President Woodrow Wilson and Edward Mandell House

One of the worst stock market crashes and deepest recessions in our history occurred after WWI, starting during the last months of the Wilson Administration and extending into the Harding years. Harding’s Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, urged government sponsored construction and other projects, paying for them with financing provided by government bonds, meaning debt or expropriation of future earnings.

Harding disagreed & instead lowered taxes and decreased regulations. Voila, within 18 months, the recession had corrected.

Hoover was an engineer, by schooling, and was likely a technocrat. Harding died and was succeeded by Calvin Coolidge who set about paying off the national debt, that because of Democrat Wilson’s War to Make the World Safe for Democracy, had soared to a staggering $4 billion. By the time Coolidge left office, it was down to $2 billion.

Herbert Hoover ran and won in 1928. Nineteen months after he took office, the infamous stock market crash of 1929 began a series of events that enabled Franklin D. Roosevelt to impose his enslaving New Deal, which consisted mostly of ‘solutions’ Hoover had proposed but couldn’t get through Congress.

FDR achieved his personal goal of looking like he was doing something, appearances were always important to him, while prolonging it from 18 months to 14 years. Among FDR’s admirers was an Austrian born German chancellor named Adolf Hitler who was maneuvering to consolidate his power. He modeled his Youth Corps after Roosevelt’s Civil Conservaton Corps.

These things are not part of American common knowledge. They should be.

April 8, 2022

~ About the Author ~
Dr. Roderick T. Beaman is a board certified family osteopathic physician who practices in Jacksonville, Florida. A native born New Yorker, he is happy to be out of that pit of liberalism. A libertarian with little use for government, he is the author of an on-line piece that won a Ron Paul Liberty in Media Award. He also is a composer.