Herbert Hoover

Herbert Clark Hoover was born on August 10, 1874, in West Branch, Iowa, a small Quaker settlement on the eastern edge of the state. His father, Jesse Hoover, ran the village blacksmith shop and later sold farm implements. His mother, Hulda Minthorn Hoover, was a recorded minister in the Society of Friends. The family's plain religious practice shaped the boy's habits: quiet speech, steady work, and suspicion of display ^[1].

Loss arrived early. Jesse died of heart trouble in 1880, when Herbert was six, and Hulda died of pneumonia in 1884. The orphaned children were divided among relatives. In 1885 the eleven year old Herbert was sent by rail to Newberg, Oregon, to live with his uncle Henry John Minthorn, a physician and school administrator. He attended his uncle's academy, then worked as an office boy in Minthorn's land business in Salem, where he taught himself bookkeeping and typing at night ^[1].

Hoover never finished high school, but in 1891 he passed the entrance examinations, with some tutoring help, for the newly opened Stanford University in California. He belonged to Stanford's first class, studied geology under the field geologist John Branner, and paid his way with jobs that included delivering laundry and managing the baseball and football teams. He graduated in 1895 with a degree in geology, a member of what he later called the pioneer class ^[2].

The mid 1890s were depression years, and the new graduate started at the bottom, pushing ore carts in the gold mines near Nevada City, California, for ten hours a shift. A clerical job with the San Francisco mining engineer Louis Janin followed, and Janin's recommendation changed Hoover's life. In 1897 the British firm Bewick, Moreing and Company hired the twenty two year old to inspect and manage gold mines in Western Australia. He proved a hard driving manager in the outback camps of Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie, and he pushed the firm to acquire the Sons of Gwalia mine, which became one of the most productive gold mines in Australian history ^[3].

In 1899 Hoover married his Stanford classmate Lou Henry, the daughter of a Monterey banker and herself a geology graduate. The couple sailed almost immediately for China, where Hoover served as chief engineer for the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company. They were in Tianjin in 1900 when the Boxer Uprising trapped the foreign settlement under siege for nearly a month; Hoover helped organize barricades and food supplies while Lou worked in the hospital ^[2].

By 1901 he was a partner in Bewick, Moreing, traveling constantly among mining operations on several continents. In 1908 he struck out on his own as an independent consulting engineer with offices in London, San Francisco, and New York, reorganizing troubled mines and financing new ventures. He and Lou also produced a scholarly translation of Agricola's sixteenth century Latin mining treatise De re metallica, published in 1912, a project that won them the Mining and Metallurgical Society of America's gold medal. By his fortieth birthday Hoover was a wealthy man, reportedly worth several million dollars, and openly restless for work of larger public purpose ^[3].

The First World War supplied that purpose. When fighting broke out in August 1914, Hoover was in London and organized the return of tens of thousands of stranded American travelers. Weeks later he took on a far larger task: Belgium, occupied by Germany and blockaded by Britain, faced starvation. Hoover created and led the Commission for Relief in Belgium, a private organization that negotiated with both warring sides, raised and spent hundreds of millions of dollars, and delivered food to more than nine million civilians in Belgium and northern France for the rest of the war ^[4].

After the United States entered the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson named Hoover head of the U.S. Food Administration. Rather than impose rationing, he ran voluntary conservation campaigns, and Americans spoke of Hooverizing their meals with wheatless Mondays and meatless Tuesdays. When the war ended he directed the American Relief Administration, which fed much of central and eastern Europe. In 1921 and 1922, despite his firm anticommunism, he extended that relief into Soviet Russia during a catastrophic famine, an operation that fed millions at its peak ^[4].

His reputation as the Great Humanitarian made him a plausible presidential contender in 1920, but he accepted instead the post of Secretary of Commerce under Warren Harding, continuing under Calvin Coolidge. He transformed a minor department into an engine of standardization, trade promotion, and new industries, taking early regulatory responsibility for radio broadcasting and commercial aviation. His management of relief after the great Mississippi River flood of 1927 kept him constantly in the newspapers, and critics joked that he was Secretary of Commerce and undersecretary of everything else ^[5].

When Coolidge declined to run in 1928, Hoover won the Republican nomination and then a landslide over Democrat Al Smith, carrying forty states. He was the first president born west of the Mississippi River, and he entered office in March 1929 with a reputation for competence that few predecessors could match. His early months brought an agricultural marketing act, expanded national park lands, and plans for prison and child welfare reform ^[5].

The stock market crash of October 1929 wrecked those plans. As the slide deepened into the Great Depression, Hoover acted more energetically than any previous president in an economic crisis: he summoned business leaders to pledge wage maintenance, accelerated federal construction, and in 1932 signed the act creating the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend to banks, railroads, and local governments. Yet he opposed direct federal payments to unemployed individuals, believing relief belonged with local government and private charity, and the economy kept falling. By 1932 roughly a quarter of the workforce was unemployed and thousands of banks had failed ^[6].

Two episodes hardened public anger. He signed the Smoot Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 over the protest of more than a thousand economists, and foreign retaliation deepened the collapse of world trade. Then in July 1932 the Army, under Douglas MacArthur, drove the Bonus Army of unemployed veterans from Washington with tanks and tear gas, and burned their camps. Shantytowns of the homeless were called Hoovervilles. In November 1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated him decisively, and Hoover carried only six states ^[6].

Hoover's marriage to Lou Henry Hoover lasted forty five years, until her death in 1944. Lou was an accomplished figure in her own right: the first woman to earn a Stanford geology degree, a national president of the Girl Scouts, and a fluent linguist. The couple sometimes spoke Mandarin, learned during their China years, when they wanted privacy. They had two sons, Herbert Jr., born in 1903, who became an engineer and later Under Secretary of State, and Allan, born in 1907, who went into ranching and finance ^[2].

The Hoovers built a rambling house on San Juan Hill overlooking the Stanford campus, designed largely to Lou's plans and completed in 1920. Hoover donated it to the university after her death, and it now serves as the residence of Stanford's president. He never accepted a salary for his public service, turning his presidential pay over to charity, a habit consistent with his Quaker distaste for profiting from office ^[2].

In private Hoover was shy, blunt, and famously uncomfortable with political glad handing, though friends knew him as a generous host who loved fishing above all recreations. He wrote an entire book on the subject, Fishing for Fun, published near the end of his life, and often said that all men are equal before fish ^[1].

The years immediately after 1933 were bitter ones. Hoover attacked the New Deal as a threat to American liberty in speeches and in his 1934 book The Challenge to Liberty, but Roosevelt's dominance left him isolated within his own party. He moved into a suite at the Waldorf Astoria Towers in New York City after Lou's death and made it his base for the rest of his life ^[7].

Rehabilitation came after the Second World War. President Harry Truman, who liked the old engineer, sent him around the world in 1946 to survey famine conditions and advise on food relief, echoing his work of thirty years before. Truman then appointed him in 1947 to chair the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, universally called the Hoover Commission, whose recommendations streamlined federal agencies. President Dwight Eisenhower named him to lead a second commission in 1953 ^[7].

Hoover remained a prolific author into his ninth decade, producing memoirs, a study of Woodrow Wilson published in 1958, and the manuscripts of a massive revisionist history of the Second World War era released decades after his death as Freedom Betrayed. He died of internal bleeding in New York City on October 20, 1964, at the age of ninety, and was buried on a hillside in West Branch overlooking his birthplace cottage ^[8].

Any honest Herbert Hoover biography has to hold two stories in tension. In one, he is the orphan who worked his way to the top of a demanding profession and then fed more hungry people than perhaps any private citizen in history; the Belgian relief alone made his name a synonym for rescue across Europe. In the other, he is the president who presided over the worst economic disaster in American history and left office among the most unpopular leaders the country had known ^[4].

Historians have gradually complicated the second story. Scholars such as Joan Hoff and biographers including Kenneth Whyte have argued that Hoover's activism in 1930 to 1932, especially the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and expanded public works, broke with strict laissez faire and anticipated parts of the New Deal, even as his refusal to fund direct relief limited its reach. Rankings of presidents still place him low, but the caricature of a do nothing president has largely faded from serious scholarship ^[3].

His institutional footprint endures. The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, which he founded at Stanford in 1919 as a war documents library, grew into a major research center and archive. The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum operates in West Branch beside his restored birthplace, now a national historic site. Among Herbert Hoover achievements, the pattern that connects engineering, relief work, and government reform is a faith that organized intelligence can fix almost anything, a faith the Depression tested and his long later life partly redeemed ^[8].