Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • August 29, 2012 from. Like the Victorian British authorities during the Irish Potato Famine, Hoover insisted that relief programs be related to physical jobs like road construction that produced visible results. As Thomas Gallagher pointed out in “Paddy’s Lament,” Ireland is still full of roads that do not lead anywhere and there are now far more Irish in America than in Ireland -- because the United States from the 1840s through the 1920s generally had a labor shortage, not a food shortage. Hoover’s great catastrophe was the Bonus March. A few months before the 1932 election, World War I veterans convened in Washington, D.C. to urge an immediate $1,000 Congressionally-authorized cash bonus to servicemen. In 1932, $1,000 was a lot of money, although it did not remain so much longer. The bonus was not due until 1945, but some veterans needed to save the house or the shop. A sighting of a handful of radicals among the mostly disciplined and patriotic veterans convinced Hoover that this gathering had some of the makings of a Bolshevik or fascist takeover. The veterans conducted drills and kept good order, and this was deemed suspicious. Hoover’s military commanders -- Douglas MacAthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and George Patton -- followed orders, chased the hungry veterans out of Ancostia Flats, with cavalry, tear gas, bayoneted rifles, and Renault FT17 tanks, and burned their shantytowns. Some of the veterans threw rocks or cursed the American flag. One old soldier pulled up his shirt, revealed a livid scar, and shouted to the spiffy young soldiers advancing on him, all of whom were glad to have a job, “I got this in the Argonne Forest when you guys were in diapers.” “Just keep moving, you dirty old bum,” one of the peacetime soldiers shouted back. Such is the sense of history. Before this political disaster, Hoover had been respected. When the election came, Hoover lost every state but Vermont. Hoover still loved everything about America, and he put out feelers to FDR to arrange a smooth transition. Roosevelt stiffed him. The fact that Hoover and FDR did not get together, Farr reported, led to a closing of the banks, so FDR arrived in the White House with every bank in the United States closed. The banks would shortly have re-opened in any case, but FDR got full credit when they did re-open, although the shutdown had been mutual fault. It was also a bit of a fake. Farr remembered that insiders knew it was coming and everybody from newspaper owners to bartenders cashed small checks and doled out money to workers or customers on request. Only the honest suckers got hit without money. FDR then demanded that Americans turn in their gold coins and gold certificates under the threat of 10 years in prison, and the suckers turned them in. The wise guys stashed the coins, taking the chance that the Constitutional provision against unwarranted search and seizure might survive FDR. The inflation that had dogged us ever since got off to a slow but steady start once the money was not backed by gold, or eventually by silver. The price of gold coins has increased so exponentially that anybody who saved a small stash could be rich today. Once the first assault on hard money ended, FDR launched the programs Hoover should have initiated. Harry Hopkins, a career social worker who became FDR’s right-hand man, sat at a desk in the White House hall opening the mail and reportedly wrote $5 million in checks to people in desperate need in one day. Houses and small farmers were saved and children got to eat real food again instead of white bread and catsup sandwiches or potatoes. When the veterans came back to Washington, FDR sent his wife Eleanor to talk to them without Secret Service bodyguards. FDR later showed up and offered some former soldiers jobs in the Civilian Conservation Corps, clearing brush and building roads. The veterans who took the jobs lived in barracks, received regular meals, and were paid $30 a month, much of which was sent to families in need. Through other programs, artists and writers produced post office murals or wrote local history books. The economy started to stabilize. FDR’s construction workers finished the dam in Colorado that Hoover had started, and FDR renamed it the Boulder Dam. Even more ominous was the huge influx of professionals and paraprofessionals into federal and state jobs. Roosevelt palliated the worst of the Depression. He may have saved at least some Americans from starving, and he saved millions of Americans from losing their houses, farms, and self-respect. He did not solve the entire Depression. World War II certainly did. His attempts to pack the Supreme Court cost him the support of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. FDR also snored through the fact -- now proven by FBI decoders and the release of KGB files -- that his second-tier and third-tier administrators included a startling number of communists. While the idealists among this faction may have helped ease hunger in America, the ideologues helped drag us into World War II to help Stalin even after Britain was no longer at risk and before the Holocaust started. These advisors clustered around a dying FDR, who was never a Communist, handed Poland and China over to the Reds, and left Germany and Korea cut in half, with millions of civilians dead in both countries. We are still dealing with the last of these gaffes, though the others have solved themselves. Hoover failed in the short run because he expected too much from the average American and did not understand the level of desperation that expanded from the 1929 crash. We may never have another such catastrophe because more people in America today work for some form of government or the schools, and most older people who were born here receive some sort of government assistance. FDR started this process mostly out of sincere compassion, but also from an appetite for approval. FDR was not innately a great man, but given Hoover’s oblivion to the problems of ordinary Americans, FDR was undoubtedly a necessary man. We will see what happens in November without undue hope and without undue fear. Polls aside, no one knows who the next president of the United States will be. However, the winner of the November election will probably not be able to solve all the nation’s problems or -- if we the people are vigilant -- be able to totally destroy representative government or the Constitution. Let us look at the worst case scenario of the past century: Herbert Hoover’s replacement by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933. The nation was gripped by the Great Depression and the major issue was how to make things better. Hoover got stuck with a situation he had not invented. This extremely intelligent man translated Georgius Agricola’s Renaissance-era book on gold and silver mining from Latin to English, and could speak and understand Chinese, which he learned during his stay in China. He was also a self-made multi-millionaire, partly through his investing skills. Hoover had gone on record before the Wall Street Crash of 1929 to the effect that Americans should not speculate by buying stock on margin. He advised that those who were not rich enough to take a hit without a panic should avoid the stock market entirely. Hoover, however, failed to understand that the average American did not share either his high intelligence or his remarkable work ethic. “My country owes me no debt,” Hoover once wrote. “It gave me, as it gives every boy and girl, a chance. It gave me schooling, independence of action, opportunity for service, and honor. In no other land could a boy from a country village, without inheritance or influential friends, look forward with such unbounded hope. My whole life has taught me what America means. I am indebted to my country beyond any human power to repay.” Finis Farr, a biographer and decorated World War II veteran who wrote an FDR biography in which he called FDR “a lightweight,” also pointed out that Hoover seemed oblivious to reality. Farr said that Hoover, a Quaker, owed his admission to Stanford to the fact that there was a fellow Quaker on the admissions board. Hoover, a white multi-generation American, enjoyed a career based mostly on his own innate abilities, but Hoover had the edge on non-whites and immigrants, and never seemed to understand that. Hoover’s tragic flaw may have been that he trusted America and Americans too much. Hoover saved thousands of lives in Belgium with a war relief program during World War I, and in the aftermath of the war he saved millions of lives in Russia from accidental famine. Hoover was a great man, but he was not a great president. Americans who entered the industrial economy after the destruction of slavery, the reconstruction of the South, and the wholesale immigration through Ellis Island were simply not clones of Herbert Hoover. These people had no aspirations to translate Georgius Agricola from Latin or to learn Chinese. They were worried about losing the house -and in some cases, about where their next meal was coming The new administration: Here’s what to look out for Midland Park On Aug. 3, a business owner reported the theft of approximately $10,000. The victim told Detective Sergeant John Gibbons that an employee, a 46-year-old Oakland man, began falsifying deposits the company received beginning in May. The man was charged with theft and theft by deception. He must appear in the Midland Park Municipal Court. Lieutenant Bernard Vandenberg assisted in this investigation. Detective Sergeant Gibbons observed a white male running out of a supermarket holding a bottle on Aug. 9. The individual was being pursued by store employees who yelled for the male to stop. Gibbons caught up to the suspect and he stopped. The suspect then opened the bottle, which contained an alcoholic beverage, and began to drink it. As the actor was being transported to headquarters, another shoplifting was reported, and the actor stated he was also responsible for that theft. The subject, a 23-year-old male resident of Midland Park, admitted to taking 12 bottles of vanilla extract and one bottle of vodka. The amount of the two thefts totaled over $180. He Borough Police Department Report was processed and charged with two counts of shoplifting. The subject was given a date to appear in the Midland Park Municipal Court. Officers Steven Vander Pyl, Kevin Van Dyk, Michael Canonico, and Brendan Burke assisted in the investigation. On Aug. 14, a Cedar Street resident reported a fraudulent withdrawal from his checking account while he was out of town earlier in the month. The resident stated an unknown person or persons withdrew $300 from the account. The case was referred to the detective bureau. As the result of an Aug. 17 traffic stop, Sergeant Noah Van Vliet arrested a 24-year-old male resident of Ridgewood on an outstanding warrant. The warrant in the amount of $250 emanated from the Ho-Ho-Kus Municipal Court. The male was transported to headquarters where arrangements were made to satisfy the warrant. He was given a summons for failure to exhibit documents. At 3:15 p.m. on Aug. 21, Det. Sgt. Gibbons spotted a 33-year-old Wyckoff man with whom he had prior dealings (continued on page 15)