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Campaigning for Herbert Hoover
(by Ed Flynn - January 23, 2008)
Being a political buff I’ve been watching the Republican and Democratic primaries with the same intense interest as a football fan watching the playoffs and wondering who is going to make it to the Super Bowl.
Actually my own involvement in political campaigns dates all the way to when I was 10 years old. That would make the year 1932 when I was growing up in Bergenfield and I distinctly remember going around the neighborhood and scrawling “Vote for
Hoover ” in chalk on the sidewalk.
In 1932 the nation was already in the grasp of the Great Depression and
Hoover , who kept claiming he could glimpse prosperity “just around the corner” was running against Franklin Roosevelt. Of course since campaigning for Herbert Hoover couldn’t have been my own idea, I’m sure it was an attempt to please my dad although I’ve never been able to understand why he would have been supporting
Hoover . After all, we’d only recently moved from
New York City ’s Hell’s Kitchen, a stronghold of Irish Democratic politics where dad had not only been raised but still worked in his mother’s blue collar restaurant on Ninth Avenue.
Maybe it was because dad, like others who had managed to move their families from the city’s jungle of tenements to their own home in the still sparsely populated suburbs saw himself as a success in life; a self-reliant man to whom Roosevelt’s promise to come to the aid of “the forgotten man” didn’t apply.
Mom, as I recall, had little to say about politics in those days but then voting for President was a pretty new idea for women in 1932 and maybe she hadn’t gotten the hang of it yet. The 19th amendment giving women the right to vote hadn’t even been ratified until 1920 when she was already 22 years old.
Another possible explanation for dad’s endorsement of
Hoover , however, may be that we had actually seen him in person. Well sort of. Earlier that fall my dad had packed the family – my mom, my sister Virginia and me – in our still almost brand new 1930 Chevrolet and we drove all the way to
Valley Forge where the president was to going to speak. It was an adventurous journey on the then narrow roads that wound their way across New Jersey to the distant
Delaware River . Once we had made it to
Pennsylvania we spent the night in a tourist cabin, one of those miniature wooden cottages you still see along some back country roads looking like a set for a Depression era gangster movie.
The next morning I remember standing on a hillside overlooking a sprawling field that was filled with people and far away – so far away that it appeared like an image seen through the wrong end of a telescope – was a platform decorated with American flags. Eventually a tiny figure appeared and my dad leaned down and whispered in my ear, “That’s the President of the , Edward.” He told me to remember that day. And I have.
I have no idea what Herbert Hoover said on that day. I’m sure I didn’t really much care, not anymore than I would have cared if someone had told me when I was 10 years old that Japan was beginning to expand its empire by invading Manchuria or that in Germany the National Socialist German Workers Party, called the Nazis for short and headed by someone named Adolph Hitler, had just won a majority of the seats in the Reichstag. Things like that didn’t matter to a 10-year-old kid.
What did matter was that in 1932 the New York Yankees trounced the Chicago Cubs in the World Series. It went only four games and Babe Ruth electrified the crowd in one of them when, with two strikes on him, he seemed to point to the bleachers at Wrigley Field and then sent the next pitch into them. Some people maintained the Babe wasn’t really pointing to the stands, that maybe he was just shooing away a fly, and Ruth himself never confirmed or denied the gesture, but we kids were always sure he’d done it.
As for
Hoover , despite my campaigning for him he lost that election by a landslide.
Roosevelt ’s New Deal was enacted and when my dad died in 1979 among the things I found in his wallet was his Social Security card, the hallmark of that legislation. Dad may not have considered himself one of FDR’s “Forgotten Men” in 1932, but when I reflect on how much he and mom depended on those Social Security checks in their declining years I can’t help but think he was probably grateful he had been remembered anyway.
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