects as a way to address unemployment—an idea that he had not only championed throughout the 1920s, but that was, contrary to perception, agreed upon as worthwhile by a majority of economists at the time, well before John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory was published in 1936. Hoover sent a telegram to state governors asking them to cooperate on state-level public-works programs. Hoover and his secretary of the treasury, Andrew Mellon (himself often wrongly portrayed as a defender of laissez faire), proposed $400 million in new federal buildings as well as $175 million in public works through the federal Shipping Board. These proposals met with approval from the professoriate as examples of “constructive industrial statesmanship.” They were also ridiculed as “pump priming” in a New York Tribune editorial cartoon of April 8, 1930, reproduced in Figure 2. The cartoon showed Hoover pouring buckets of water labeled “millions for public roads,” “millions for public buildings,” and “millions for public construction” through a water pump labeled “U.S. Business.” Observers at the time understood exactly what Hoover’s program was all about. Most significantly, Hoover revived the business-government conferences of his time at Commerce by summoning major business leaders to the White House several times that fall. His agenda for these meetings was clear: he wanted businessmen to promise not to reduce wages in the face of rising unemployment. Hoover believed, as did a number of intellectuals at the time, that the cause of prosperity was high wages, even though the truth is the reverse: prosperity, thanks to the accumulation of capital that increases the productivity of labor, leads to higher wages. He argued that if major firms cut wages, workers would not have the purchasing power they needed to buy up the goods being produced. As most depressions involve falling prices, cutting wages to match falling prices would have kept purchasing power constant. What Hoover wanted amounted to an increase in real wages, as constant nominal wages would
be able to purchase more goods at falling prices. Presumably out of fear of the White House, or perhaps because it would keep the unions quiet, industrial leaders agreed to this proposal. The result was rapidly escalating unemployment as firms quickly realized they could not continue to employ as many workers when their output prices were falling and labor costs were constant.
Of all the government failures of the Hoover presidency, excluding the actions of the Federal Reserve between 1929 and 1932 over which he had little to no influence, his attempt to maintain wages was the most damaging. No proponent of laissez faire would have used White House pres sure to intervene in the private sector this way. Hoover’s high-wage policy was a clear example of his lack of faith in the corrective forces of the market and his willingness to use governmental power to fight the Depression. The promulgators of the myth of Hoover’s commitment to laissez faire will find it difficult to explain away this point. Later in his presidency, Hoover did more than just jawbone to keep wages up; he signed two pieces of labor legislation that dramatically increased the role of govern ment in propping up wages and giving monopoly protection to unions. In 1931, he signed the Davis-Bacon Act, which mandated that all federally funded or assisted construction projects pay the “prevailing wage,” (i.e., the above-market-clearing union wage). This had the result of both shutting out non-union labor, especially immigrants and non-whites, and driving up the cost to taxpayers. A year later, he signed the Norris-LaGuardia Act, whose five major provisions each enshrined special provisions for unions in the law, including a prohibition on judges using injunctions to stop strikes and making union-free contracts unenforceable in federal courts. Hoover’s interventions into the labor market are further evidence of his rejection of laissez faire.