Putting Hoover on the Map: Was the 31st President a Progressive?

Abstract

If any U.S. President is in need of a public image makeover, surely it is Herbert Hoover.Although not considered the nation's worst president, Hoover continues to serve as an object of derision in contemporary debates over economic policy. But is the textbook portrayal of Hoover as an unrelenting conservative historically accurate? A number of scholars assert that Hoover was a progressive president. Given Hoover's status in our political consciousness, the stakes in this debate are significant. Political science can inform this debate with rigorous ideological measurement. I complete a record of Hoover's legislative positions and use W-NOMINATE to estimate Hoover's ideal point relative to the 71st and 72nd Congresses. I demonstrate a design to improve presidential ideal point estimation. The results fill a gap in presidential scholarship, show that Hoover was a conservative Republican, and suggest that efforts to portray Hoover as a progressive leader are misinformed.If any U.S. president is in need of a public image makeover, surely it is Herbert Hoover. Although experts do not judge him to be the nation's worst president (Nice 1984;Nichols 2012), Hoover continues to serve as an object of derision in contemporary debates over economic stimulus and austerity measures. 1 A substantial number of Hoover scholars, however, challenge the portrayal of Hoover as a laissezfaire conservative and maintain that Hoover was a progressive president (e.g., Best 1983;Burner 1974;Degler 1963;Jeansonne 2012;Wilson 1975). Have we misjudged Hoover? Unfortunately, political scientists have not been able to answer this question. Although we possess sophisticated tools for analyzing political behavior, Hoover has thus far eluded measurement.In this article, I hope to shed light on this historical controversy by analyzing Hoover's legislative record with modern tools of political science. These tools allow us to map Hoover's ideological preferences relative to other actors and determine whether he stood with the right, left, or center of the Republican Party. We can also compare Hoover to progressive members of both parties. Based on the requests he made for legislative action, the bills he signed and vetoed, his nominees and a treaty he proposed, Hoover was significantly more conservative than his contemporaries in the House and Senate on most issues. This research fills a gap in our understanding of twentieth century presidents and demonstrates a robust method of estimating presidential ideal points. However progressive he may have been in spirit and personal affairs, Hoover did not act like a progressive while in office. "EXCAVATING" HERBERT HOOVERAmerica's economic prospects were so bright in early 1929 that newly inaugurated President Herbert Hoover proclaimed that the end of poverty was near. In hindsight it is clear that Hoover could not have been more wrong. By the end of his administration, the country's gross national product was cut in half, the unemployment rate was 25%, and Hoover was soundly defeated by Franklin Roosevel...

Does the Presidency Moderate the President?

“…I also questioned whether the subset of roll call votes used to compare presidents to members of Congress is representative of roll call votes used to measure congressional preferences. Prior works show the enlarged set of bridging observations used to estimate presidents' ideal points here are more representative of the roll call record generally and produced more reliable estimates than do scaling request votes only (Edwards ; Treier ). While broader samples of presidents' legislative records are more comparable to voting in Congress than narrow samples of request votes, there still arises the issue of whether the difference between the individual's ideal point as president and as a member of Congress is a result of the presidency and not the different agendas of these institutions.…”

“… In Hoover's case, the president's legislative requests appear more moderate than his full record of legislative requests, nominations, signings, and vetoes reveals (Edwards ). The moderate nature of Hoover's legislative requests is consistent with the relatively passive approach of historic presidents.…”