ABSTRACT
By the time that Herbert Hoover was inaugurated as the 31st President of the United States on 4 March 1929, inter-Allied indebtedness had been relegated to the status of a secondary issue in international diplomacy. Beneath the surface, concerns still undoubtedly existed in Washington during the spring and summer of 1929, as the tetchy exchanges with Owen Young over the implications of his plan for the final settlement of German reparations demonstrated. Yet for all that, war debts loomed more as a subterranean source of vague uncertainty than as an actual or immediate threat to the tranquillity of Hoover’s early months in the White House. During this initial honeymoon period, Hoover enjoyed a formidably strong position. By the end of the First World War, he had already acquired the status of ‘an authentic American folk hero’ by virtue of his achievements as a mining engineer turned government administrator and humanitarian. Although as Secretary of Commerce from 1921 to 1929 he won further accolades for his organisational genius and aggressive promotion of American business interests abroad, he only accepted the post after Harding promised him an important voice in economic and international affairs; an increasing influence which soon earned him the informal title of Secretary of Commerce and ‘Undersecretary for everything else’. When he stood for the presidency in November 1928, Hoover emerged from the election with more popular votes than had ever previously been cast for a candidate in American history. With this overwhelming mandate behind him and with the economy still booming, the new President pledged himself to the twin goals of prosperity and freedom in pursuit of what he described in his inaugural address as ‘a new economic system, a new social system, a new political system’. In short, everything seemed set fair for what the press already hailed as ‘the dawn of the Hoover Era’.1
