NOVEMBER 5, 1984

Our Election Day Scapegoats

MY TURN/ROBERT S. MCELVAINE

"Absence makes the heart grow fonder" was not written of American presidents, but it describes our attitude toward most of them. Historians--and the public--usually find virtues in the nation's chief executives soon after they depart the White House, even if such qualities remain undetected while they are in office.

Harry Truman was reviled by many as a narrow-minded, quick-tempered, unreflective provincial, but in retirement he became a folk hero. Dwight Eisenhower never seemed able to utter a simple sentence while he was president, yet a recent biographer called him "the most undervalued and misunderstood statesman of the 20^th century." For most, Richard Nixon remains exceedingly unpopular, yet in the minds of some, he has become an elder statesman.

It is natural for the past to take on a glow as it recedes more deeply into memory. Most of us prefer to recall the good old days and repress the bad ones. The ultimate in this mindset was expressed by a man who told me, "I think Truman was the best president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Eisenhower was the best president since Truman, and Kennedy was the best president since Eisenhower," and on he went down to Reagan.

Such assessments, however, are rarely carried back beyond Roosevelt. Although Herbert Hoover lived just short of 32 years beyond his humiliating loss to FDR, it was not long enough to revise the popular image. "I'm the only person of distinction," he said in later years, "who's ever had a depression named after him." The result was that in each successive election year Democratic politicians could not resist the temptation to run against him. "We ought to be eternally grateful to Herbert Hoover, who has been our meal ticket for 12 years," Roosevelt aide Tommy Corcoran told a meeting of Democratic strategists in 1944.

The fact is that Herbert Hoover was not the heartless ogre pictured in a half century of Democratic stump speeches. He was a reformer who introduced a whirlwind of programs including the cancellation of private oil leases on government lands. He was a humanitarian who believed that compassion and charity were voluntary activities; he was a idealist who believed in local self-help efforts. Unfortunately eating ideals proved unpalatable fare during the Depression. And in the 1936 campaign, the Republican candidate tried to avoid mention of Hoover's name, hoping that the public memory of him would fade and he would not be obliged to defend his party's last administration. Democrats had other plans. Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed the prospect of running against Hoover in 1936 "perfectly grand." It was easier to run against an unpopular specter than a real opponent.

Ideology: It still is. Democrats continue to mention his name, but now do so in the same breath with Reagan's. Yet the implication that they are similar is unfair--to Hoover. The only important link between them is a commitment to an ideology of individualism. Hoover never subscribed to the social Darwinism that Reagan espouses. "The only trouble with capitalism," he told a columnist, "is capitalists; they're too damned greedy."

The modern president who most resembles Hoover is not Ronald Reagan, but Jimmy Carter. The parallels between the two are striking, at least in personal style. Both were elected, in part, because they said they were not politicians. Both were engineers who thought they could bring efficiently to government. Both were far more intelligent than many of our presidents, yet they had difficulty conveying their wisdom to the public. Neither could get along with the press. Each loved statistics and detail. Each had poor relations with his own party leaders in Congress.

Both Hoover and Carter were given to a degree of self-righteousness and, as events turned against them, to periods of self-pity. They could be compassionate--Hoover would send live Thanksgiving turkeys to friends because he did not want the birds' deaths on his conscience. Yet both seemed secretive, thin-skinned and humorless in public. They appeared incapable of using the presidency as "a bully pulpit."

Their similar styles helped produce, I think, a similar fate at the polls; both were judged to be colossal failures. Though neither was primarily responsible for the ills blamed on him, each served as a symbol of failure. And their own parties weren't helpful in rehabilitating their public standing. Hoover's role in the 1944 campaign was reduced to praying for a victory.

Shortly after America's entry into World War II, when Bernard Baruch suggested that Hoover would be a good man to help organize the home front, Roosevelt replied, "Well, I'm not Jesus Christ. I'm not going to raise him from the dead!" Truman nonetheless did, and by the time Hoover died on Oct. 20, 1964, he had overcome some of the public's animosity. "I outlived the bastards," he once said.

Reassessment: Historians now recognize that Hoover was not a villain. He did not cause the depression, but he failed to understand it. His greatest problem was that he was not a politician. Nor, as it turned out was Carter. But now that historians have begun to reassess the real Hoover, it is my hope that we will soon be willing to do the same for another engineer, Jimmy Carter.

McElvaine wrote "The Great Depression" and teaches at Millsaps College.