Herbert Hoover's Crusade Against Collectivism
February 11, 2016 12:00 ET

What do Herbert Hoover and Barack Obama have in common? Very little, except one word: Statism. The earlier President opposed it as vigorously as the current President advances it.

In 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover left the presidency as a virtual pariah, maligned and hated like no other American in his lifetime.  During the next three decades, he became a tireless crusader against Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and other forms of what Hoover called collectivism or statism. Hoover's battle is the main subject of a long lost memoir, The Crusade Years, which he wrote late in life--a memoir only published in 2013, nearly half a century after his death.  Dr. George H. Nash, a Hoover biographer and editor of this volume, will discuss Hoover's remarkable crusade against collectivism and its relevance today. 

George H. Nash is a scholar, historian, and lecturer, with specialties in twentieth century American political and intellectual history. He is also an authority on the life of President Herbert Hoover. Between 1975 and 1995 he prepared three volumes of a definitive, scholarly biography under the general title The Life of Herbert Hoover (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.). Dr. Nash is the author of Reappraising the Right: The Past and Future of American Conservatism (ISI Books, 2009). Dr. Nash is also the author of a monograph entitled Herbert Hoover and Stanford University (Hoover Institution Press), as well as many published essays about Mr. Hoover. He is also the author of Books and the Founding Fathers (Library of Congress: Center for the Book).

Dr. Nash received his Ph.D. in History from Harvard University. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the Historical Society, the National Association of Scholars, the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation, and the Churchill Centre. He served two terms as president of the Philadelphia Society, the nation’s oldest organization of conservative intellectuals. In 2008 he was the recipient of the annual Richard M. Weaver Prize for Scholarly Letters, created by the Ingersoll Foundation.

 

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