nation in the high-tech world that he foresaw approaching in the 50s and 60s so he had an extraordinary impact on american life. a [inaudible conversations] spinet programming. or here at the roosevelt house and i welcome you on behalf of the president of the college who can't be here this evening and also harold holzer who is the

director of the roosevelt house in albany this evening. we are very excited to have kevin here to talk about his biography of food for and also to have amity chalets to interview him. you can imagine that this is not a house in which herbert hoover is historical or in the present-day talked about often were usually very kindly so one thing i want to say about the introduction is the indictment and advocacy shape and overwhelm the story of the man herbert hoover and they think that there has been more indictment in these holes than anywhere else because they lived here in this

house during the 1932 campaign so we will hear a different story in the campaign and you might have heard interpreted. we met in the library on the second floor which is where president roosevelt met with members of the 32 election so i have a feeling they were talking about what a bad job herbert hoover had been doing. as the review says about the biography, they called it an intensely researched resurrection of a brilliant man, so we are very eager to hear about what his interpretation of herbert hoover is and especially his role in the great depressi depression. one of the wonderful things about having amity is that she

brings a different period -- and applause. [applause] one thing she wrote in 2009 in the "washington post" is like no other president, roosevelt inspired those in despair about roosevelt and the economist isn't worthy of emulation. we are happy to bring that perspective to you and have her here as well. she's the author of four "new york times" bestsellers including the forgotten man which is a new history of the great depression which is a "new york times" best seller in its graphic form, so it was text and a cartoon version of the book.

even graphic novelists returned to their work as cartoons, so that is in my defense. and also the author of the best-selling biography of calvin coolidge another president we do not hear much about in this home. also the chair of the board of trustees of the calvin coolidge presidential foundation. so before i turn over i want to say we also have in the house the great granddaughter of herbert hoover, margaret and we are honored to have her for the conversation. she is in the back of the house. [applause] thank you all for being here and after the conversation there will be a q-and-a and then i will invite you to the former dining rooms of the house to have a reception and book

signing. thank you for being here and i will turn over to amity. [applause] i always knew the roosevelt were gracious people and entertainers and we feel very welcome here and we thank you for that. to be here is an honor for both of us. my guest is kenneth white and i want to add one or two words of a biography about him to bill's wonderful introduction. there are newspaper people and newspaper innovators. innovators are rare. he falls into the second category. he's published monthly, weekly and daily periodicals and that

is a broad range for a newspaper man or woman. also the founding editor of a wonderful periodical we always admired and emulated here. he's edited the claims and has been the publisher of dozens of magazines and that's important to know. it takes a great flexibility and mind and heroism as a publisher as the media changes itself so much. he's the author of an underground king story of william randolph hearst and now extraordinary white and extraordinary times. i believe bill quoted the review that was lovely. you should know that cold war works monumental and the new yorker called you a [inaudible]

and that as a badge of honor. we are going to speak about 30 minutes. we want to welcome you in as fast as we can. the first question so obviously he's ranked pretty low and is number 36 in the one poll says she's come down over time because he was 20 out of 32. >> is a pleasure tit is a please this evening and to share the stage with him even if she did pick out one negative word of.

i started looking into his life and i didn't know anything about the guy except he was a failed president number 36 in the rankings. when you look at the basic arc

of hoover's life. it looks like a garden shack and is smaller than the average one car garage. he came from nothing and was orphaned at the age of nine and then shift around to different branches of the family before finally getting off to stanford university. it's the biggest gold mine in australian history to that point goes to china and pulls off the

biggest transaction in the history of that country to that point. then he goes to london and he sets himself up as a global tycoon and makes a fortune. then the first world war happens. he emerges as an international humanitarian and game's internationainternational fame . when america enters the war, he returns to the united states and joins woodrow wilson's cabinet as does the practically ran the whole food system for americana during the course of the great war. when war ends and wilson goes to paris to negotiate the treaty, wilson and the other leaders are hammering out the verse i treaty and wilson has pretty much absolute control of the entire

economy. he came back to america after the verse i treaty and ran for president unsuccessfully in 1920 and served as a commerce secretary for harding and coolidge and has his own term in office and it was an amazing time to be president just five months after he is inaugurated in the greatest economic disaster in the history of the united states and the history of the world and he spends three years fighting that. he loses office and only to be resurrected by harry truman in 1945 he serves truman and eisenhower's fourth and fifth president that he serves a very

high-level and finishes his days fishing for writing books three at a time and th into the desk e towers and the prince of wales, so it's not a bad arc to the life. and as soon as i realized that about him that there was so much drama and adventure, so many highs, so many lows, i was kind of stunned that i stumbled onto this and nudged towards writing about a figure that i have seen from the start was an amazing human being and a and american unlike any other. that was a wonderful tour.

now the interview part. tell us a little bit about how hoover figured out what his career was a. he was the best situated and the one who could add the most valuable to the industry so tell us a little bit about that. >> cougar came out of college with a drive that was almost inhumane and was determined to succeed at almost any cost. one view of him, he has

detractors and supporters and they tend to look at his business careers as a horatio alger story as a young man who by virtue of his character and hard work finds his way in the world and does great things. he went to australia to be a minor and hired a bunch of stanford buddies to come and work with him. there's letters that exist writing to his brother in california about how he was managing fees stanford friends. in one letter, herbert hoover says i have wilson here. he is going to take this new mine and build it in record time, and if he doesn't, he's going to be back in the u.s. so

fast and so poor, he won't know where to eat. >> the interesting thing about , while they were doing their corporate depredations, they were also doing some good in the world. and hoover, while he was going around making his fortune, he was also supporting back in

california a lot of people, fellow students and family members. he was paying the salary of the librarian at stanford. he was donating rare books and jesuit publications that he picked up many china to stanford. -- in china to stanford. most remarkably, there was an accountant for the firm that hoover worked at who embezzled a ton of money from the firm and almost put it out of business, went to jail, and hoover decided to support the man's wife and child so that they could maintain their standard of living while the guy was in jail. so he was doing a lot of what we might call dastardly things in the business world, but at the same time doing a lot of good simultaneously. >> oh, that's, it's sort of like a cowboy, right? there's a theme here, though, that we'll come back to later

which is if you were on hoover's team, he was tough on you, but he really valued loyalty. it was his people versus the world. and you can, you can see that very early. i am the dell -- the devil to other people, but i i am the angel to us. tell us a little bit, rather than china, i'm going to go to europe. he's a successful, basically, investment banker in a certain area, his area, mining, with a very successful firm. and at a relatively young age, he declares himself almost ready to retire and moves into the whirl wined of world war i -- whirlwind of world war i seeing the starving belgians and deciding he will take that project on in such a huge way. please tell us about that including operating outside the law and his opponents, and there

were many and respectable ones in this endeavor. >> yeah. hoover had pretty much made his fortune by the time he was in his mid to late 30s and had decided at the same time that he wanted to be more than a rich man. i talk about the tension in his personality between the ruthless businessman and the guy who wanted to do good in the world. well, that better side of his nature does come forward through his 30s and into his 40s. he's older, he's more mature, he's got a wife and children, and he's a little bit embarrassed by some of the things that he did in his business career. so he looks for an opportunity to get into public service. and when the first world war broke out, one of the first events of the war was, of course, that germany invaded france, and it did it through bell belgium. it occupied belgium in the

initial weeks of the war. and hoover learned from friends in london that one of the consequences of german occupation of belgium was that the food supply was essentially cut off. the nation before the war had imported about 80% of its food, and suddenly the supply lines were blocked by britain which blockaded belgium, and the germans didn't see it as their job to feed a captive people. so the belgians had nothing to eat. hoover then spent the next three years building the commission for the relief of belgium which was a really phenomenal logistic feat. this was a world war. there were no ships, there was no surplus food, there was no surplus cash, yet he managed to get from all around the world enough grains and enough meat to keep eight million belgians alive through the course of the

war and a couple of million in northern france as well. it was just a colossal humanitarian endeavor, saving the lives of 8-10 million people in a war that killed about 10 million people. and it was the sort of thing that only somebody with hoover's business capacities and his sheer will could have pulled off. because the germans didn't want the belgians being fed by external forces and being dependent on anyone but the germans, and the british didn't want the food going into belgium because they thought that the germans would just steal it to feed themselves, and it was going to be a long war of attrition, is so is that wasn't a good thing. hoover believed the generals, the heads of state, he bullied them, he lied to them. all the sort of reprehensible

practices that he used to use in business he now used in the cause of his humanitarianism, and he pulled off this fantastic feat of humanitarianism. and over the next decades of his life beyond belgium after the first world war, after the second world war, he was credited with saving in his humanitarian endeavors somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 or 100 million people. >> and when you go to the hoover institution in california, they have a beautiful exhibit of the gifts that people sent to president hoover to thank him; embroidered grain bags, using the little resources they had to show their deep gratitude to him. but it was controversial. food is fungible, right? so that was quite tough. i want to move to versailles because you have a strong financial expertise, ken, and at

versailles there were basically a bunch of people who didn't quite know what they were doing. we know that, right? and especially not on the financial. and you had also a lot of anger, right? france is not going to let germany get away without being impaled. and most of the people are intriguing, they're counterproductive to put it in modern therapy language, you know? they're intriguing, they're skullduggery, and then there's hoover. and of all people, maynard keynes took a look at the crowd of people who were supposed to save the world by writing meaningful treaties and observed that hoover was the exception. he said hoover imported into the councils of paris precisely that atmosphere of reality, knowledge, magnanimity and

disinterestedness which, if they had been found in other quarters, also would have given us the good peace. tell us about that and of what exactly hoover said. what was the hoover thought or plan at versailles? >> one of the things they had difficulty with at versailles was stopping the war. they went to the negotiating table -- germany, france, britain, others -- and they were still determined to settle scores, still determined to get an advantage over one another, still worried about future hostilities. hover's attitude was -- hoover's attitude was thank god this war is over, let's work on recovery. he didn't care about where things had ended geopolitically. his attitude was let's get the railways going again, let's get

the factories going again, let's make sure people are fed. the sooner we leave behind the hostilities of the war, the sooner europe recovers, european recovery is good for america, america trades with europe. the international financial system requires a stable europe. so hoover was just very practical about trying to force other people around the negotiating table to see things in those practical term ands to work constructively for rehabilitating europe rather than for continuing to fight. >> yes, and he came home a superstar. today we're very concerned with fame. fame wins elections. if someone is known, he or she wins. if someone is unknown, then the chances are pretty low. i think hoover was one of the

most famous people coming from outside politics into politics in the u.s. history. and i want to ask you about his superstar status, how he ended up with one party instead of the other. this would be around 1920, '21, how he chose, and i'll read to you a poem, an american poem about hoover. this god. who kept the belgians' black bread buttered? who fed the world when millions muttered? who knew the needs of every nation, who keeps the keys of conservation? who fills the bins when mines aren't earning? who keeps the home fires banked and burning? who will never win a presidential position because he isn't a practical politician? there's mockery there. hoover, that's all. let's doubt those who doubt hoover. >> hoover, hoover was famous.

he wasn't a politician, and he was probably as unlikely a politician as you could find. politics, as you know, is a team sport, and hoover didn't like to work with ore people. with other people. politics is a very tribal activity, and hoover wouldn't belong to any of the conventional tribes, democrat or republican, liberal, conservative, internationalist, nationalist. he had his own view of america, and he wanted to be true to that, and he looked at the parties more or less as steppingstones to his ambition to be president. he, i guess by personal traditions, he was a republican. his family had been republican. his uncle who had raised him had

been a republican, and the republicans were more or less the party of business at the time, so it made sense that he'd go with the republican party, and he did. but he did not ever have good relationships with the party grandees, with the party establishment, and he was always viewed as something of an outsider in republican circles. >> yes, that's right. and that's something margaret hoover has also written about. he wrote a book about american individualism which was hoover's manifesto. and just in a word or two, because i want to be sure to get to the big depression, the big controversy, tell us about his manifesto in the early '20s. >> hoover believed that what really made american -- america great in the first place was its notion of individualism. and it wasn't a las say fair

notion -- laissez-faire notion of every man for himself, it was the idea that everything great that happened in the life of the country came at the beginning from individual initiative and individual genius, individual inspiration. and he thought that a society and a government should do everything it could to encourage in each and every individual the kind of striving and hard work that would allow a person to flourish and give whatever was in the person to give. he believe that government should be set up to encourage that in every human being regardless of race, creed or economic status and that it should do so by making sure that every individual had access to the basic necessities of life, that people had food, clothing,

shelter, education and whatever else they needed to get a fair start in life. it was rooted, in fact, in lincoln's idea of the fair chance. it was a very, i think, sensible and admirable view of america, and it was the lodestar for hoover through the whole of his political career. >> and we will get to it later, but the irony of being the rescuer who is unable to rescue. >> uh-huh. >> that -- and you can feel the shadows of it before -- hoover was commerce secretary under presidents harding and coolidge, and before we get to how he bridled in the position, not quite powerful enough and was -- tell us a little bit about what he did. because he was extremely active. the commerce department had a

reputation of being kind of sleepy. it was rellively new, and it was -- relatively new, and it was said that you put the light on at the lighthouses and you put the fishes to bed at night. [laughter] but hoover was a man of business, and he really utilized the position to cause changes in industry and cause attitudes in industry to change. could you say a little bit about that? >> the hardest part of this book to the write was about the commerce years of hoover, eight years in that position. and it's because there is so much to talk about. there is just so much that he did in those eight years, and there's so much material. i, frankly, didn't know how i was going to get through that. and i think that's why i'm the first guy to ever write a start-to-finish biography of hoover by himself, is because there's just so much in there. but he, he basically laid the

foundation for the contemporary broadcast industry for both radio and for television. he laid the foundations of commercial aviation. he organized the nation's traffic systems. he laid the groundwork for the explosion of suburbs in america in the middle of the century. there was almost nothing that he didn't have his hand in in the government at that time. he was called secretary of commerce and undersecretary of everything else. and he was kind of greedy as commerce minister about the scope of his responsibilities. he was always trying to steal departments or agencies and jurisdiction from his fellow cabinet ministers which from

time to time made him rather unpopular. but he had the confidence of both harding and coolidge. and in both of those governments, he was seen as the force for progress in modernization because of his relationship to all the new technologies that were coming on and great projects like the boulder dam, now known as the hoover dam. so he was empowered by both of those presidents to work on a lot of things well beyond the scope of what traditionally had been the commerce department because he was effective and able to put the governments that they ran in a more bullish, progressive light. and by progressive i don't mean in the political sense, i mean more in the sense of we're doing constructive things on behalf of

the american people. >> oh, yeah, tell them a little bit about the moment of television. >> uh-huh. hoover was actually the first man on television. they didn't even know what it was called at the time he was on it, but the man who i think -- the men who i think were, i may be wrong about this, but i think it was rca who set it up between washington and new york. they set up a connection, and hoover sitting in his office in washington was seen and heard at the same time on a screen in new york. it was a huge story, made the front pages of all the newspapers here, and it was probably still another 15 to 20 years before it became commercially popular. but hoover does have the claim to being the first guy to appear on screen. >> well, what you're getting at, ken, and he gets at this so beautifully in the book, is also the question of philosophy of

government. does the federal government cause change, or does it showcase change? and he was more in the showcase mode. this was a media opportunity not just because he liked to see himself in an important situation, but because he more than most members of the cabinet at least would grasp the possibility of television in the '20s. think, you know, and you want to ask why was, you know, rca stock was very high. it's one of the famously high stocks of '29. and there's whole rafts of economic work on this. the question is, was rca stock really, really too high or somewhat too high? because what it promised was television. and it wouldn't be another 15, 20 years before we had television, but sometimes that's priced into a stock right now, the potential for something. and he got this.

>> uh-huh. >> we move now to, though, the question of being secretary of commerce and undersecretary of everything else, and before we get to the depression a little bit about how he interacted with president coolidge particularly and mello to n. and i want -- melon, and i want to read a quote of lou hoover's, mrs. hoover's -- because president coolidge, who i'll be representing for the minutes -- [laughter] was a much more silent type and was a little unnerved when hoover would come around and show how effective and knowledgeable and modern and good at business and popular and all he was. and it was clear that hoover wasn't going to stop at commerce, right? and, well, what about coolidge? he only was elect his first time -- elected his first time, and was he going to have two terms, or was hoover going to

take -- so two men of very different types. and mrs. hoover, and i've never seen this before, you undug this, heard rumors that hoover was pushing coolidge, the commerce secretary was pushing the president a little too much, and she said daddy is playing ball in a team, she wrote in a letter, in a family letter. and whether anyone persuaded him to run for the presidency or not, he certainly would not do it directly or indirectly while calvin coolidge was still apparently thinking of it for, of course, he would never plot against a man who was captain of the team. [laughter] and we all, we are all disingenuous, every one of us, about our vanity and our pride, so i thought that was very, very compelling. and i'm sure both were true. hoover would never plot against coolidge and of course he would. >> yeah. he had no problem plotting against coolidge. [laughter] one of the fascinating things about lou hoover, her letters to

her sons -- which amity just quoted -- were indispensable to me because hoover himself, he wasn't, you know, an introspective type. he didn't keep diaries, he didn't write long letters to friends explaining how he felt about this things. so if you want to know what the mood was in the family at any given time, you've got to go to lou and lou's letters to her children, and that's when you really see what's going on in the household. to an extent, lou is a very good source, but there are times when she's a bit unreliable. and this is one. because hoover was ambitious, and he had started thinking about replacing harding in harding's first term. and then i'm sure or the moment that coolidge was elected, he started thinking about when he was going to replace coolidge. he was an ambitious man.

and after the midterms in 1926, he started to actively organize a campaign team that, he did it in a stealthy way, but he started to lay the groundwork for his own presidency in 1928, and he excused it to himself on the grounds that, well, other candidates out there were organizing, so why can't i too. as long as i am respectful of coolidge and as long as i'm not seen to be elbowing him to the wings. and so he was doing this, he was having meetings with his stealth campaign team all the time, but whenever lou came around, they'd stop talking politics. lou didn't really like the fact that he was so ambitious, and she was of the view -- as a remarkable number of people

around hoover were -- that he was just climbing the, you know, up the slippery pole by his being dragged up there by other forces, not trying to climb himself. he was a man without ambition who was just serving the public. which wasn't at all the case. he was very deliberate, and he got along very well with coolidge for the first couple of years that they worked together. but as soon as it became clear to coolidge that hoover was a man in a hurry, hair relationship soured. -- their relationship soured x. that's when you get quotes from coolidge complaining about the boy wonder, hoover, and how this man had given me nothing but bad advice for the last several years. the relationship never really recovered, and coolidge tortured hoover in the last year of

coolidge's regime by not saying that he was going to retire. even after after he had announced his retirement, by refusing to endorse hoover. and hoover was scared to death right up to the last minute that coolidge was going to decide to run again, and hoover would have to stand aside because it would be the right thing to do. >> yes, exactly. and you tell that so wonderfully. it's not always given to us to pick our successor. >> no. >> i want to move to the great depression though, because this is the meat of your story. and where you are most plausible, by the way. [laughter] let's start with that. >> did you write a letter to -- [laughter] >> absolutely. >> thank you. >> absolutely. [laughter] in 1928 hoover wins election. he was popular. he was a popular republican. the economy is strong. 1929 he is inaugurated.

coolidge goes back to northampton, massachusetts. the stock market goes very high, double what it was quite recently to 381, and then it crashes in the end of august -- sorry, september, october, november '29, right? that's the beginning of the crash. and it goes on and on until all through the hoover presidency until the market is down more than 80%, i believe close to 90%. 40 something. that's so dramatic. historians depict this as hoover's fault. and what you do so wonderfully is you lay out the case that he almost rescued the economy, and that's why we need two more minutes two or three timings. i think you say three times. so we give a bit to each of those. and that his successors -- that would be, unfortunately, i'm sorry, president roosevelt to be saying this in your house --

president roosevelt and the democratic party put the economy, you contend, back into a tail spin. so let's first talk about the three rescues and then what the successors did wrong or could have done better, and then we'll given to close out the session for questions. >> i wasn't going to talk about any of this in respect to the -- [laughter] venue, but since you brought it up. [laughter] after the markets crashed in 1929, hoover did a series of things designed to support public confidence. he saw that in past depressions the thing that had tended to drag them out was that people were afraid to trust the economy again after a market crash. they wouldn't spend money, and everything ground to a halt. so after the crash of '29, he

called businessmen to washington and said, look, we're going to have a depression. we've had a stock market crash, we may have a recession after this, but recent recessions -- all the recessions, in fact, since the fed was established, federal reserve backing in 1913, all of them have been short, so let's count on this one being short. and you businessmen, don't do what you always do and lay off rafts of people just because times are bad. let's just wait this out, you share pain with your workers, and we'll get through this. and the businessmen agreed and labor agreed that it wouldn't go on strike are, and everyone agreed that we would stand firm in the wake of this market crash and that the crisis would pass in about six months, and everything would be fine. hoover was applauded by pretty much all opinion in america at the time whether you go to

washington post, the new times, new york herald tribune, they were all unanimous in support of hoover's actions. in fact, they credited him with doing something new with the presidency, what they call adding a psychological dimension to the presidency. he was encouraging people. he was essentially saying you have nothing to fear but fear itself. and in this way, they were all going to get through the crisis together. unfortunately and despite all economic prediction at the time, it wasn't over in six months. it kept going on and on. and then there was in 1931 a new dimension to it when the european economy crashed. ..

essentially to put all of these issues of who owed what to whom to the side until the economy had healed and it worked for a time again and he was given an enormous credit for it, but again, it didn't last and the old animosities resumed. the economy continued down.

his last great effort, the centerpiece was the reconstruction finance corporation which was designed to help the banking sector which was in rough shape by 1992. it was enormously successful for a time. in the last month of hoover's term, pretty much every economic indicator you want to look at was on its way up. productivity was on its way up, prices were stabilized, employment was coming back up. by october it was about 75 points. everything looked to be going in the right direction. then the election happens. hoover loses.

there is a democratic congress and the democrats decided that the reconstruction finance was given money to bankers and that wasn't a good thing. they were bailing out, the government was bailing out bankers and industrialists and not looking after the people so they started publicizing in congress the names of the banks that were going to the reconstruction finance corporation for assistance. of course when you start publicizing which banks are wea weak, people flee from those banks. that's exactly what happens. they stopped going to the reconstruction finance corporation and as a result, the banking sector went back into a tailspin and the recovery stalled. the second reason it stalled and this is not my theory, this is from barry who is probably the best economists on the subject, on the gold

standard, roosevelts uncertain position, whether or not he would keep america on the gold standard caused a lot of uncertainty itself in financial circles and cause a lot of gold to leave the country and not further undermined the recovery. so between roosevelt election in 32 and his swearing-in in march of 33, this recovery that he had got underway began to collapse and hoover had a whole bunch more plans to counter that including to quit publicizing the names of the rereconstruction finance customers and things like that, and he tried to get congress to work with him.

one of the things i found in the course of my research, they were all looking past hoover to roosevelt and roosevelt had been very clear with them that he wanted nothing to happen. he wanted to deal with the depression on his own watch and solve it in his own way. he didn't want hoover solving it before he could get to office himself, and as one person put it, it was as if the administration was trying to pull this economy out of the water and they got it back up only to have the democrats and roosevelt to get back into the water to have the honors

of rescuing it themselves. >> i know there will be some good questions about that. before we go to questions, i want to mention all biographers stand on the shoulders of biographers. i want to mention george nash who has done so much work minute by minute and that's one reason he never finished all the way although he's done a lot of it, is the careful attention to detail. the first to suggest that he was a progressive and there is plenty of evidence for that and that's what can looks into and showcases red this is all a collective effort. you're more of a collectivist, clearly, then herbert, because

we all couldn't do what we do without working with one another. the last question for you has to do with president trump because we are here and now. tell us about president trump and president hoover. are there any similarities? any differences to people of business? >> well, as far as i know they very are the only two typhoons to make it to the white house, and i think they each have their problems as a result of being a typ typhoon. i don't think they're very similar at all his people. hoover was probably the hardest working chief executive of all time and he

revered the office of the president. he never embarrassed at all during his time in power and he left with a remarkably scandal free record especially considering some of the things that happen not to long. he was a very serious and sincere earnest public servant and i think that's just a little bit different than what we are dealing with now. [laughter] they were both businessmen. they were both tycoons. they were very accustomed to running their own show and running it from the top and having people do what they said in a very autocratic approach which was common among business executives.

they both came to washington and were reluctant to work any other way than the way they've always worked. so for hoover who is not only a businessman but a scientist, a trained geologist, he wanted to find the best way to answer a question, the smartest way, the most direct way to the problem for an up to optimal outcome. he was collecting data like crazy. he was bringing experts and calling conferences of experts in washington constantly in order to analyze public policy questions and find the optima optimal results and then he would hopefully go to congress and get them to rubberstamp that. he didn't like politics, he didn't want to deal with all the backslapping dealmaking that goes on in congress all the tim time. they come out with all these compromise deals that are far less than optimal policy

solutions and hoover wanted to avoid that. it didn't work. you can't get anything done in washington without dealing with congress and the ones who have historically dealt with them best got the most on. it wasn't until the second half of the mandate that he realized he was going to have to change the way he worked and he got, he rolled up his sleeves and got down and dirty with congress and actually got quite a lot accomplished. the issue with trump is somewhat different. he also doesn't like to share power with congress. he doesn't like to be overseen , he likes to be front and center all the time. his solution to trying to run

congress is to tweet or hold a rally or sign an executive order. he is going to run into exactly the same problems that hoover did. you can't work autocratic liana thomas lee in congress. >> very interesting. we think the audience and we are ready for questions. first question. >> this lady right here. >> have a question about his early life. what were the influences in his childhood and in his environment that caused him to be a person with so much confidence, so much drive, so much ambition and so much self empowerment that he could achieve everything he wanted to achieve. >> it was a one stop sign town

he grew up in, a tiny little place without much to it. there were no theaters, there was a school but no sports fields, there was very little in th the way of worldly and amenities but his parents were fairly well-educated and they were community leaders. his mother was a quaker minister and his father was on the town council and so on. they were not very wealthy, but they were empowered within their community and they saw themselves as responsible to the rest of the community. they saw their role to support people around them.

>> thank you so much. my name is chris gates. thank you both for your scholarship and how you've opened up this important period of american history. i've got a question for each of you. the question is, is there anything about ken's scholarship that has opened up anything about calvin coolidge or caused you to reconsider anything that you have thought about coolidge up until his work, and ken, do you want to talk about your role of the federal reserve during the hoover years? >> kent reveals through quality research, the disingenuous aspect of calvin coolidge. i will say that, but also then highlights the agony, it's not

given to us to pick our successor when we are in power and when you turn around and leave, as coolidge opted to, he might've run against, you expect the world will follow you and applaud you and say wonderful man for going and there's this deafening sound as they all go run to follow the next person. thank you. >> i want to thank her. i've learned a lot from the coolidge book and the forgotten man. i don't think i would've had the courage to follow where the research was taking me on some of these questions if i hadn't seen her do it before me. it's all part of a big conversation and it builds and

builds over time. the federal reserve was very useful in the early years of the depression, and the reason there was no bank collapses, while there isn't any major banking crisis until quite late in the depression was because the federal reserve in atlanta and in new york reacted very well to signs of stress in the system initially. but then when things got really bad and some of the banks looked not just challenged but actually insolvent, the federal reserve bank didn't see it as its role to bailout insolvent banks. at that point it was kind of useless.

[inaudible] can you elaborate on the point that he made. >> 1932 election, we are both trying to get at the same thing which is the uncertainty generated when you have a shift, and that's true every time. this is not all one person's fault or the other, but in a time of economic crisis, of course uncertainty matters more. if they had a index it would've gone crazy, if they had future, so that's what i worked on two. since the forgotten man came out and in the time you've been working on this, there are new indices being created to look at uncertainty. i believe it's davis david at

the university of chicago who has an uncertainty index because it can be damaging. and it's not always optimal. >> we both, every president wants a clean slate. it was just a particularly tough time for roosevelt to turn around and ignore hoover and his letter, missing 1o. the other person who wrote wrote well about that is perhaps jonathan welter. >> why didn't hoover avoid veto. [inaudible] >> you recall what i said

about hoover in politics and not really understanding politics and not really wanting to work with congress. he let him run away with smoot-hawley and they did. that was part of the learning process. at the end of the day, the tariffs were real political defeat for hoover and they showed him to be not the political genius he was said to be when he went into office. it took tariff rates in the u.s. from slightly high to hire at a time when international trade was of minimal importance to the economy.

economically what mattered more was the fact that hoover showed himself unable to command the republican congress and showed himself vulnerable to a lot of the personalities on the hill. >> i've been perusing your book. it's a terrific read. we also feature mr. hoover in our world war i exhibit for his contribution so we may be the house of the roosevelt, but we also like to respect history. here's my question. how did hoover and his fellow republicans so underestimate roosevelt in this election? he had been reelected governor by 700,000 votes. he had mastered the medium of radio, he gave great speeches

and although people knew he was crippled, that did not deter the support for him. how did this happen that he and his associates did not recognize what a strong candidate he was? >> he not only thought he was the week candidate but he also wanted roosevelt to win because he thought he would be the least opposition. he wasn't alone without opinion. a lot of republicans believe that a lot of others believed it. he thought he was more or less a parity, talking out of both sides of his mouth, having no real convictions, and that was

not an uncommon view. he was a lightweight. i went back and read all those campaign speeches. you can see why they had a low opinion of him. roosevelt was talking outside both sides of his mouth. he was making a lot of wild accusations. he talked about hoover as being a crook and he said he was a crook and he was working with the other five crooks who control the entire economy in america at the time. these were not the utterances

of the next woodrow wilson. he didn't come across to a lot of people, especially the more intelligent abundance as a credible candidate, but what roosevelt did have and you allude to was a kind of political genius. he knew, he knew how to go about finding finding and bringing together large groups of people which at the end of the day is what matters in politics, and he was really a genius at that, probably a as quickly as anyone in american politics, and hoover, not being a political type himself entirely underestimated the worst of those talents that roosevelt had, and it wasn't until late in the campaign

that he began to see that roosevelt was far more ready than he anticipated. it was just published five years ago where he had very unorthodox views of the postwar including the pearl harbor was not a sneak attack and that they were looking for a backdoor war and we had no business in the war. do you think they will ever come around to that kind of thinking in the public? >> no.

people have a hard time imagining it could have happened any other way. this book that he wrote and was never published, it was actually about a thousand pages. the alternative view of the start and conduct of the second world war, i don't think there was anything terribly outrageous about it. if the second world war was prevented or if it was going

to go another way, if it was generally recognized that some of the actions toward japan by america were provocative and hoover thought much too provocative. they thought hoover was giving encouragement to britain and france in the lead up to the war and as a result britain and france were playing a lot tougher with germany than they needed to, they did think germany would eventually go to war and they wanted hitler to go east which is where hitler was looking to go originally and it didn't matter much who is not a friend of rusher or

admirer of congress, didn't matter that they were looking to go east and he would've been happy to see them exhaust themselves in a fight. it makes for a very interesting counterfactual read and makes you think hard about whether things really needed to happen the way they did or not. hoover was a very intelligent man, he hated roosevelt and that comes true, all of that text and there are parts of it that are a bit overwrought that there are a lot of interesting arguments in it. >> we want to thank mr. white. [applause] wonderful, readable look into

herbert. thank you for hosting this session. may our good move move over into the world of politics. >> thank you very much. [applause] >> here's a look at some of the best books of the year. according to amazon, edward liszt, chief columnist for the financial times argues that the liberal democracy is threatened in the retreat of western liberalism. in the last castle, denyse karen reports on biltmore house, the largest resident in american history. tom nichols, professor of security affairs argues that

due to the spread of the internet and 24 hour news, expert opinion is now being discounted in the death of expertise. you've all. [inaudible] the buzzfeed essays on her upbringing as a daughter of immigrants in canada. one day we will all be dead and none of this will matter. >> in my eighth grade biology class our teacher gave us a checklist of dominated versus recessive to teach us about how babies come out looking the way they do. the subtext from this nationalistic teacher appeared to me years later that we are all end up looking darker and more bag than we did in the past. she wasn't exactly unhappy about it, but she did express some concern regarding the eventual loss of the blue-eyed

natural blonde. we were paired up with someone of the opposite sex so we could compare jeans and determine what our potential child would look like. let me drive this home. a public school teacher in suburban calgary told her teenage students to pretend they were going to have sex with each other and their biologically likely babies. i was one of the only ethnic kids in the class and my jeans were already steamrolling everyone else's. my partner, eric who was a white boy for a holster t-shirt went down the checklist with me. when we arrived at hair, fingers or knuckles, i looked down at my hands for what seemed like the very first time. standing up from the meat of my fingers were soft black strands of hair. i was horrified. how had i never noticed such a grotesque feature. i always knew my legs were hairy in my arms were covered but i had overlooked this new barbarity. i don't have any he said looking up at me while i hid my hands under the desk that i nodded and said me neither.

>> some of these authors have appeared on the tv. you can watch them on our website book to be at.org. booktv.org. >> you are watching the tv. here's our lineup. they recall the life of bonnie mellon. the designer of the white house rose garden and a close friend of jaclyn kennedy. then victor davis hanson recounts the key points of world war ii. on afterwords, jenness discusses her grandfather. at 10:00 p.m. new york university pastor linda gordon reports on the 1920s resurgence of the ku klux klan. we wrap up our programming with steve villano. he recalls working for mario cuomo where histh