3 - The new economics at center stage in 1929

Summary

No American president has come into office with a more detailed conception of what he wanted to accomplish in economic policy and of the way to go about it than did Herbert Hoover in 1929. His apprenticeship as secretary of commerce had sharpened his thinking on both strategy and tactics. The White House provided an opportunity to press forward with projects that had not yet fully matured and with some which he had pushed, but without success, as the servant of Presidents Harding and Coolidge. As president, Hoover now had a much freer hand to act, though his sense of liberation was still not complete. In his memoirs, he lamented that the public could not fully appreciate the burden an incoming president must carry when he succeeds a member of his own party. He may wish to shift course, but, as an heir who is expected to pay decent respect to his inheritance, he may be constrained from doing so too abruptly.

Setting the initial agenda for economic policy

It has become standard practice for newly elected Presidents to commission “task forces” to provide expert counsel on the challenges a new administration is likely to confront. For Hoover, a special exercise of this sort on economic policy was unnecessary. He already knew what he wanted to do. A function analogous to the latter-day task force for a president-elect was, however, performed by a study group organized under the auspices of the President's Conference on Unemployment in January 1928.