The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson #1)

by Robert A. Caro

All during the 1920’s, farmers held out a hand to their government, but the administrations of Harding and Coolidge were deaf to their pleas. Seeing the industrialists of the Northeast prospering behind a wall of protective tariffs—tariffs that helped the Northeast at their expense—farmers asked for tariff reform. But when, in 1927, Congress finally passed the McNary-Haugen Bill for tariff reform, Coolidge vetoed it, claiming it violated the sacred principle of laissez-faire—“although,” as the historian Frank Freidel notes, “on the very day of his … veto, he signed an order increasing by 50 percent the tariff on pig iron.” In 1928, Congress passed McNary-Haugen again; Coolidge again vetoed it. In 1929, Herbert Hoover, Coolidge’s Secretary of Commerce, builder of the immense Department of Commerce Building that was a temple to American business, became President, having carried forty of the forty-eight states. A new tariff bill was introduced; Hoover said that if it was passed he would veto it, so Congress didn’t bother to pass it. Farmers asked for debt relief; Hoover’s reply was that federal mortgages were already available, and so they were—from a federal agency whose directors seemed to feel they were running a company store, so onerous were the terms of its loans. By 1931, one out of every four of its borrowers was delinquent—and the agency was busily foreclosing: during 1931 alone, almost 4,000 American families were thrown off their farms by their government. Hoover’...