Herbert Hoover

President of the United States (1929–1933)

• Born: August 10, 1874
• Birthplace: West Branch, Iowa
• Died: October 20, 1964
• Place of death: New York, New York

As the US president whose tenure ushered in the Great Depression, Hoover has long been castigated as a failure. Nevertheless, his career both before and after his presidency and the accomplishments of his administration give final judgment of Hoover as a great American.

Early Life

Herbert Hoover, or “Bertie,” as he was known to his family, was born in West Branch, Iowa. He had an older brother, Theodore "Tad," and a younger sister, Mary "May." His father, Jesse Hoover, was a businessman who worked as a blacksmith and operated a farm implement store. He died in 1880, at the age of thirty-four. Herbert’s mother, Hulda Minthorn Hoover, worked as a seamstress to pay the family’s debts after the death of her husband and was vigorously active in the Quaker Church, speaking at meetings throughout the area. She died of pneumonia in 1884, at the age of thirty-five.

The three orphaned children were separated and parceled out to other family members. Herbert stayed briefly with his paternal uncle Allan Hoover and his aunt Millie before moving to Oregon at the age of eleven to live with his mother's relatives, Laura and John Minthorn. John Minthorn was a medical doctor and a businessman, and the family provided a more cultured environment for young Hoover than he had found in Iowa. In 1891, Herbert became the youngest member of the first class to attend the newly established Stanford College in California. Nearly six feet tall, thin, and muscular, with thick, light hair, Hoover had the brusque, retiring manner that also characterized him as an adult. Even as a youth he had the plump cheeks, which, as an adult, became the familiar jowls that dropped down to the stiff white collars he wore, long after they had gone out of style. He worked his way through the university, where he met his future wife, Lou Henry, who, like Hoover, was majoring in geology.

Hoover was graduated in 1895 and the following year left for a mining job in Australia, where he began a highly successful career in mining. In 1899, he married Lou Henry, who accompanied him to China, where they were both actively involved in aid for those civilians caught in the Boxer Rebellion. Hoover moved up the ladder of success, returning to Australia and then to London, where his son Herbert, Jr., was born in 1903, followed by another son, Allan, in 1907. By 1908, Hoover had built a home in Palo Alto, California, developed mines in Burma, and established a consulting business that allowed him to exercise his managerial and organizational talents as well as enlarge the fortune he had already earned. In 1909, Hoover published his Principles of Mining, which was the standard textbook in the field for many years. In 1912, he was named a trustee of Stanford University, an institution to which he was always loyal. He later established the Hoover Institute on the university campus.

Hoover was in Europe at the outbreak of World War I and immediately plunged into the organization of Belgian relief. His committee was credited with saving more than several hundred thousand persons from death. After the United States entered the war, Hoover turned his organizational talents to directing the United States Food Administration, with remarkably effective results. He next accompanied President Woodrow Wilson to Paris, where he acted as head of the European Relief Program and as one of Wilson’s economic advisers at the Paris Peace Conference. Following the war, his organization, the American Relief Administration, assisted in feeding the hungry in twenty-one European countries; he also coordinated famine-relief efforts in Soviet Russia, despite the opposition of those who saw such aid as support for communism.

Life’s Work

At the end of World War I, Hoover had both a national and an international reputation. As the great humanitarian and as the great engineer, Hoover seemed to combine the best of both worlds, as a practical idealist. In 1920, both the Democrats and the Republicans considered him to be a presidential possibility. When he declared himself to be a Republican, he allowed friends to pursue his possible candidacy, but the Republican leadership was cool, and he did not do well in early primaries. In 1921, he accepted the position of secretary of commerce in the cabinet of President Warren G. Harding, and he remained there under President Calvin Coolidge as well. He was an activist secretary, certainly one considered a Progressive in the context of the 1920’s.

Under Hoover’s direction the Commerce Department made major gains in gathering and distributing information on a wide variety of subjects of interest to the business community. Hoover was also reasonably sympathetic to labor unions. He effectively used two tactics that had served him well in his earlier activities: voluntary cooperation and widespread publicity for his goals. Once again responding to crisis, Hoover directed relief efforts for victims of the 1927 Mississippi River flood. In that program, and throughout the Commerce Department, Hoover began an effective program of racial desegregation.

When Coolidge chose not to run again in 1928, Hoover became a candidate for the Republican nomination, which he received and accepted on his fifty-fourth birthday. His campaign focused on progress through technology and, on major issues, differed little from that of his Democratic opponent, Alfred E. Smith. Hoover, with his reputation enhanced by his cabinet years and the country ready to continue the prosperity that seemed tied to Republican leadership, was a comfortable winner in 1928.

As president, Hoover was more progressive than most contemporaries recognized. He supported both civil liberties and civil rights. The Wickersham Commission on Crime and Prohibition gave a mixed report on the constitutionally mandated abstinence from alcohol. Hoover chose to enforce the law, though he was apparently not in full agreement with it. Although Lou Hoover would tolerate no alcohol nor, while in the White House, would the Hoovers attend functions where alcohol was served, after leaving the presidency, Hoover was partial to one martini after dinner. Hoover, as president, supported conservation of natural resources and aid to the economically distressed farmers, and, in 1930, he supported the Hawley-Smoot Tariff. A high tariff had long been a Republican tradition, but the Hawley-Smoot Tariff became highly politicized, as the Democrats charged that it had helped to spread the Depression.

Hoover had little opportunity to initiate a program before the stock market crash of 1929 launched the Great Depression . He had been concerned about the speculative fever of the stock market before he took office and, after the initial crash, worked closely with the nation’s major banks to alleviate the crash. Hoover believed that the decline would, like the other panics in America’s past, be relatively brief in duration. The idea that prosperity was “just around the corner” (actually said by Vice President Charles Curtis, though often attributed to Hoover) quickly proved false, and the nation rejected Hoover both for the crash itself and for what was perceived to be false optimism.

Hoover endeavored to follow the pattern of his earlier success: voluntary activity and publicity. Despite his holding biweekly press conferences and participating in ninety-five radio broadcasts during his four years in office, Hoover never was able to restore public confidence. His bland, unemotional voice conveyed neither his genuine concern for the suffering caused by the Depression nor his underlying confidence in America and in its people. Voluntary action similarly proved to be inadequate in the face of the ever-worsening Depression.

In spite of a philosophy and a personal experience that emphasized individualism, Hoover did provide active leadership to meet the emergencies of the Depression. In 1932, he encouraged the establishment of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) to provide economic aid for the banks, which Hoover believed would then “trickle down” to help provide funds for business and thus jobs for the unemployed. Hoover, throughout his administration, feared direct relief on the part of the federal government, believing that it would damage the concept of local self-government as well as deprive the recipients of the desire to work. The RFC was maintained and expanded by the New Deal; indeed, many of the concepts held by Hoover became part of the New Deal. Franklin D. Roosevelt, however, carried many ideas further and faster than Hoover could have tolerated.

In foreign policy, Hoover was something of a pacifist. He met face-to-face with British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald and French premier Pierre Laval. He supported the World Court and continued the pursuit of disarmament at the 1930 London Naval Conference and, in 1932, at the Geneva Peace Conference. Hoover authorized the 1930 establishment of the Department of Veterans Affairs to look after those who have served their country. He opposed the kind of “dollar diplomacy” that led to intervention in Latin America, anticipating here the Good Neighbor Policy of his successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria produced the Stimson Doctrine , which provided nonrecognition of such aggression. The Hoover Moratorium in 1931 suspended payment for one year of both the Allied war debts and the German reparations from World War I. The continuing downward spiral of the economy had the result of making the suspension of payments permanent.

In 1932, Hoover was renominated by the Republicans but without noticeable enthusiasm. The Democrats chose New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, who promised the nation a “new deal.” The two men were of dramatically different personalities, which made them seem further apart in philosophy than they often were. Hoover appeared even more aloof from the problems of the common person as he failed to repudiate the excessive actions of General Douglas MacArthur in driving the Bonus Army (World War I veterans who marched to Washington to seek early payment of their promised bonus) out of the capital. The outcome of the election was easily predicted a Democratic victory.

Hoover and his wife briefly returned to their home in Palo Alto, California, but in 1934 moved permanently into a suite in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. Hoover wrote many books, traveled to Europe, and, over the years that made him one of the longest-lived former presidents (behind Gerald R. Ford, Ronald Reagan, and John Adams), collected 85 honorary degrees and 468 awards. With the outbreak of World War II, he once again raised funds for relief. He opposed United States participation in the Korean War in spite of a growing and rigid anticommunist outlook. President Harry S. Truman brought Hoover back into government to do what he had always done best: organize and manage. Hoover chaired the 1947 Committee on the Organization of the Executive Branch of Government and brought much-needed reform and coherence to that branch of government. At the age of eighty, he chaired a second committee, later dubbed the Second Hoover Commission, to which he was appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In 1962, Hoover's presidential library was dedicated in his birthplace of West Branch, Iowa. He died at his home in New York two years later, at the age of ninety.

Significance

Throughout his long life and varied career, Hoover’s outlook was dominated by his Quaker heritage. He believed in an orderly universe and in the beneficial results of cooperation among men of goodwill. He also held strongly to the belief, grounded in experience, in individualism. It was a self-help philosophy tempered by his belief in cooperative action. His engineering background gave him a strong faith in technology and statistics. His many humanitarian activities reveal a deep and abiding concern for humanity revealed also in his opposition to foreign intervention and his desire for peace.

In any other time, Hoover would have been a superior president. He had abundant leadership and managerial skills but, unfortunately, few political talents. His pompous physical appearance, dry wit, and undynamic demeanor were suitable for the chair of the board, not for an elected executive who on occasion needed to persuade both the Congress and voters of the value of his policies. Generally nonpolitical (he had never voted for president before 1920, because he was so often out of the country), Hoover never acquired the skills that came so easily to Franklin D. Roosevelt (and that made the contrast between the two of them so painfully denigrating to Hoover).

Hoover’s experience and philosophy limited the extent to which he could involve the government in the lives of citizens. However, when it was clear that voluntary and local relief had failed, Hoover first set the federal government on the path of response to the public need down which it traveled so much more rapidly under the New Deal. In the context of the 1920’s Hoover was a classic Progressive in the programs he supported; it was the Depression and the vigorous activism of Roosevelt that made him seem to be a conservative.

Hoover lived long enough to see himself rehabilitated in public esteem. He advised many presidents, and his enormous managerial skills were again used for the national good under Truman and Eisenhower. In spite of his stalwart anticommunist stance, he never supported the excesses of Senator Joe McCarthy during the Red Scare of the 1950’s (nor had he tolerated the similar excesses of the 1920’s). He was a good man, indeed a great man, who was overpowered by the awesome circumstances of the Great Depression. Unable to articulate and communicate his concern for the people and his optimism for the future, Hoover saw his reputation, like the stock market, plunge and, like the economy, eventually revive.

Bibliography

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