Where's Herbert Hoover when we need him?

In times like these, we need a guy like Herbert Hoover.

Hoover has long been a joke for his poor performance in reacting to the Great Depression during his presidency. Prosperity is "just around the corner," or so he said. Can you say Hooverville?

When World War I erupted overseas, while his country remained neutral, Hoover jumped into the fray and chaired the Committee for Relief in Belgium. He was responsible for feeding thousands of starving people in Belgium and northern France

When the U.S. joined World War I in April 1917, Hoover was the man they called upon to get shit done. He was named head of the Food Administration and came to be known as the "food czar." Most people know of Victory Gardens on the home front in World War II. But there were War Gardens in The Great War. While President Wilson called on Americans to make sacrifices for the war effort, Hoover fed the civilians at home and the doughboys in France.

After the war, he led the American Relief Administration which shipped four million tons of food to Central and Eastern Europe and post-revolutionary Russia. In 1920, the newly-elected President Harding made him head of the Department of Commerce. His competency earned him the title of "Secretary of the Department of Commerce and Under-secretary to all of the other departments." During the big Mississippi River flood of 1927, Hoover ran the relief efforts.

Hoover ran for president as a Republican in 1928 and decisively defeated Al Smith. The stick market crash came less than a year later and, in 1932, FDR took over the White house for 13 years.

Hoover was, as I said before, a guy who could GSD. So why did this go-getter from modest Midwestern roots lose the 1932 election to a rich guy from New York? He never took seriously the suffering of Americans during the Great Depression. FDR made a lot of promises and ended up keeping many of them, earning him the hatred and some envy from Republicans. Hoover had tried to get the economy moving again. But he was adamant that the government should not be directly involved in relief efforts.

Sound familiar?

It;s one of the ironies of history that Hoover could feed millions across the globe but let those in his backyard starve. He was all food food relief efforts as long as they didn't come from the gubment. He wasn't a cruel egomaniac like Trump. But his Republican small-government stance was almost America's undoing.

I'm no historian but Hoover's dilemma seems to be playing out inside the Beltway almost 90 years later. Unlike Trump, Hoover was an accomplished administrator in the private sector and in government. But their approach to an emergency seems the same. It's no big deal. Americans can't starve. We are immune to Third World viruses. The suffering was all around.

Last night, as I watched the third season of "Babylon Berlin," the stock market crashed in October 1929. In the Berlin streets, men ran madly to their banks and brokerage houses. One of protagonist Inspector Rath's colleagues goes crazy and takes hostages at a bank, threatening to kill them if they don't hand over his money. Outside an office, a businessman shoots himself in the head. As Rath walks down stairs, a man's legs hang limp above him, obviously a case of hanging. Rath is not oblivious to the suffering. He knows a little bit about it. He's a combat veteran of the war and treats his serious shell-shock symptoms with hits of morphine. He also knows that Nazi sympathizers plot to take over the police department and he is on a mission to do something about it.

There are those who are oblivious due to political orthodoxy. That is not Trump. Remember that he was a Democrat for much of his life, probably because he had to deal with lots of Dems in NYC. Trump is what he has always been, an unscrupulous narcissist. Yesterday, when threatened by America's governors charting their own way out of the pandemic, he said that they couldn't do that because he alone was in charge. Period. Spoken like a true autocrat. One of these days, he will read the Constitution and discover that we have three branches of government. They've all been compromised by the GOP but we know how it's supposed to work. In November, we will have the opportunity to return the country to its roots. I hope that all those nurses and doctors and CNAs and first responders will remember that it was Trump who left them unprotected against the COVID-19 scourge. When it happens again, and it will, we need an adult in charge.