Herbert Hoover — 31st President (1929–1933)

**Herbert Hoover** was the most qualified person ever elected president — a self-made millionaire mining engineer, the man who fed starving Europe after World War I as head of the American Relief Administration, and a brilliant Secretary of Commerce. Then the Great Depression hit eight months into his term, and he became the symbol of government failure. He wasn't lazy or callous — he worked harder than any president before or since — but his philosophical conviction that voluntary cooperation was preferable to government intervention made him too slow to act at the scale the crisis demanded.