# Andrew Mellon — "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate" > [!quote] Attributed to Andrew Mellon, as recounted by Herbert Hoover > "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate." The most frequently cited sentence in the history of American austerity economics. It is quoted as Treasury Secretary [[Andrew Mellon]]'s prescription for the downturn that followed the [[1929 Stock Market Crash]]: let the collapse run its course, and let it destroy whatever it destroys. Hoover's own gloss, in the same passage, is that collapse would clear away excess — that it would "purge the rottenness out of the system," leaving people to work harder and live more moral lives. Taken together, the two lines are the canonical statement of what economists now call [[Liquidationism]]. ## Where the quotation comes from > [!warning] Single-source attribution, written 22 years later > The quotation survives in exactly one place: [[Herbert Hoover]]'s own memoirs, *The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression, 1929–1941* (1952), page 30. Hoover presents it as Mellon's "only one formula," and labels the faction Mellon headed the "leave it alone liquidationists." > > There is **no independent record of Mellon saying it.** No contemporaneous note, letter, transcript, or press account reproduces the line, and nothing in Mellon's public speeches resembles it. Economic historian Lawrence H. White argues Hoover was caricaturing Mellon in order to cast himself as the more activist figure by contrast, and notes that Mellon in fact backed rate cuts in 1930 and urged Hoover to increase federal construction spending. Even commentators who use the quote polemically concede the point: "all we have is Hoover's version, written many years later." > > The accurate description is therefore **the advice Hoover attributed to Mellon**, not a verified Mellon utterance. A second, separable dispute concerns whether the advice was ever *followed*. Hoover's defenders on the right — and some of his critics on the left — agree it was not: Hoover raised federal construction spending, signed the [[Smoot-Hawley Tariff]], created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and raised taxes sharply in 1932. The policy record is therefore a poor match for the slogan, which is part of why the quote has outlived scrutiny of it. ## Why it matters The line's durability has little to do with its provenance. It endures because it states, with no euphemism at all, a position that is usually advanced in gentler language: that a downturn is a cleansing, that the people ruined by it had it coming, and that government relief interrupts a necessary moral process. Every later austerity argument is a softened version of this sentence. It is also the hinge in [[Andrew Mellon]]'s reputation. The architect of the 1920s tax cuts — the original supply-sider, whose top-rate reduction from 73% to 24% is the template for every Republican tax cut since 1981 — is remembered in the popular record not for the Mellon Plan but for four words Hoover says he said. The quote did to Mellon's name what the [[Great Depression]] did to the economic program behind it. ## See Also - [[Liquidationism]] — the doctrine the quote is used to summarize - [[Andrew Mellon]] — the attributed speaker - [[Herbert Hoover]] — the sole source, and an interested one - [[Austerity]] — the modern descendant of the argument - [[Scaife-Mellon Family]] — the dynasty whose reputation the quote still shadows