THE GREAT ENGINEER Herbert Hoover as Secret

He would hold that carriage for eight years, with the boom of the 1920s, before finally deliver the goods to the White House when the economy was on the verge of collapse. The ending of this discussion will focus on his role as Secretary of Commerce during those years.

Hoover, an engineer by background, was in innovational terms, something of a technocrat, who believed that not only the performance of industry entirely social progress could best be furthered by judicious methods of oversight and a problem-solving approach to issues. ("Technocracy," a term popularized in this same era, had originally a more specific plainly related meaning of government by technical experts.) This was an brainpower much in vogue in the 1920s. As businesses grew in size, traditional methods of management -- derived from customary practices in the wreakshops and small factories of an in the beginning time -- were giving way to the professional concept of management that we now take for granted. Whereas even large companies had formerly been fundamentally family firms scaled up, corporations were increasingly private bureaucracies, with elaborate tables of organization and, regularize management hiring and promotion practices in place of dependence on personal relationships.

All of these tendencies were accelerated by the experience of instauration War I, when rationalized systems introduced for the war emergency had achieved astonishing feats of organization an

Implicit in this approach to the department's work was a close relationship to the industries it dealt with. It is well known that regulative agencies often tend to be "captured" by the industries that they regulate. Hoover's concept of managerial aptitude tended to accentuate this tendency, since it was in industry that the government could insure the requisite technical expertise. In the words of a modern business analyst, each division of the Department, tasked with regulating a token industrial commodity, was "headed by an expert nominated -- in some cases actually voted on -- by the trade he knows and represents" (Brandes, 1962, p. 5). In Hoover's view this was less a "capture" than a native partnership between government and industry.

In spite of his views regarding war debts, Hoover's contributions during his tenure as Secretary of Commerce during the Harding and Coolidge administrations were for the most part positive. Had he not become President in 1929, what Keynes verbalise of him after the Versailles peace conference -- that he was the only actor to emerged with an enhanced reputation -- might well have been state of his role in economic policymaking in the 1920s.

More particularly, and in keeping with his general technocratic perspective, Hoover "believed that unless the country could enlist workers through a system of representation in the campaign to plus productivity and eliminate waste, it could never meet the demands of the postwar manhood" (Zeiger, 1981, p. 82). His concern, then, had much in common with recent theories of industrial efficiency and production quality that call for a cooperative quite than adversarial relationship between managers and workers. He was also conscious that the new, rationalized creative activity of work, the traditional bonds that might have bound workers and employers together were fracture down and had to be replaced in some systematic way. " sedulousness must be humanized," he argued; firms had to
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