The Troubling Legacy of Herbert Hoover

Most people know Herbert Hoover as one of the worst presidents in the nation’s history, a conservative Republican who led the country into the Great Depression. If they only knew the real impact Hoover had, they would be shocked.

Up until Herbert Hoover, a majority of African-Americans had supported the Republican Party, the Party of Lincoln. Hoover changed all that with his Lily White Policy, a plan devised to get African-Americans out of the Republican Party and bring in the white Southerners. He’s responsible for developing the Southern strategy that Nixon, Reagan and Bush would later embrace. He turned the party of big business into the white man’s party.

Herbert Hoover was a white supremacist. He believed blacks were inherently inferior and wanted to get rid of any blacks from positions of authority and power in the Republican Party. Hoover’s racism is manifest in his response to the great Mississippi Flood of 1927, his Supreme Court picks, and his use of patronage to strip blacks of power. He even fought against anti-lynching laws.

Another example of Hoover’s racism is how he selected General Douglas MacArthur to reorganize the army and then watched over as the most famous black military unit in the country was eliminated. He also forbade blacks from the Air Corps and enforced segregation in the military. W.E.B. DuBois, the founder of the NAACP, saw Hoover as a “sinister enemy of the black race.”

Hoover’s racism extended to other groups as well. It was Hoover who deported over two million people, many of which were legal American citizens. Anyone with a Mexican-sounding name had their property confiscated and were shipped to Mexico City.

Hoover was a trained geologist and one of the first graduates of Stanford University. He holds a special place at the horse farm where the Hoover Institute carries out his vision. Few people are aware that they keep the actual day books written by the Nazi commandants of German concentration camps at Stanford’s Hoover Institute.

Herbert Hoover had a special relationship with Adolph Hitler and met with him in 1938. He had become a quiet supporter of the German fuehrer. Hoover would oppose America’s involvement in World War II and fight against FDR’s Lend Lease program to aid Britain. He assured everyone that Hitler would soon conquer Europe and it was better to be his friend.

Hoover was the behind the scenes power of the America First movement, leaving the public face to the freshly scrubbed aviation hero Charles Lindbergh. According to FDR, there could be no doubt that Lindbergh was a Nazi. Lindbergh was finally exposed when he gave his famous anti-Semitic, America First speech in Iowa. After the speech, which blamed the Jews for the world’s unrest, Hoover invited Lindbergh up to his hotel suite at the Waldorf Astoria and praised him. The two would later engage in discussions of impeaching Roosevelt.

FDR hated Hoover, but Harry Truman rehabilitated the man’s tattered reputation. When Nixon became vice-president, Hoover had an open line into the White House and slowly built back his power. Hoover was the kingmaker who made deals and promoted the people who thought like he did. He became the liason between Wall Street, the military, corporations, and Washington insiders. He gained enormous power operating from his hotel room at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. Hoover would live to be 93 and outlive practically everybody.

Aaron Dahl

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