Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert C. Hoover, a Liberal and a Conservative

Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert C. Hoover were two very different leaders during a time of struggle in America, The Great Depression. They also had different ways and theories on how to get America out of it’s slump. Hoover felt that in order for the economy to get better, the government should not expand any more than it had to and that the people should take care of their own problems with the help of only volunteers and such, which was a very conservative stance. On the other hand, Roosevelt did everything he could to help as many people as possible and was open to new ideas that led him to do things that no other president had tried to do before. To a full extent, Hoover was a strict conservative president and Roosevelt was a liberal one. Generally speaking, one could say that what made Hoover a conservative was his unwillingness to deal with the problems of the economy directly during his time in office. He was attacked by people accusing him of lacking sympathy for those suffering, which was caused by his strict stance that voluntarism and local and state governments could take care of their own problems (Doc C). He felt that “the Depression cannot be cured by legislative action or executive pronouncement” (Doc B). If voluntarism and the local and state governments could not completely fulfill their jobs of helping their own suffering people, then and only then would Hoover ask the aid of the federal government to help (Doc C). At most, Hoover attempted to help the farmers with the passing of Agricultural Marketing Act, which authorized loans to farmers in hopes of preventing them from going bankrupt, but the loans were expected to be paid back in full, which proved to make it unsuccessful. Thus, not expanding the government to help meet the demands of the needy individual would label Herbert C. Hoover as a conservative. Although the state of the country was critical when Franklin D. Roosevelt came into office in 1933, he immediately