ulyssesscat:

is eerily apropos today (if you over look the references to WWI and the need for massive tariffs to protect American agriculture). 

Mr. Chairman and My Fellow Citizens:

In accepting the great honor you have brought me, I desire to speak so simply and so plainly that every man and woman in the United States who may hear or read my words cannot misunderstand.

The last three years have been a time of unparalleled economic calamity.  They have been years of greater suffering and hardship than any which have come to the American people since the aftermath of the Civil War.  As we look back over these troubled years we realize that we have passed through two stages of dislocation and stress.

Before the storm broke we were steadily gaining in prosperity.  Our wounds from the war were rapidly healing.  Advances in science and invention had opened vast vistas of new progress.   Being prosperous, we became optimistic — all of us.  From optimism some of us went to over expansion in anticipation of the future, and from over expansion to reckless speculation.  In the soil poisoned by speculation grew those ugly weeds of waste, exploitation, and abuse of financial power.  In this overproduction and speculative mania we marched with the rest of the world.  Then three years ago came retribution by the inevitable worldwide slump in consumption of goods, in prices, and employment.  At that juncture it was the normal penalty for a reckless boom such as we have witnessed a score of times in our history.  Through such depressions we have always passed safely after a relatively short period of losses, of hardship and adjustment.  We adopted policies in the government, which were fitting to the situation.  Gradually the country began to right itself.  Eighteen months ago there was solid basis for hope that recovery was in sight.

Then there came to us a new calamity, a blow from abroad of such dangerous character as to strike at the very safety of the Republic.  The countries of Europe proved unable to withstand the stress of the depression.  The memories of the world had ignored the fact that the insidious diseases left by the Great War had not been cured.  The skill and intelligence of millions in Europe had been blotted out by battle, disease and starvation.  Stupendous burdens of national debts had been built up.  Poisoned springs of political instability lay in the treaties which closed the war.  Fears and hates held armaments to double those before the war.  Governments were fallaciously seeking to build back by enlarged borrowing, by subsidizing industry and employment with taxes that slowly sapped the savings upon which industry must be rejuvenated and commerce solidly built.  Under these strains the financial systems of many foreign countries crashed one by one.

New blows from decreasing world consumption of goods and from failing financial systems rained upon us.  We are part of a world the disturbance of whose remotest populations affects our financial system, our employment, our markets, and prices of our farm products.   Thus beginning eighteen months ago, the worldwide storm rapidly grew to hurricane force and the greatest economic emergency in all history.  Unexpected, unforeseen, and violent shocks with every month brought new dangers and new emergencies.  Fear and apprehension gripped the heart of our people in every village and city.

If we look back over the disasters of these three years, we find that three-quarters of the population of the globe has suffered from the flames of revolution.  Many nations have been subject to constant change and vacillation of government.  Others have resorted to dictatorship or tyranny in desperate attempts to preserve some sort of social order….

http://publicpolicy.pepperdine.edu/faculty-research/new-deal/hoover-speeches/hh081132.htm has the full speech.