No, he wasn’t!
Yet, one often hears — erroneously — that Hoover was a laissez faire Republican, and that Roosevelt’s election marked a sharp break from those policies. That’s not only false, but wildly false. Hoover was a big-government Republican.
(It was Coolidge — who had numerous disagreements with Hoover — who was a defender of limited government.)
In Reason, Damon Root shows how ignorant some remarks about late twenties, early thirties American history really are:
The Atlantic’s Joshua Green just published a long profile of Rep. Ron Paul entitled “The Tea Party’s Brain.” Cato Institute Executive Vice President David Boaz also took a close look at the piece and caught Green making a pretty embarrassing factual error about President Herbert Hoover’s response to the Great Depression….
Now watch as Boaz walks Green through some American history 101:
“Hoover didn’t cut federal spending, he doubled it. He established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. He propped up wages and prices. Indeed, he launched the New Deal.…”
See, Wait, Herbert Hoover Wasn’t a Libertarian? – Hit & Run : Reason Magazine.
For a sharp description of how similar were many of Hoover’s and Roosevelt’s policies [but not their political skill in describing them], see The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. The book affords a quick corrective to ignorance and false notions about Hoover’s policies..