Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. Today, as August 3rd, 2010, and my guest is David Kennedy of Stanford University,

is the author of many books, including Freedom from Fear, the American People in Depression and

War, 1929 through 1945. David, welcome to Econ Talk. I'm glad to be here. I want to start by

talking about the Great Depression and bring our conversation forward to the present economic and

political situation. If we have time at the end, I want to talk about the nature of history. Starting

with the Great Depression in the 1930s, one view of the Great Depression is that Hoover stood by doing

nothing as the economy collapsed, paralyzed by its free market principles. Roosevelt came to the

rescue with the New Deal, saved the economy and democracy. What's true and false about this view?

Well, that view does capture a lot of our folkloric understanding of that passage in our history. The

fact is that Herbert Hoover was the legatee of the old early 20th century progressive tradition. He

cast his first presidential ballot for the Bull Moose Party of Theta Roosevelt in 1912. He served in

Woodrow Wilson's cabinet as the wartime food administrator. He was sought by both parties as a

progressive presidential candidate in 1920. He ended up becoming a declaring himself a Republican.

But he was very much inherited that progressive era impulse to try to use the power of

government to solve social and economic problems or to address them commensually with their

gravity as they presented themselves in the 20th century. Part of the progressive agenda was to

build governmental institutions that were on a scale that equaled what the economy and the

society had become as the Constitution was written in the 18th century. So interestingly,

...