Historian Donald Ritchie explains, “Now, ‘Doctor’ Hoover is dressed as a man. Hoover ran his administration, he was in charge, nobody would have put Hoover in a nurse’s costume. He was the doctor. He had been seen actually before this as the nation’s physician. Before he became president he had been Secretary of Commerce during a major flood that took place in the Mississippi River. He was sent in to help [with] emergency relief. Before that during World War I he had provided emergency relief for the Belgians and others in Europe. So Doctor Hoover was the man who came in when you were sick and in trouble. That was the great irony of his presidency—the nation was in trouble and Doctor Hoover failed and people had expected him to play the role he had played before he had become president. For a lot of ideological reasons Hoover refused to do that. But again, an editorial cartoonist would have never gotten away with putting Herbert Hoover in a skirt in any of these cartoons.” Here you’ll notice his VP, Charles Curtis is depicted as one of the nurses!

Share on Facebook