History of the United States II / Unit 18 USH2 2558 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The Line Hoover Would Not Cross
The idea
Entry 1368 corrects the charge that Hoover did nothing. He called business conferences, cut taxes, organised private relief, created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation with two billion dollars and signed a public works act. Entry 1365 records the Yawp's judgement that the corporation was radical in its use of direct government aid. What Hoover refused was direct federal relief to individuals: he opposed the relief bill of nineteen thirty-one, entry 1364, on the balance between state and federal power.
In practice
Loans to banks on one side, and on the other the one kind of aid Hoover would not give.
Where people slip
The line matters because the next president crossed it. Entry 1368 records that the corporation's first loans ran upward, forty-one million of its first sixty-one million dollars to three institutions, and entry 1398 gives the anchor's two-sided verdict. For theme six, Hoover's presidency is the last before the federal government accepted direct relief as its task.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it · Sources for History of the United States II