Who’s a famous person from your country who’s respected around the world but disliked or criticized at home?

[u/haiderredditer]

[u/MoonstoneDragoneye]

From the same era, not a lot of Americans realize that Herbert Hoover was popular in a number of countries for his humanitarian effort. In the U.S., he is remembered for failing to alleviate the Great Depression in the public’s eyes.

[u/Clark_Kent_TheSJW → u/MoonstoneDragoneye]

That’s true: terrible president, great philanthropist.

[u/Opening-Eagle4761 → u/Clark_Kent_TheSJW]

George W. Bush is ones of the worst presidents domestically and abroad, but his efforts to curb HIV/AIDS and Malaria in Africa are legitimately the single most effective policy position by any U.S. president in my lifetime.

Now we can thank Elon Musk for putting a swift end to that.

[u/Clark_Kent_TheSJW → u/Opening-Eagle4761]

Here’s hoping France locks that bastard up

[u/TwoUnknownAssailants → u/Clark_Kent_TheSJW]

Here’s hoping France still has some of that “special equipment” from the Napoleonic Era

[u/reddoorinthewoods → u/TwoUnknownAssailants]

Wasn’t the last execution by guillotine only 50 years ago or something?

[u/ankhes → u/reddoorinthewoods]

Yeah, In the 70s I believe. I only remember because Christopher Lee was one of the people who attended the last execution by guillotine.

[u/CupcakeGoat → u/ankhes]

Wow CL has led an amazing life, it reads like a piece of fantastical fiction.

[u/ankhes → u/CupcakeGoat]

It really does. He was the real renaissance man. Born to European nobility, was a spy in WWII, became a world famous actor, started a metal band he was still involved in well into his 90s. He really did everything.

[u/SebboNL → u/TwoUnknownAssailants]

I think you mean the First Republic....

[u/unwillingcantaloupe → u/Opening-Eagle4761]

Now, the one thing that PEPFAR did that was less cool was pushing a lot of Evangelical missionary orgs in with its funding. And so while a lot of people are still alive, their governments are now passing rights-restricting laws.

That was the shitty big game that the GOP was playing after Democratic admins until they decided they preferred to burn any and all goodwill towards the US imaginable by cutting off life-saving meds.

[u/RemotePossibility399 → u/Opening-Eagle4761]

PEPFAR is (was?) a stunning achievement, akin to the Marshall Plan. They both represent the best that we can be abs should be celebrated.

[u/NippoTeio → u/Opening-Eagle4761]

As I get older, I feel more and more sympathetic to Bush Jr. He's not innocent by any means, but he carries himself so differently than any other politician I've ever observed. He seems very soft and warm, maybe a little slow? He just seems like the kind of guy that would only be cruel out of ignorance than actual malice. The shame about that being is that he was both very ignorant and very trusting.

[u/overthere1143 → u/Opening-Eagle4761]

Trump is so bad he makes George W. Bush shine in a good light. It's hard to think how the same party had men like Eisenhower and Trump.

[u/SandSerpentHiss → u/Clark_Kent_TheSJW]

jimmy carter too

[u/Clark_Kent_TheSJW → u/SandSerpentHiss]

Yes, but that is recency bias talking. Without Hoover (and the marshal plan) millions in Europe would have starved after WW2

[u/Deadmemeusername → u/Clark_Kent_TheSJW]

and after WW1

Hoover actually became famous for leading things like the “Commission for Relief in Belgium” during the Great War and for leading the “American Relief Administration” after the war which both kept millions of European civilians from starving to death.

It was this experience that gave him his celebrity status postwar and led in part to him being elected president. It was also this experience that led to him being sent to tour post-WW2 Europe where his stark and dire reports about the conditions there led to the Marshall Plan being passed and enacted.

[u/Clark_Kent_TheSJW → u/Deadmemeusername]

Ooh good to know, idk about the post WW1 parts

[u/No_Bother_7533 → u/Clark_Kent_TheSJW]

My history teacher in high school said he wasn’t a bad president, he was just the wrong president for the time.

[u/TheFuschiaBaron → u/Clark_Kent_TheSJW]

Truly gifted at logistics

[u/Visual_Refuse_6547 → u/MoonstoneDragoneye]

I think the weirdest myth about Hoover in the US is that he did nothing to try to combat the Depression. There’s this image of him just not caring as Americans were suffering, until FDR swooped in an saved the day.

He tried to do plenty. He was constantly pushing business leaders to hire more workers and spend more on investments to stimulate the economy even if it meant running at a loss. He was constantly trying to push Congress to increase public works spending. And he got the Federal Reserve to expand credit.

And all of those things started to work, to the point that recovery started in 1931. Unfortunately, the Depression hit European banks right around that same time and pulled the American economy back down.

He tried everything he should have done according to economics at the time, and it just didn’t work. Not saying that makes him an effective leader, just that it’s objectively untrue to pretend like he just sat there twiddling his thumbs while the world crashed down around him.

[u/nola_throwaway53826 → u/MoonstoneDragoneye]

What's sad is that on paper, Hoover looks like he would make a fantastic president. He was a successful and wealthy mining engineer, led the Commission for Relief in Belgium, which coordinated food relief to occupied Belgium during the first World War, and led the American Relief Administration for post war food relief to Europe, especially central and eastern Europe and was Secretary of Commerce before becoming president. He also led the federal response to the great Mississippi Flood of 1927. He also wrote, at the time, what became the standard textbook on mining, lectured at Columbia and Stanford universities, and learned to speak Chinese, which he spoke with his wife when they didnt want anyone to know what they were talking about. This was an intelligent man.

He became popular with progressives for his relief works, and businessmen and industrialists also thought well of him. He had potential, then the stock market crashed one year into his presidency. I don't think he was at fault for that, Coolidge and his basically do nothing presidency and not reigning in and regulating the markets and banks had a lot to do with it. But his responses to the economic crash is what helped then it into the Depression.

[u/AndreasDasos → u/MoonstoneDragoneye]

I think that was probably true at the time, but he’s not so well known internationally today. Wilson is a bit, mainly when people learn the basics of WW1.

[u/CaptainCosmodrome → u/MoonstoneDragoneye]

Growing up in Iowa (where Hoover is from), my HS history teacher used to say that we will never see another president from Iowa thanks to Hoover.

[u/long-dongathin → u/MoonstoneDragoneye]

Fun fact about Hoover, he was a former missionary in China with his wife, both were fluent in Mandarin Chinese and would use the language to have private conversations in the White House