When President Herbert Hoover took office, the unemployment rate was 4.4 percent. When he left office, it was 23.6 percent. Hoover’s efforts in providing relief during and after World War I saved millions of
Europeans, including Germans and Russians, from starvation and made him an international hero. Yet little more than a decade later, many of his own countrymen regarded him as a heartless brute who would provide
federal aid for banks but not for hungry Americans. Hoover was a proponent of "rugged individualism." But he also said, "The trouble with capitalism is capitalists; they're too damn greedy." During the early days of the Great Depression, Hoover launched the largest public works projects. Yet, he continued to believe that problems of poverty and unemployment were best left to "voluntary organization and community service." He feared that federal relief programs would undermine individual character by making recipients dependent on the government. He did not recognize that the sheer size of the nation's economic problems had made the concept of "rugged individualism" meaningless.
The president appealed to industry to keep wages high in order to maintain consumer purchasing power. Nevertheless, while businesses did maintain wages for skilled workers, it cut hours and wages for unskilled workers and installed restrictive hiring practices that made it more difficult for under qualified younger and older workers to get a job. By April 1, 1933, U.S. Steel did not have a single full-time employee.
Hoover persuaded local and state governments to sharply increase public works spending. However, the practical effect was to exhaust state and local financial reserves,
which led government by 1933 to slash unemployment relief programs and to impose sales taxes to cover their deficits.
Hoover quickly developed a reputation as uncaring. He cut unemployment figures that reached his desk, eliminating those he thought were only temporarily jobless and not seriously looking for work. In June 1930 a delegation came to see him to request a federal public works program. Hoover responded to them by saying: "Gentlemen, you have come sixty days too late. The Depression is over." He insisted that "nobody is actually starving" and that "the hoboes...are better fed than they have ever been." He claimed that the vendors selling apples on street corners had "left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples."
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=466
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