president hoover believed that the best strategy for ending the depression was?

Question

answers:
1) encouraging massive government spending
2) lowering import duties
3) setting up federal relief programs
4) encouraging voluntary controls in the business sector

Answer 1

I think 3 because I know a lot of government programs were started durning the great depression to give people jobs and money. Programs like the park ones and like cleaning the lakes or something. Plus when in a depression the public expects the government to do something even though a lot of times they may make it worse.

Answer 2

The BEST answer is #4, but that is misleading.

A quick overview:

It most definitely is NOT #2 -- Hoover supported, if uncertainly, INCREASES in import duties

He actually supported ALL the rest to some extent.

You might rule out #1, but mostly just because FDR ended up advocating even BIGGER programs!

As for #3 - Hoover did support federal relief programs, though again not QUITE as large as FDR later proposed. And relief, by its very nature, was to tide people over, not to fully resolve the underlying problems.

That brings us to #4. True, Hoover urged businesses to voluntarily co-operate. But note that what he urged on them was essentially wage and price controls.


The weakness of this question is that it seems to believe too much in the popular notion about Hoover's approach to the Depression -- which suggests that he believed in government IN-action ("laissez-faire"), unlike FDR. (A modified version of this acknowledges Hoover's efforts, but thinks his philosophy kept him from being able to do quite enough.)

On the contrary, Hoover "established several new agencies and also funded public works projects in the hope of stimulating the economy and getting the nation back to work."
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/hoover/hooverbio.htm

And that's just a start!

In fact, Hoover argued AGAINST the government's taking the sort of laissez faire approach (letting the business cycle 'work itself out') that had worked in 1920-21, and boasted about this in his 1932 bid for re-election.

Murray Rothbard in "America's Great Depression" argues:

"Hoover's role as founder of a revolutionary program of government planning to combat depression has been unjustly neglected by historians. Franklin D. Roosevelt, in large part, merely elaborated the policies laid down by his predecessor. To scoff at Hoover's tragic failure to cure the depression as a typical example of laissez-faire is drastically to misread the historical record. The Hoover rout must be set down as a failure of government planning and not of the free market."

Some have called these forgotten precedents to Roosevelt's own policies, the "Hoover New Deal" --for it was marked by
"extensive governmental economic planning and intervention-including bolstering of wage rates and prices, expansion of credit, propping up of weak firms, and increased government spending (e.g., subsidies to unemployment and public works)"

http://www.mises.org/rothbard/agd/chapter7.asp

Other 'activist' policies that only made matters worse, were the introduction of many trade restrictions, including tariffs, quotas, foreign trade controls -- including the misguided "Smoot-Hawley Act". The idea of this was to protect American industries from foreign competition (not at all a laissez-faire notion!) Instead it drove American prices up, killed free trade and contributed (along with other nations' taking similar steps) to a GLOBAL depression.

RAISING taxes (doubling the income tax in 1932!) was another interventionist attempt that failed miserably.

http://www.sennholz.com/inflordefl.html

(Sennholz goes on to show how Roosevelt followed in Hoover's footsteps. I do not agree with his overall analysis, but his summary of Hoover & Roosevelt is pretty good.)

Note that several of the FIRST steps taken by the famous "Hundred Days Congress" at the beginning of FDR's first term enacted proposals that HOOVER had tried, unsuccessfully, to push through Congress.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal#The_First_Hundred_Days

Answer 3

So amazed that I found this topic already answered! Its like you've read my mind!

Answer 4

Thanks to each and everyone of you guys for the answers!