Erin ’s Reviews > Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times > Status Update

"Democracy is a harsh employer."

During Prohibition the volume of alcohol consumption grew, and attitudes towards liquor especially among women and young were notably looser than a decade earlier.

Lou Hoover sized Roosevelt up as a lightweight and an invalid.

Hoover was not alone in his belief that winter that the worst of the Depression was over. The Harvard Economic Society declared that the severest phase of the recession was over by March.

Hoover in set up his administration filled with scions of great American families, was insulating himself from the voice of the people.

Hoover's cabinet looked more like a business council than a political body and an elite one at that.

Hoover won 444 Electoral College votes and 58% of the Popular vote.

At 2:15 on Saturday April 7, 1927 Hoover read a brief statement that aired on a new "television apparatus". It was the first demonstration of AT&T's television technology.

Signs of improved quality of life were everywhere; annual incomes increased by 30% from 1922 to 1929; increasing numbers of workers kept a more leisurely 48 hour week.

Hoover the champion of equal opportunity thought it fair that the wealthy should accept a greater burden of taxation and he was comfortable using taxes to limit the political and social influence of wealth and to prevent the formation of large multi generational estates.