A tribute to Herbert Hoover, the anti-Fascist

Even so, Democrats attacked Hoover's wealth. Sure FDR was richer, yet, to be sure, the chattering classes didn't want Iowa's orphan to climb. They even blamed the job-producing pioneer for inheriting the Great Depression.

Nonetheless, some newspaper owners couldn't stomach FDR but in Modern Times (The World from the Twenties to the Nineties) Paul Johnson (page 257) explains that:

... their journalists loved him, forgiving him his frequent lies, concealing the fact that he took money off them from poker (which had damned Harding), obeying his malicious injunctions to give his Administration colleagues “a hard time”.

There were dark corners in the Roosevelt White House: his own infidelities, his wife's passionate attachments to another woman, the unscrupulous, sometimes vicious manner in which he used executive power. None was exposed in his lifetime or for long after.

Of course, society's snobs were clearly jealous of Hoover's relationship too. But why? Because he was happily married whereas FDR was living in some freaky arrangement; because Mrs Hoover opened the doors of hospitality to the wives of black congressmen in the pre-Civil Rights era; because Hoover married in a Catholic ceremony (well before JFK became a "groundbreaker"). Oh, and because good Protestant men trouble godless Democrats. And that's the raw truth. Iowa's favourite orphan was too Christian for them all.