Rhetoric as Currency: Herbert Hoover and the 1929 Stock Market Crash

Popular wisdom has it that following "Black Tuesday," October 29, 1929, the nation began its irrevocable descent into the Great Depression. This did not happen. Instead, armed with a highly rhetorical understanding of macroeconomic behavior, Herbert Hoover orchestrated a campaign for what he termed economic confidence. The campaign was premised on the assumption that collective beliefs about the future were part and parcel to creating collective economic reality in the present. The campaign was an unequivocal success in the short run. In the long run, though, the campaign contained the seeds of its own failure.