Issues and attitudes change, but there can be no doubt about it–Calvin Coolidge was a CL. Personally austere, he was determined to keep the size of the federal government as small as possible. He presided over a lopsided boom, and missed the Great Depression. It is fortunate for his reputation, and for the country, that he did.
Hoover, on the other hand, was a PBP. He was willing to use the power of the federal government to boost the economy even before the Great Depression. In the final analysis, however, he was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task before him, and he was unwilling to take the steps that were necessary to generate a real recovery, because he thought the cure ultimately was worse than the disease. As history shows us, he was wrong; FDR changed the country in innumerable ways, but he didn’t destroy it as a liberal democracy.
Hoover reminds me of Lord John Russell during the Potato Famine: an intelligent and decent man who was constrained by limited government ideology from doing what needed to be done to respond to a disaster of unimaginable proportions.