This entire comment seemed really odd, so I thought I'd poll Manifold to see what it's users think about the last part.
Was Herbert Hoover the better man?
This doesn't strictly relate to their presidency, but can include things they did outside of it.
Curious to hear peoples' thoughts in the comments.
Related questions
FDR had a greater positive impact on the world strictly because fighting WW2 was extremely important but that's less to do with FDR and more to do with the circumstances that he became President- I think Hoover would have done a similar job. Hoover was one of the most extraordinary and charitable men who ever lived and constantly went out of his way to help random people who he never met. FDR seems like a generally okay person, but I've never heard of him being extraordinarily charitable or kind, and he was very ruthless to his enemies. FDR did grow up pretty rich (even in the midst of WW2, his NYT obit was titled 'Family of Wealth gave Advantages') and I don't think he was fabulously charitable despite that. FDR also did not exactly lead a super competent organization, but that's orthogonal to how good a person he was. If I needed to trust one of them with my life, I'd pick Hoover and it's not particularly close.
I'll just leave this here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/17/book-review-hoover/
Hoover was the first (and only?) engineer president, a logistics genius, a great humanitarian (having saved the country of Belgium from starvation during WWI), and an adult-in-the-room with good diplomatic instincts, e.g. that France shouldn't be forcing Germany into debt after WWI, who believed in peace over war.
If I had to say something nice about FDR, it'd be that he was one of the OG mad scientist baron presidents, who tried a whole bunch of programs to see what might help.
@JamesGrugett Is the general anti-Communist fervor here so intense that people are really this eager to rehabilitate the ardent racist & big-time loser Herbert Hoover?
This idea that he was a friend to the Bonus Army is particularly repugnant. He sent in MacArthur to bludgeon & murder them!
>(having saved the country of Belgium from starvation during WWI)
As the very review you linked points out, that stands in stark contrast to NOT helping save his own citizenry from starvation. How's that heroic?
Disturbing also to swallow Whyte's biases so eagerly. He's a man who idolizes William Randolph Hearst, & who thinks Ralph Nader's quest for seatbelts was a bridge too far. Irrational to put his work on such a pedestal.
@ChurlishGambit Lol, dude, it's just a fun poll. One in which FDR is crushing Hoover.
The post James linked offered a lot of new information that I didn't know about Hoover, and it mentioned Whyte's biases multiple times.
Instead of reducing the world into this black-and-white idea of good and bad, it might be more helpful for you to start thinking of humans as complex beings, that can be both good and bad in different respects.
Is the general anti-Communist fervor here so intense that people are really this eager to rehabilitate the ardent racist & big-time loser Herbert Hoover?
What a strange thing to say in this context. How many people were killed or otherwise had their lives destroyed as a result of Hoover's racism? Keep in mind that we are comparing him to someone who put at least 125,284 people in concentration camps because of their ethnicity, killing at least 1,869 of them.
I don't like anything I know about FDR. I disagree with him about everything, but even if he had exactly the same views as me about everything, except for concentration camps and Japanese people, I would still regard him as one of the most evil people to ever hold the office of US President.
@J89502 Hoover deported over a MILLION Mexican-Americans, born in the US, because of their ethnicity. He paid cities & counties for helping the "deportation" & passing laws barring people of Mexican descent from any kind of employment. The cops would literally round up anyone who they thought appeared Mexican, & load them onto trains, then send them over the Southern border. To a country they weren't from.
He also revitalized the Lily-White Movement, & fueled the racist Southern coalition that then turned against the New Deal, & hardened into the anti-Civil Rights movement.
There is no defense for FDR's racist internment policies—neither the brutal internment of Japanese & Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, nor the lesser internment of Germans & Italians, & German-Americans & Italian-Americans, on the East Coast. But Hoover's got him beat by a mile
@ChurlishGambit I did not know about that, and I absolutely do not defend it. It's completely indefensible. However, I still think FDR was likely worse.
It is difficult to find information about how many people were killed by Hoover. The Wikipedia article doesn't mention death at all. One source says that "many died" and gives one example:
Balderrama and Rivera wrote that infants and the elderly, pregnant women, the sick and the mentally ill suffered the most, and many died along the way. One of Mexico City’s leading newspapers, El Excélsior, reported that 25 children and adults died on one repatriation train just on the trip to the border. Many repatriates fell victim to the scare tactics used and neglected to report to their consuls, arriving at the border without necessary documentation.
https://epcc.libguides.com/c.php?g=754275&p=6235176
I think it's unlikely that it approaches FDR's death toll because I think I should be able to find more examples if the deaths were in the thousands or more.
It also seems like most of Hoover's victims left in a self-organized manner motivated by a combination of factors, such as wanting to avoid formal deportation or other forms of racist violence from both state and non-state actors, and the Mexican government's promise of free land. That doesn't excuse Hoover, but it does mean that the process seems to have been less dangerous than one would otherwise expect.
As for those who survived, I think being put in a concentration camp is significantly worse than being deported to a foreign country. I would definitely prefer to be deported to almost anywhere in the world rather than be put in a camp, especially as I would never be able to feel safe in the country that put me in the camp after being released and would therefore want to leave anyway. Obviously, different people will feel differently, but I think most would rank concentration camps over deportations in the hierarchy of horrible things governments do to people.
@J89502
>It also seems like most of Hoover's victims left in a self-organized manner motivated by a combination of factors
As I just told you, the cops were beating people & rounding them up onto trains lol
I just don't get why, after learning all that, you're still trying to stump for Hoover?
>I think I should be able to find more examples if the deaths were in the thousands or more.
Well, no, how would you? We didn't exactly follow up with the folks we kicked out of the country. We don't have serious data on how their lives went.
& as far as ranking "deportation" higher...remember, these were primarily AMERICAN CITIZENS. They weren't being sent back to their own country, they were being forcibly ejected from their native country. They were stripped of all rights & sent away. This & internment are similarly evil acts, in many ways. I feel like your mind may be working to downplay this, unconsciously, in order to get past the cognitive dissonance of learning that Hoover was not a superhero
As I just told you, the cops were beating people & rounding them up onto trains lol
My point is that many people seem to have left before that happened to them, which means that they traveled in a manner that is less likely to have resulted in their death. As I said, that doesn't excuse Hoover in any way, it just means that the death toll was likely lower than otherwise. It also seems like cops kept beating people and rounding them up onto trains under FDR, although at a lower rate.
Well, no, how would you? We didn't exactly follow up with the folks we kicked out of the country. We don't have serious data on how their lives went.
It's unlikely that living in Mexico would come with a risk of death approaching that of living in FDR's camps. The fact that FDR was responsible for the conditions in the camps while Hoover was not responsible for the conditions in Mexico is also at least somewhat relevant. We also don't know anything about how many people died from causes related to the camps after being released, and we don't have a complete picture of deaths in the camps either.
I'm not denying that Hoover was both a bad person and a bad president, but I do thing FDR was worse on both counts.
>I'm not denying that Hoover was both a bad person and a bad president
Well I'm glad you've come around on that, at least
@carl Took your suggestion and created this: https://manifold.markets/houstonEuler/who-is-manifolds-goat-round-of-64-p