Quid non mortalia pectora cogis, auri sacra fames?
O cursed hunger for gold, what do you not force mortal hearts to do?
- Aeneid, by Publius Vergilius Maro
Sometimes historical coincidences just fits the moment.
Virgil was the Roman poet who gave the empire its most durable story about itself — other than the one about the she wolf — he was from northern Italy and rose to become the unofficial laureate of the Emperor Augustus’s new order. Virgil’s Aeneid is Rome’s great origin story, an epic about a defeated refugee who wanders the Mediterranean with his people and having been told they are destined to take dominion. It links tales of love, war, prophecy, and a political myth justifying the rule of the Romans. You find both claims about the grandeur of empire but also the sheer human wreckage left in it wake at its foundation. Western literature keeps returning to this poem. From Dante to Milton to modern Hollywood storytellers Virgil’s story keeps inspiring because it set the template for the phoenix like rise story arc of going from vanquished to hero. Would there be J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elendil the Tall without Virgil’s Aeneas? The story is a rise, but that required a fall first. As the 1920s came to an end, the USA was in the middle of an economic fall like none it had experienced before, and out it would rise a New Deal movement that would also lead the USA in the war to come.
Change came in 1930. Since 1864 the GOP was the de facto ruling party of the American republic. Abraham Lincoln had saved the Union and was assassinated for his heroics, plunging the country, almost leaderless into the turmoil and lost opportunity of early Reconstruction. The association of the Democratic Party with the South, slavery and rebellion made the GOP the natural party of the majority of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the North and West, and among the freed African Americans population. Even after the imposition of Jim Crow and disenfranchisement throughout the South, the domination of the GOP elsewhere was enough to ensure domination of Congress of the control of the White House for all except for 16 years between 1869 and 1933, and with the Democrats only reelecting a president to a consecutive term only once, with Wilson in 1916. The crack in the GOP’s power began in the middle of the Depression.
The stock market crash of 1929 was only a year old when the 1930 midterms rolled around. Hoover’s Republicans were defending a comfortable majority in the 71st Congress, with 53 Senators to the Democrats 43, and a total domination of the House with 265 seats to the Democrats mere 166. But this was not a time for comfort, concern was in order.
Hoover the engineer could not engineer the economy to perform and come out of what was by the fall of 1930 clearly a slump. On Halloween, less than a week until the November 4 elections, he did not have much to say to the press. But just the day before he had setup the President’s Emergency Committee for Employment (PECE). But on the 31st, he was giving his last White House press conference before the voters went to the polls, so it was the time when the leader of the GOP should have made his pitch to stick with the party that had made the US into a superpower. Instead he gave underwhelming remarks, almost as if he did not want to bother with the business of being a politician:
I have no public statement to make today.
There are some things in the background of Government relations to unemployment that might interest you, just for your own information in making up for Colonel [Arthur] Woods’ Committee--help to piece out.
The public works contracts outstanding on the first of October in the Federal Government amounted to $938,416,000, of which $370,660,000 is incomplete. In other words, these contracts are about two-thirds completed.
Question from the Press. Mr. President, does that mean contracts let ?
THE PRESIDENT. Actually let, yes.This is not quite a full statement of the public works of the Government because there is quite an amount of works being carried on departmentally, but it is impossible to estimate it in terms of contracts. It includes public works contracted, and also includes the ships being built under loans from the Shipping Board, and includes the Navy construction-the war vessel construction. It does not, unfortunately, include the aircraft contracts, which we have not been able to get in time. Roughly, the work current would amount, if it were translated into contracts, of all items, roughly about a billion dollars. That will be considerably increased before the first of January. It takes time to prepare for contract work or for construction. It is necessary, of course, in the public buildings to agree on a site, which is not always easy, and to acquire the sites before even designs can be made for Government buildings. It requires from 6 to 8 months to get the designs and specifications completed before contracts can be let. A vast amount of preparation has been going on in the last 6 or 8 months so that contracts will be considerably enlarged between now and the first of January.
I have also looked up the number of Government employees. If we take all Government employees, such as the Civil Service, enlisted men in the Army and Navy, the people who are working on contract public works, but not including people manufacturing supplies purchased by the Government, it amounted, on January 1, to 990,000, and on October 1 to 1,033,000. This does not, as I have said, include people working upon supplies. With the additional contracts that will be let that will be somewhat increased by the first of January.
Question from the Press. What was that last date Mr. President?THE PRESIDENT. October 1. It shows an increase of about 43,000 during the period from January 1 to October 1.
In fairness Hoover was not a politician by nature, but he is being too subtle here. He refused to issue a “formal” statement but then almost as an aside he feeds the press numbers to defend his record, insisting that roughly a billion dollars in Federal public works and shipbuilding was already in motion, that these contracts would increase. And that Federal employment had already risen by about 43,000 since January; the overall effect was to present the creation of the PECE not as a break with past policy but as one more piece in the technocratic program of his work in associating the federal governments limited efforts with private business initiatives, rather than openly conceding the need for a new, more aggressive model of federal relief. But this performance would not fire up the American people or create much of a splash on the front pages. There was no big roll out of the initiative, or a hard sell of what exactly Colonel Woods was going do immediately and after the election.
Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit
Perhaps someday it will help us to remember even these hardships.
- Aeneid, by Publius Vergilius Maro
Surprisingly, the GOP held onto the Senate, but they lost eight seats, retaining only a two-seat margin, 48–46, with one third-party senator representing the Farmer–Labor Party; this was their only good fortune. Then, as now, the House had 435 members. The Democrats won 52 new seats, bringing their total to 216. Again, one seat was held by the Farmer–Labor Party. The GOP held on with 217, but there was one vacancy, so the Republicans had exactly half of the 434 sitting members of the House. Then doom set in. The new Congress was not set to meet until December 1931, even though the members’ terms of office began in March 1931. By that time, several members of the House had died in office. Four Republican members were replaced by Democrats, and three of them—Bird Vincent of Michigan (died July), Ernest Robinson Ackerman of New Jersey (died October), and Harry McLeary Wurzbach of Texas (died November)—died early enough for their successors to take office, giving the Democrats an outright majority, with 219 members, when Congress convened.
It was the start of a year of bad luck for the Republicans and the beginning of the end of the old Party of Lincoln.
Perhaps it is an irony that only after the November 1930 election defeat was Hoover’s October message to Anna P. MacVay, the vice president of American Classical League, noting and celebrating the 2,000th birthday of the Roman poet Vergil (Virgil) read at the ceremony held at Carnegie Hall in New York to mark the occasion:
My dear Miss MacVay:
I am heartily in sympathy with American participation in the celebration of the two thousandth birthday of Vergil, whose immortal works have so stimulated the imagination and enriched the cultural life of so many generations. So much of our language and literary are derived directly from the Latin classics that the study of them must ever remain an indispensable part of the training of one of the most valuable types of mind. The youthful struggles to master Vergil’s lines have been forgotten by millions who in maturity recall only that he brought to life and the world about us a new meaning and fresh beauty.
Yours faithfully,HERBERT HOOVER
Virgil was born October 15, 70 BC and died September 21, 19 BC.
Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt
There are tears at the heart of things, and mortal suffering touches the mind.
- Aeneid, by Publius Vergilius Maro