Engineering Memory of the Month

Engineers vs. The Great Depression

In 1932, President Herbert Hoover was fighting an uphill battle to reverse what had become the nation’s most dire economic crisis: The Great Depression. Amid the near-collapse of the nation’s industrial and financial systems, he turned to a man named Marx. No, clearly not that Marx. The man in question, pictured on the left, was Charles David Marx, the founder of Stanford’s civil engineering department.

Marx, one of the original Stanford faculty, was by this time an emeritus. President Hoover tapped him to lead an engineering advisory board to the Reconstruction Financial Board, a body with a pool of $1.5 billion to lend to anyone who’d build public buildings, giving local economies across the country a boost. Keep in mind that $1.5 billion 75 years ago was the equivalent of $22 billion today.

Hoover was a Stanford Engineering alumnus and his brother, Theodore, was dean of the new Stanford School of Engineering at the time. As an engineer, Hoover reached out quite broadly to his professional brethren for help. In all, 500 engineers from the American Engineering Council formed 50 committees to tackle various aspects economic recovery.

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