In a recent posting by Steven Horwitz on the Coordination Problem weblog, the author shows how pop culture can shape history — or, rather, our recollection of it: As I’ve been writing about the myths surrounding the Hoover presidency the last week or so, it got me thinking about the question of where those myths came from and why they persist. Certainly a big part of the persistence has to do with the biases in the media, the punditry, and academia. The economic facts of how much worse the Great Depression got under Hoover are not in dispute, but if one is predisposed to think, even in a naive way, that government intervention is the answer to economic problems, then it’s almost a necessity to accept the myth of Hoover as “laissez faire.” If you don’t, it would require some major cognitive dissonance to square the idea of Hoover as a proto-New Dealer (which he was) and the disaster of his presidency with your priors about the necessity of government intervention. But putting biases aside, I think there’s probably another source for it, especially in more recent years when more and more serious historians have rightly recognized Hoover’s interventionism. I
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