Saint Herbert

In the hagiology of liberal America, Franklin Roosevelt has always been a favorite saint. Herbert Hoover was only slightly less villainous than Judas Iscariot. Now at least a few writers of the radical left are changing the text. In The Greening of America, Yale's Charles Reich argues that the New Deal helped create not only an inhuman corporate state but "a new consciousness that believed primarily in domination and the necessity for living under domination."

Herbert Hoover knew it all the time. So says Oregon State University's William Appleman Williams, dean of revisionist historians. In the New York Review of Books, Williams portrays Hoover as a prophet who fought against precisely the corporate America that radicals decry--"vast repetitive operations dulling the human mind," the congestion of the population, the economic domination of great wealth. "Hoover outlined our future in 1923," Williams concludes. "We are living in it now." The dour Quaker President was done in, according to Williams, "by his faith in the dream of a cooperative American community. The trouble with him was that he believed. Not just in us. But in the very best of us." Right on, Herbert.

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