Student Question
Why was the Hoover administration ineffective during the Great Depression?
Quick answer:
The Hoover administration was ineffective during the Great Depression due to its reluctance to implement government intervention. Hoover, a conservative Republican, believed in self-reliance over government aid, which led to minimal and insufficient government programs. When Hoover eventually recognized the need for intervention, his efforts were too conservative and lacked the scale necessary to significantly address the economic crisis, unlike the later New Deal programs.
The reason for this was that the Hoover administration did not believe in government action that was meant to help people. It eventually did try some of this, but it was not willing to be very aggressive in such efforts.
Hoover was a conservative Republican who believed that the people should help themselves rather than relying on the government to help them. For that reason, he did not want to create government programs to help alleviate the Great Depression. When he finally came to realize that such programs might be necessary, he was not willing to create really big programs like those of the New Deal. The programs he did create were not big enough to make much of a dent in the problems people were facing because of the Depression.
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