# Herbert Hoover — "poverty will be banished from this Nation" > [!quote] Herbert Hoover, Stanford Stadium, August 11, 1928 > "we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this Nation." Spoken by [[Herbert Hoover]] in his address accepting the Republican presidential nomination, delivered at Stanford Stadium in Palo Alto, California, before a crowd of more than 70,000 with millions more listening by radio. Fourteen months later the [[1929 Stock Market Crash]] began; by 1933 roughly one American worker in four was unemployed. The claim was not rhetorical excess by the standards of the moment. It was the summary case for continuing the policy mix of the decade — [[Andrew Mellon]]'s tax cuts, [[Calvin Coolidge]]'s deference to business, and a Commerce Department run as a service bureau for industry. Hoover's argument was that the formula had been tested for eight years and was working, and that its continuation would finish the job of eliminating American want. ## Why it matters This is the high-water mark of 1920s Republican confidence, preserved in a single sentence and dated precisely enough to be checked against what happened next. The Hoover Presidential Library's own account of the speech concedes that the optimism "would later come back to haunt him." It stands as the control case for a recurring claim: that cutting taxes on the wealthy and withdrawing government from the regulation of markets will raise everyone. The claim recurs in [[Supply-Side Economics]] and [[Trickle-Down Economics]] with new branding each cycle. In 1928 it was made at the top of a speculative bubble, by a candidate who won 58.2% of the vote on it, and the test arrived faster than usual. > [!warning] Textual variant > Renderings differ on capitalization and have propagated a typo. The Hoover Presidential Library (NARA) gives "this Nation"; the widely reproduced version in Edward Angly's *Oh Yeah!* (Viking, 1931), pages 8–11, reads "this nation" and drops a letter from "the help of God." The NARA rendering is used above. ## See Also - [[Herbert Hoover]] — the speaker - [[Great Depression]] — what arrived instead - [[1929 Stock Market Crash]] — fourteen months later - [[Liquidationism]] — the administration's response once the promise failed - [[Trickle-Down Economics]] — the claim in its later forms