Hoover’s Activist but Limited Federalism

“Hoover is probably the most intelligent president the United States has ever had. That is not necessarily a guarantee of political success.” — Anthony Badger

Given our preoccupation with American decline, it’s nice to sometimes remind ourselves of the reasons for the country’s rise to superpowerdom. Anthony Badger, the former Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge, has dedicated his life to charting the rise of the United States as the world’s leading economic and military power. His new book is Prosperity Road: America, 1920–1945, from Hoover to Roosevelt. There is, thankfully, no mention of Trump or MAGA in it.

Badger’s interest in the United States came through Huey Long, who he read about as a schoolboy in gray nineteen-fifties Britain. What intrigued him was not Long’s showmanship but his delivery. Plenty of Southern populists made grand promises. But the Kingfish actually delivered on some.

In Prosperity Road, Badger reminds us of America’s astonishing domestic transformation in the first half of the 20th century. In 1920, he notes, most Americans’ entire experience of the federal government was the mailman and the occasional man in uniform, and almost nobody paid income tax. By 1945, all Americans had a social security number, worked under the Wagner Act or drew a price support, and lived within sight of a public works project. And they came to trust it. By 1958 some 73 percent told pollsters Washington could be relied on to do the right thing. That trust, Badger dryly notes, is not something that would go on forever.

On Herbert Hoover, Badger is a revisionist without being excessively sentimental. The most intelligent president America has ever had, he says of the Stanford-educated engineer. But, like Jimmy Carter, Hoover was a technocrat with little political touch and an excessively thin skin. Not exactly Huey Long.

Oddly enough, he is less effusive about Roosevelt. Badger describes him as no intellectual, an actor, a patrician who somehow persuaded working Americans he was on their side. “He’s the first president who understands that my boss is a son of a bitch,” Badger quotes a textile worker on FDR.

I asked what we, in 2026, should make of all this. Hoover and FDR were serious people, Badger notes. And they both had a concept of public service that has proved very difficult to recreate in recent years. That said, he reminds us that the New Deal grew out of the near collapse of the country in 1932. So perhaps Prosperity Road hasn’t quite run out of asphalt. Although Anthony Badger is certainly less optimistic about the United States than he was when he fell under the spell of the Kingfish seventy years ago.

FURTHER READING

•   Anthony J. Badger, Prosperity Road: America, 1920–1945, from Hoover to Roosevelt (Harper, 13 October 2026). Kirkus review. Note that Badger has reused his own title: his first book, in 1980, was Prosperity Road: The New Deal, Tobacco, and North Carolina — so a search on the title alone will return the wrong book.

•   Badger was Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge from 1992 to 2014 and Master of Clare College from 2003 to 2014; he has been a professor at Northumbria since. Read at Sidney Sussex, took his doctorate at Hull in 1974. His Cambridge faculty page. The book on race AK raises at 44:00 is Why White Liberals Fail: Race and Southern Politics from FDR to Trump (2022); he has also written The New Deal: The Depression Years, FDR: The First Hundred Days and Albert Gore, Sr.: A Political Life.

•   Huey Long, the figure who drew Badger into American history, was shot at the Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge in September 1935 and died two days later — the building AK mentions visiting.

•   Greg Steinmetz on Roosevelt’s pursuit of Andrew Mellon through the Internal Revenue Service, which Badger calls one of the low points of the administration — that episode. His book is The President and the Oligarch: Roosevelt, Mellon, and the Triumph of Big Government.

•   The two episodes AK opens on: Janet Reitman on The Inheritance: An American Tragedy in Five Acts, and Eliot Cohen on The Strategist.

•   Three details worth checking against the tape. J. Edgar Hoover became director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924; the Bureau was founded in 1908 and renamed the FBI in 1935. The trust figure Badger attributes to Pew comes from the American National Election Studies, which recorded 73 percent in 1958; Pew publishes the series but did not conduct those early surveys. And the “unsordid act” description of Lend-Lease is Churchill’s.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. They had been friends, and then there was the business with the crutches. Badger reconstructs the Hoover–Roosevelt feud as a personal story before it is ever a political one. The two lived near each other in Washington during the First World War and were close enough that Roosevelt praised Hoover privately and publicly, when Hoover was the star of American politics — the humanitarian who fed Belgium, the self-made millionaire engineer who looked like the man of the future. Then the snubs. Hoover denied the president-elect Secret Service protection on leaving office, and at a White House reception Roosevelt was made to stand in a very uncomfortable position while on crutches. Both men were thin-skinned; Hoover, Badger says, was particularly thin-skinned, and he answered the Democrats’ Depression attacks with real anger.

2. The line past which activism became fascism. The most interesting thing about Hoover is not that he did nothing but that he believed in activist government up to a point and could never explain where the point was. Past it, in his own word, intervention became fascistic — and nobody except Hoover was able to locate the line, which is why he looked to contemporaries like a man refusing to act. Badger’s counterfactual is the generous one: had Hoover served the two terms he fully expected, we would remember a reforming president who made government more efficient and the relationship between government and industry more rational. Instead he arrived at the one moment when things went badly, and discovered he could not bear people doubting his sincerity.

3. The welfare state was built by the people Roosevelt hired. Asked who actually built it, Badger does not say Roosevelt. He says Frances Perkins, and adds that it is very difficult to think about the American welfare state without noticing that the experts were women. Social Security brought almost no immediate benefit to anyone, and he finds it remarkable that they were willing to t...