> Hoover never favored laissez-faire.
He was not a pure, doctrinaire laissez-fairist, but for some reason he seemed to be a lot more timid and restrained an advocate of government action than FDR. True to his engineering background, his approach was to commission a huge study of the whole state of the nation before getting the government to act, whereas FDR plunged right in.
Of course, as Kennedy points out, the government was much smaller during the Hoover administration than it became under FDR, so it was not able to do as much. And the crisis became much more serious by the time FDR was inaugurated. Starting with the "100 days," FDR created a whole raft of agencies and programs that didn't exist before; I'm not quite sure why, but he seemed to be much more uninhibited in this direction than Hoover.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax