Coolidge runs in 1928? and the 1932 Election?

[TommyC1776]

What if Coolidge runs in 1928 and wins?  Would the Republican candidate in 1932 have done better than Hoover?

[Dr. Cynic]

The economy would've crashed no matter who was President, because the depression was a globalized one... Everybody got hit. England, France, Germany (Especially Germany), etc.

Coolidge would've gone down to defeat in 1932 the same as any incumbant would've... If it had been Al Smith, the Republicans would grab control.

[Bono]

Coolidge wouldn't have put into effect Hoover's keynesian policies that furthered the depression. Without them, it would have been a recession like any other and would've been over in a couple of years.

[Dr. Cynic]

Coolidge wouldn't have put into effect Hoover's keynesian policies that furthered the depression. Without them, it would have been a recession like any other and would've been over in a couple of years.

Your theory amazes me... Hoover believed in just what you believe in... Let the government right itself and provide as little support as possible... Clearly, you've got your history mixed up... There is little any candidate could've done to stop it, and it was not a "recession" as you put it, but a global economic collapse. Doing nothing would not have righted the economy, the government needed to intervine. If Coolidge had done less than Hoover, then midwesterners and laborers would've revolted... It was already close to total anarchy. Hoover did not apply Keynesian economics.

You want to know what ended the depression?... World War II... The country needed something like that to kickstart the steel and farm industries.

[Bono]

Coolidge wouldn't have put into effect Hoover's keynesian policies that furthered the depression. Without them, it would have been a recession like any other and would've been over in a couple of years.

Your theory amazes me... Hoover believed in just what you believe in... Let the government right itself and provide as little support as possible... Clearly, you've got your history mixed up... There is little any candidate could've done to stop it, and it was not a "recession" as you put it, but a global economic collapse. Doing nothing would not have righted the economy, the government needed to intervine. If Coolidge had done less than Hoover, then midwesterners and laborers would've revolted... It was already close to total anarchy. Hoover did not apply Keynesian economics.

You want to know what ended the depression?... World War II... The country needed something like that to kickstart the steel and farm industries.

I've already disproven that in another thread, so I'll just copy the relevant parts of my post here:

There had been several depressions before 1929, most often results of the mismanagement of the money and credit supply by the governmnet. However, all of these depressions didn't last more than four years, and most of them were over in two. If the great depression lasted this long, it was because of an amazing compound of government errors. I'll not coment on the causes of the crash except to say that the Smoot-Hawley, which was championed and signed by Hoover, was one of the chief causes of it. That by itself should kill any myth that Hoover was any kind of free marketeer. However, there is much more to add to his keynesian follies.
Within a month of the crash, he was forcing business leaders to create wage floors, even though both prifits and prices were falling. Consumer prices fell almost 25 percent between 1929 and 1933 while nominal wages on average decreased only 15 percent. As economist Richard Ebeling notes, "The ‘high-wage’ policy of the Hoover administration and the trade unions . . . succeeded only in pricing workers out of the labor market, generating an increasing circle of unemployment."

Hoover increased government spending for subsidy and relief schemes. In the space of one year, from 1930 to 1931, the federal government’s share of GNP soared from 16.4 percent to 21.5 percent. Hoover’s agricultural bureaucracy doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to wheat and cotton farmers even as the new tariffs wiped out their markets. His Reconstruction Finance Corporation ladled out billions more in business subsidies. Commenting decades later on Hoover’s administration, Rexford Guy Tugwell, one of the architects of Franklin Roosevelt’s policies of the 1930s, explained, "We didn’t admit it at the time, but practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started."

Though Hoover at first did lower taxes for the poor, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen in their sweeping A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror stress that he "offered no incentives to the wealthy to invest in new plants to stimulate hiring." He even taxed bank checks, "which accelerated the decline in the availability of money by penalizing people for writing checks."


As if high tariffs and huge subsidies weren't enough, Congress then passed and Hoover signed the Revenue Act of 1932. The largest tax increase in peacetime history, it doubled the income tax. The top bracket actually more than doubled, soaring from 24 percent to 63 percent. Exemptions were lowered; the earned income credit was abolished; corporate and estate taxes were raised; new gift, gasoline, and auto taxes were imposed; and postal rates were sharply hiked.

Schweikart and Allen survey some of the wreckage caused by these disastrous interventionism:

    "By 1933, the numbers produced by this comedy of errors were staggering: national unemployment rates reached 25 percent, but within some individual cities, the statistics seemed beyond comprehension. Cleveland reported that 50 percent of its labor force was unemployed; Toledo, 80 percent; and some states even averaged over 40 percent. Because of the dual-edged sword of declining revenues and increasing welfare demands, the burden on the cities pushed many municipalities to the brink. Schools in New York shut down, and teachers in Chicago were owed some $20 million. Private schools, in many cases, failed completely. One government study found that by 1933 some fifteen hundred colleges had gone belly-up, and book sales plummeted. Chicago’s library system did not purchase a single book in a year-long period."


Now the platform of FDR's democratic party declared, "We believe that a party platform is a covenant with the people to be faithfully kept by the party entrusted with power." It called for a 25-percent reduction in federal spending, a balanced federal budget, a sound gold currency "to be preserved at all hazards," the removal of government from areas that belonged more appropriately to private enterprise, and an end to the "extravagance" of Hoover’s farm programs. This is what candidate Roosevelt promised, but has nothing to do with what President Roosevelt actually delivered. So much for the theory that a socialist revolution was on the brink.