Hoover's Foreign Policy
ROCHE, JOHN I.
Hoover's Foreign Policy American Diplomacy in the Great Depression. By Robert H. Ferell Yale. 319 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Jhon P. Roche From 1929 to 1933, as the American economy lurched toward...
...It would be easy to blame the dullness of the book on Professor Ferrell, but it would be unfair...
...And, as usual, nobody in the State Department seemed to like the Secretary of State, who was arbitrary, capricious, and, worst of all, seldom listened to sound advice...
...The American people simply didn't give a damn...
...Reviewed by Jhon P. Roche From 1929 to 1933, as the American economy lurched toward its nadir, the United States was, as usual, blessed with a Secretary of State and what passes for a foreign policy...
...Here the eternal verities end, for one emerges from reading this scholarly study with a conviction that seldom, if ever, in the history of the Republic has the conduct of foreign relations been so marginal and so dull...
...A Marxist analyst would search in vain for evidences of "aggressive capitalist adventurism...
...After 277 careful, exhaustive and exhausting pages of documentation, Ferrell might have devoted more than five pages to an overall appraisal, might have attempted to fit these four years into the perspective of 20th-century diplomacy...
...He has done his best to mitigate the rigors of a ferociously tedious era and his book is a solid contribution in the Bemis (or nose-to-the-ground) tradition...
...But, if Ferrell has refused to paint on a broad canvas, he has mixed the paints—no one will have to do this job again...
...It is also somewhat generous to say that Hoover "had the makings of a superb President" unless one accepts the improbable view that political experience is unnecessary preparation for the toughest political job in the country...
...One has the feeling that President Hoover concerned himself with foreign affairs only when a crisis arrived, and that Secretary Stimson ran the Department on banker's hours...
...The Department, run by the formidable (and somewhat self-indulgent) legalist Henry L. Stimson, was trapped, as usual, between the long-range imperatives of "national interest" and the short-run demands of American politics, notably with respect to foreign debtors...
...American capitalism in the throes of its greatest crisis became profoundly introspective and isolationist...
Vol. 41 • April 1958 • No. 16
