Answer:
See below.
Hebert Hoover was President of the United States from 1929-1933.
Why was Hoover blamed for the Great Depression?
Hoover is properly blamed for causing The Great Depression, but most people blame him for the wrong reasons. It is claimed that recessions and depressions are a natural part of capitalism, and that government action is needed to mitigate the business cycle and get the country out of a depression, but Hoover was some laissez-faire ideologue who did nothing and let the country sink deeper into the Great Depression.
The is entirely opposite of the truth.
Herbert Hoover said some nice things about “rugged individualism”, but he was hardly a proponent of laissez-faire. He strongly believed that the government had to take a leadership role during recessions. The man who founded a number of government regulatory agencies, including the FCC, is not a believer in laissez-faire. In 1921, he held a Presidential Conference on Unemployment which concluded that government has to act to reduce unemployment during recessions.
As soon as the 1929 collapse happened, Hoover called business leaders to Washington to pressure them, with the threat of pro-union legislation, to keep wages high when economic conditions demanded that they fall in order to maintain full employment. Lee Ohanian of UCLA calculates that this alone was responsible for 2/3 of the rise in unemployment. He also implemented public works projects and increased deficit spending like a good proto-Keynesian, raised the top income tax rate to 63%, signed Smoot Hawley, and started a number of other recovery programs.
“When we all burst into Washington . . . we found every essential idea [of the New Deal] enacted in the 100-day Congress in the Hoover administration itself. The essentials of the NRA [National Recovery Administration], the PWA [Public Works Administration], the emergency relief setup were all there. Even the AAA [Agricultural Adjustment Act] was known to the Department of Agriculture. Only the TVA and the Securities Act was drawn from other sources. The RFC [Reconstruction Finance Corporation], probably the greatest recovery agency, was of course a Hoover measure, passed long before the inauguration.”—Raymond Moley, a member of FDR’s “Brain Trust”
Herbert Hoover was the most interventionist American President yet, and as a result, the economy fell deeper into The Great Depression.
An actual laissez-faire policy would have allowed the economy to recover in almost no time.