Herbert Hoover, accepting the Republican nomination for the US presidency, 1928. 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.