TIL

[timelets]

Herbert Hoover got almost 40% of the vote in 1932.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1932_United_States_presidential_election

Comments

[tijd]

A good article about the differences between Hoover (an engineer) and Roosevelt (a politician):

“We think that we don’t need politicians; we even think that we’d be better off without them. The truth is that in a democracy, especially during a national emergency, they’re the only people who can get things done.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/23/hating-on-herbert-hoover

Годы Гувера (1929-1932) совпали со сталинской пятилеткой, во время которой американские инженеры осуществили индустриализацию непризнанного СССР.





Разбогатев на постройке советских нефтеперерабатывающих заводов, Фред Кох, отец известных братьев, стал одним из основателей John Birch Society и родоначальников параноидного направления в американской консервативной политике.

Fred attended M.I.T., where he earned a degree in chemical engineering. In 1927, he invented a more efficient process for converting oil into gasoline, but, according to family lore, America’s major oil companies regarded him as a threat and shut him out of the industry. Unable to succeed at home, Koch found work in the Soviet Union. In the nineteen-thirties, his company trained Bolshevik engineers and helped Stalin’s regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries. Over time, however, Stalin brutally purged several of Koch’s Soviet colleagues. Koch was deeply affected by the experience, and regretted his collaboration. He returned to the U.S. In the headquarters of his company, Rock Island Oil & Refining, in Wichita, he kept photographs aimed at proving that some of those Soviet refineries had been destroyed in the Second World War. Gus diZerega, a former friend of Charles Koch, recalled, “As the Soviets became a stronger military power, Fred felt a certain amount of guilt at having helped build them up. I think it bothered him a lot.”
In 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover. Members considered President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be a Communist agent. In a self-published broadside, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties.” He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy, and disparagingly of the American civil-rights movement. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” he warned. Welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech that prefigures the Tea Party’s talk of a secret socialist plot, Koch predicted that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations

[timelets]

Thanks for the link. Hoover was a technocrat in Henry Ford's mold. Unfortunately, his engineering talents were of no use for the country in the Great Depression.