History of the United States II / Unit 10 USH2 1368 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
What Hoover Did
The idea
The familiar story says Hoover did nothing. The anchor's record contradicts it. He called business conferences to hold wages, cut taxes, created an organisation to coordinate private relief, established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation with two billion dollars, and signed a public works act of one and a half billion. What he refused was direct federal relief to individuals, and he opposed the relief bill of nineteen thirty-one on that principle.
In practice
A list of Hoover's measures, and beside it the one kind of aid he would not give.
Where people slip
The confusion to avoid is mistaking a narrow response for no response. Hoover acted, and the acting ran upward: of the corporation's first sixty-one million dollars, forty-one million went to three institutions. The line he would not cross, direct relief to the unemployed, is the line unit eleven's New Deal crossed.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
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