HERBERT HOOVER
Biography
The life of Herbert Hoover is an American success story. Orphaned at the age of 9, Hoover rose to become a successful mining engineer and a wealthy businessman. During World War I he headed a relief commission that provided food for millions of starving people in Europe. He became United States food administrator, then secretary of commerce in the 1920's, and in 1929 President of the United States.
Early Years
Hoover was born in West Branch, Iowa, on August 10, 1874. He was the second of three children of Jesse Hoover, a blacksmith, and Hulda Randall Minthorn Hoover. His parents were Quakers. In 1880, when Herbert was 6, his father died of typhoid fever. Three years later his mother died of pneumonia, and Herbert went to live with an uncle, Allan Hoover, who had a farm near West Branch.
Hoover worked his way through Stanford (as one of the very first students). He clerked, delivered newspapers, ran a laundry, and managed special lectures and concerts. During summer months he worked on geological surveys in Arkansas and Nevada. Hoover soon showed his talent for business as financial manager of the Stanford football team. Once he arranged a game that sold over $30,000 worth of tickets.
His Engineering Career
After graduating in 1895, Hoover's first job was as a laborer in the goldfields of Nevada. In 1896 he went to San Francisco, where he was hired by a well-known firm of mining engineers. He started as an office boy, but in less than a year he was assistant to the superintendent of one of the company's mines. In 1897 a British company hired the 23-year-old Hoover to manage its gold mines in Australia. This was the start of a career that would take him around the world and make him a rich man.
Hoover spent 2 years in Australia. He returned home only long enough to marry Lou Henry on February 10, 1899. She had been a fellow student at Stanford. The next day they sailed for China, where Hoover had been appointed director of the Chinese bureau of mines. Soon after they arrived, the Boxer Rebellion--a revolt of Chinese against foreign domination--broke out. Hoover organized water and food supplies in the city of Tientsin. It was his first job in the kind of work that later made him famous.
During the next 15 years Hoover worked on engineering projects in Europe, India, South Africa, and Egypt. He also wrote Principles of Mining and, with his wife, translated a 16th-century Latin work, Agricola's De Re Metallica (“About Metals”). By 1914 he was known as the boy wonder of mining engineering. He was manager of a number of mining companies throughout the world and consultant to many others. Not yet 40 years old, he was already rich enough to retire.
His Public-Service Career
Hoover was in London when World War I broke out in 1914. The American ambassador, Walter Hines Page, asked him to help with the thousands of Americans stranded in Europe by the outbreak of war. Hoover became head of the American Repatriation Committee, which helped the Americans borrow money to return home.
When the German Army invaded Belgium, Page again called on Hoover, who organized a group to send food to starving Belgians and Frenchmen in the war zones. This was the start of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, which fed 10,000,000 Belgians and Frenchmen during the war.
When the United States entered the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Hoover United States food administrator with the job of regulating and directing food production. It was especially important to supply more food to Allied and neutral countries. Hoover asked Americans to cooperate by saving food. His motto was “Food will win the war!” and “hooverize” came to mean “economize.”
After the war ended in 1918, Eastern Europe was struck by a famine caused by crop failures. Hoover turned his food administration into a relief agency to send American surplus food to the starving people there. In 1918 and 1919 Hoover's agency provided food for 300,000,000 people.
His Political Career
When his humanitarian task came to an end, Hoover planned to return to engineering. But by 1920 he was one of the most popular men in the United States. Hoover clubs were formed to boost his nomination at the 920 Republican convention. But Warren G. Harding won the nomination and the election. President Harding offered Hoover his choice of the posts of secretary of the interior or secretary of commerce. Hoover chose the commerce post. After Harding died in 1923, President Calvin Coolidge reappointed Hoover. For 8 years he headed the Department of Commerce, which he reorganized and enlarged.
The Election of 1928
When Coolidge decided not to run again for president in 1928, Hoover's popularity made him the natural choice of the Republicans. His Democratic opponent was Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York. The campaign was a bitter one, centering on two issues. One was religion. The second was prohibition. Under a Constitutional Amendment the federal government had banned the sale of liquor. Many voters opposed Smith because he was a Catholic, a big-city man, and against prohibition. Hoover campaigned on a platform of prosperity. The United States was rich and could grow even richer. Voters were promised “a chicken in every pot.”
Hoover won a landslide victory, receiving 444 Electoral votes to Smith's 87. The popular vote was 21,392,000 for Hoover and 15,016,000 for Smith. The orphan from Iowa had become president, the first from west of the Mississippi River.
President
But less than a year after Hoover took office, in October, 1929, the stock market crashed, starting the United States toward the worst depression in its history.
Actually, the prosperity enjoyed by the United States during the 1920's had been misleading. Not everyone had shared in it. Farmers were hard hit because of falling prices on their crops. Stock prices were too high, and the stock market was weakened by the practice of buying stocks on credit.
The Smoot–Hawley tariff bill, passed by Congress in 1930, helped intensify the Depression. The bill was meant to help farmers meet European competition by raising tariffs (import taxes) on farm products. Hoover, who had promised during the campaign to help the farmers, signed the bill reluctantly, for it also raised tariffs on many manufactured goods. In retaliation, European countries raised their tariffs on American goods, thus reducing European purchase of American products.
The Depression
Hoover was faced with a task that made all others he had undertaken look small. The stock market crash had wiped out many investors. As businesses went bankrupt and banks failed, people lost their jobs and their savings. Many political leaders and businessmen thought that the Depression would not last long—that “Prosperity was just around the corner.” Hoover was reluctant to interfere in the economy. Instead, he favored voluntary cooperation by business, and relief for the jobless and hungry through state and local agencies. He called businessmen to Washington to urge them to keep their factories going. Addressing the nation, he appealed to the people to have confidence.
But the Depression deepened, soon spreading to Europe. In 1931 Hoover introduced a 1–year moratorium, or delay, on war debt payments owed to the United States by European nations. This helped them fight their own depressions and in turn helped the American economy.
In January, 1932, at the President's urging, Congress established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. This agency provided federal loans for banks and businesses and funds to the states for local relief. Huge public works projects were started to provide jobs for workers.
Foreign Affairs
Hoover's main concern in foreign affairs was for peace. The United States took part in the London Naval Conference in 1930, which was attended by the leading nations of the world. The members of the conference hoped to prevent war by limiting the size and number of warships. When Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, Hoover condemned the Japanese and refused to recognize their conquests in Manchuria. This policy of nonrecognition, named the Stimson Doctrine, after Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, might better be called the Hoover Doctrine. Relations with Latin America were improved when Hoover removed United States Marines from Nicaragua, where they had been stationed since 1912.
The Election of 1932
As election time approached, Republicans did not expect victory. The Depression had become worse. Over 10,000,000 people were out of work, and almost everyone blamed Hoover for the hard times, often unfairly. Poor people lived in shantytowns, which they called Hoovervilles. Newspapers, used to keep out the cold, were nicknamed Hoover blankets. Hoover lost the election to the Democratic candidate, New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, by a margin of more than 7,000,000 popular votes.
Hoover left the White House in 1933 and returned for several years to Palo Alto, where he served as a trustee of Stanford University and founded the Hoover Library. Later he moved permanently to New York City. He wrote lengthy memoirs and several books critical of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. His two sons, Allan and Herbert, Jr., became mining engineers like their father. (Herbert Hoover, Jr., later served as undersecretary of state under President Dwight D. Eisenhower.)
Later Years
During and after World War II, Hoover returned to humanitarian work, directing famine relief in Europe. In 1947 President Harry Truman appointed him to head a commission on reorganization of the executive branch of the government. A second Hoover Commission, as it was called, was established by President Eisenhower in 1953.
Hoover died in New York City on October 20, 1964, at the age of 90.
In a letter to a young admirer Hoover once summed up his personal philosophy: get the “constructive joy out of life”; be honest, sportsmanlike, and considerate of others; have “religious faith”; be “a man of education.”
Reviewed by Frank Freidel
Author, America in the Twentieth Century