speech delivered 1928 by Herbert Hoover,

 This passage is adapted from a speech delivered in 1928 by 
Herbert Hoover, “Rugged Individualism.” Hoover was 
campaigning for the office of president of the United States 
as a member of the Republican Party.
After the war [the First World War], when the 
Republican Party assumed administration of the 
country, we were faced with the problem of 
determination of the very nature of our national life. 
During one hundred and fifty years we have builded 
up a form of self-government and a social system 
which is peculiarly our own. It differs essentially 
from all others in the world. It is the American 
system. It is just as definite and positive a political 
social system as has ever been developed on earth.
It is founded upon a particular conception of
self-government in which decentralized local 
responsibility is the very base. Further than this, it is 
founded upon the conception that only through 
ordered liberty, freedom, and equal opportunity to 
the individual will his initiative and enterprise spur 
on the march of progress. And in our insistence upon 
equality of opportunity has our system advanced 
beyond all the world.
During the war we necessarily turned to the 
government to solve every difficult economic 
problem. The government having absorbed every 
energy of our people for war, there was no other 
solution. For the preservation of the state the Federal 
Government became a centralized despotism which 
undertook unprecedented responsibilities, assumed 
autocratic powers, and took over the business of 
citizens. To a large degree we regimented our whole 
people temporarily into a socialistic state. However 
justified in time of war, if continued in peace-time it 
would destroy not only our American system but 
with it our progress and freedom as well.
When the war closed, the most vital of all issues 
both in our own country and throughout the world 
was whether governments should continue their 
war-time ownership and operation of many 
instrumentalities of production and distribution. We 
were challenged with a peace-time choice between 
the American system of rugged individualism and a 
European philosophy of diametrically opposed 
doctrines—doctrines of paternalism and state 
socialism. The acceptance of these ideas would have
meant the destruction of self-government through 
centralization of government. It would have meant 
the undermining of the individual initiative and 
enterprise through which our people have grown to 
unparalleled greatness.
The Republican Party from the beginning 
resolutely turned its face away from these ideas and 
these war practices. A Republican Congress
co-operated with the Democratic administration to 
demobilize many of our war activities. At that time 
the two parties were in accord upon that point.
When the Republican Party came into full power it 
went at once resolutely back to our fundamental 
conception of the state and the rights and 
responsibilities of the individual. Thereby it restored 
confidence and hope in the American people, it freed 
and stimulated enterprise, it restored the government 
to its position as an umpire instead of a player in the 
economic game. . . .
There has been revived in this campaign,
however, a series of proposals which, if adopted, 
would be a long step toward the abandonment of our 
American system and a surrender to the destructive 
operation of governmental conduct of commercial 
business. Because the country is faced with difficulty 
and doubt over certain national problems—that is, 
prohibition, farm relief, and electrical power—our 
opponents propose that we must thrust government 
a long way into the businesses which give rise to
these problems. In effect, they abandon the tenets of 
their own party and turn to state socialism as a 
solution for the difficulties presented by all three. It is 
proposed that we shall change from prohibition to 
the state purchase and sale of liquor. If their 
agricultural relief program means anything, it means 
that the government shall directly or indirectly buy 
and sell and fix prices of agricultural products. And 
we are to go into the hydro-electric power business. 
In other words, we are confronted with a huge 
program of government in business.
There is, therefore, submitted to the American 
people a question of fundamental principle. That is: 
shall we depart from the principles of our American 
political and economic system, upon which we have 
advanced beyond all the rest of the world, in order to 
adopt methods based on principles destructive of its 
very foundations?

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