President Herbert Hoover, 1930s. After serving as Secretary of Commerce in the Republican administrations of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s, Herbert Clark Hoover (1874-1964) won the 1928 US presidential election for the Republicans. The great stock market crash of 1929 occurred less than 8 months after his taking office, setting off the Great Depression, and he was defeated in the 1933 presidential election by Franklin D Roosevelt.