Margaret Hoover

speaker

359 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 5 Aug

Margaret Hoover’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The David Frum Show · Was Herbert Hoover America’s Most Misunderstood President? · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

Hoover certainly made mistakes.

I mean, there's conservatives begrudge him for raising taxes when they shouldn't have, for forcing wages to be lower.

He tried to get industry to keep wages even and so sort of tampered with the free markets.

Certainly there are mistakes that were made on Hoover's side.

And yet...

You know, it's hard to use a modern and contemporary context and knowledge to judge those, judge him at that time, or even FDR, really.

That's certainly true.

I mean, I think the economy actually was getting better in 1931.

At least there were some signs that it was getting better in 1931.

There were also, Andrew Ross Sorkin actually documents very clearly in his book that the biggest story in the New York Times at the end of 1929 was not the stock market crash.

It was Admiral Byrd's discovery of the North Pole.

Nobody realized sort of that there was going to be this cataclysmic effect.

But what also did happen, and I think this is where Hoover really failed in his presidency and departed from his previous habits and patterns, something happened with Hoover.

And I've heard this both from his biographers and from my father and from my grandmother when she was alive.

Hoover had been masterful at managing his image in the press.

really throughout his entire career.

I mean, from the time he was in Western Australia, he was getting coverage of the successful mining operations in Australia, all through the good press he got through World War I, you know, the only man to emerge from the Odile in Paris with his reputation enhanced.

All through the Commerce Department years, he had very strong relationships with the media, the press, with reporters, journalists, and many people who helped tell his story or tell the story of what he was doing.

Something happened in the presidency where he, and this is what my father has told me, but it is complimented by a biographer's accounts, is that he believed suddenly that the American presidency was such a revered position.

that his ambition should no longer drive the efforts to shape how it was seen.

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