Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 74.

I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I'm recording this on Memorial Day, May 30th, 2022, in Austin, Texas.

If you are new to the podcast, we are telling the history of the lands now

encompassed by the United States from the beginning without presentism. This episode is a sidebar,

which is our term for an episode that is off the timeline of the history of the Americans,

really my way of signaling that the episode need not be

listened to in sequence. Apart from the company of a couple of old dogs, I've been home alone

this Memorial Day weekend on account of the misses having great fun with a girlfriend in New Orleans,

and that has given me the time to read old presidential speeches.

I like old presidential speeches, especially obscure ones. Everyone's read the Gettysburg

addressed 50 times because they reflect the audience and sensibilities of their day.

Presidents are, obviously, politicians, acutely attuned to their audience, hoping both to

say what voters want to hear and to persuade them to their side. Well, on Saturday, May 30th,

precisely 91 years ago today and two and a half years into the catastrophic Great Depression.

Herbert Hoover gave a speech on the Saturday following Memorial Day under a ferocious

sun at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. With a little background and interjected commentary, I'm going

to read it to you. Probably not quite as Hoover would have done.

At the end of the speech, I'll play a clip of Herbert Hoover's voice so you can get some sense of

what he might have sounded like on that day at Valley Forge.

Most people today, except maybe for kids who go to school in eastern Iowa and take the inevitable

field trip to the Hoover Library and West Branch, at least I hope they still do that.

Don't know much about Hoover as anything other than one of our worst presidents.

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