Hoover gets a bad rap.
His main problem was that while a brilliant mining engineer and manager, he was a poor politician. For him, everything was a discrete problem with a neat empirical solution. How people felt was largely irrelevant to him as getting things done effectively.
You'd think after his work with Committee for Relief in Belgium, US Food Administration, and so forth feeding millions of Europeans starving after WWI and Secretary of Commerce during the 1920's the Great Depression should have been a snap for him.
The Great Depression was several calamities intersecting at once that Hoover managed decently seriatim, but had no overall plan to deal with. He believed in his bones that America's economy and politics were fundamentally sound, it was just a passing storm, etc.
In twenty years, he was proven right, thanks to the work of millions of Americans led by FDR, doing everything he bitterly opposed.
Also keep in mind a lot of initiatives associated with the New Deal (public works projects), were started with the Hoover Administration, but ramped up by FDR.
Long story shorter, Hoover (and Congress, let's not forget) did too little, too late, let the Bonus Army crisis make him look weak and unwilling to sack MacArthur for clearing the Bonus Army camps with gas and gunfire. He exhausted the American public's patience as an aloof but humanitarian figure unwilling or unable to tackle the Depression as a whole.
To butterfly that- I'm at a loss. Hoover was smart, diligent, and capable and completely flummoxed by something that didn't give him a discrete problem to tackle by itself.
Also, while he suffered horrible personal losses as a child, being orphaned by nine and living like a foster kid- he had not experienced failure as an adult.
Everything that happened until was something he could handle with his own resources.
The guy made 4 million dollars (@ 400 million in 2012 USD) by the time he was forty and that's gotta affect what you think ordinary people can do.