Hoover came into office in 1929, a year later the stock market crashed. He was blamed by the [poor] people who were worst affected by the depression.
Hoover [didn’t seem] to be greatly active in try to help the economy probably because of the laissez-faire of the government, (at the time). I think that it was more a case that the policies he did implement were conservative and usually unhelpful in many ways such as the Smoot-Hawley tariff.
Hoover didn’t want federal policies where people would receive money, he believed that the private sector should help i.e. and kept such policies to an absolute minimum he tried to keep ‘confidence’ in the businesses (confidence in the currency) so it sort of reflects the way Hoover reacted his approach was to try and be conservative and get the businesses to reinvest, he tried hard to get the companies not to lower wages.
It didn’t work, instead more of the workers were laid of, the ones that did have a job saved their money and cut back thus adding to the spiralling economy. Hoover failed to realise that the federal government needed to intervene, as millions where homeless and jobless, the local government simply didn’t have the resources.
One of the main reasons that Hoover was not able to help the people of America was that he believed in keeping a balanced [federal] budget which was difficult because the rest of the government wanted to launch various relief programs, they also wanted to inject large amounts of currency into and abandon the gold standard.
Things were not helped when tariffs like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (which raised the import tax on a large number of goods to record high levels, this tax was put in place to supposedly protect farmers and other producers by encouraging Americans to by American things, however other countries retaliated and did the same in response) where enacted. It also meant that the farmers that where still over producing after World War I couldn’t sell their goods, which needed to be sold at any price – without