Woman of Substance

Now the activist Lou Hoover receives her due from Nancy Beck Young, who contends that Hoover blazed the trails that ER would follow and extend. Lou Hoover “revolutionized” the office of first lady, Young says, expanding the traditional role of hostess to include her own political agenda. She became the first first lady to speak on the radio, to contend with civil rights issues, and to struggle against the effects of the Great Depression.

Unlike Eleanor Roosevelt, Lou Henry Hoover had been unconventional all her life. Born in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1874, she always championed traditional rural values. But her father, Charles Henry, taught her to fish and to ride bareback, unladylike diversions by the standards of the day. In 1890 she wrote an essay entitled “The Independent Girl.”

More remarkably, Lou Henry majored in geology at Stanford. She encountered little discrimination until her graduation in 1898, when she began to look for a job. At that point, she regretted that her degree, an A.B., “unfortunately does not stand . . . for ‘A Boy’–ah, what wouldn’t I give just about now to be one!” She corresponded with Herbert Hoover, a fellow geology student, by then off seeking his fortune in the mines in Australia. He proposed by telegram, she accepted, and they traveled to China where she followed him into the mines and on the barricades during the Boxer Rebellion. She had two sons, but always felt her place was with her husband.

By the start of World War I, the Hoovers had enough money to live on their investments and devote their time to public service. Leaving their boys with her parents, Lou and Bert worked together to provide relief to war-torn Europe, Bert through food programs, and Lou by heading up a committee to rescue nearly 26,000 American women and children stranded by the conflict. After the war, Hoover’s work diverged from her husband’s, as she worked on the national level with women’s athletics and the Girl Scouts. She developed organizational and bureaucratic skills, moving beyond the “single-issue female activists of the era,” says Young.

When Lou Hoover went to the White House in 1929, she continued to pursue her activist agenda. Even her entertaining had political overtones, as when she invited the wife of Illinois congressman Oscar DePriest, the first African-American U.S. representative since Reconstruction, to a tea for congressional wives. She also anticipated Jacqueline Kennedy by three decades in her restoration of the White House, and built the first presidential retreat.

The price of being a transitional figure was widespread criticism. Southern senators bellowed in protest over the invitation to Mrs. DePriest. Hoover was criticized for driving her own car. Her social secretary tried to convince her to slow down. Even though women’s roles were changing in the 1920s, the public was not ready to accept an activist first lady, whose role is always a “lagging indicator” of social mores, says Lewis L. Gould, editor of the University Press of Kansas series of Modern First Ladies, of which this book is a part.

Even female journalists, who had broken with convention themselves, criticized Lou Hoover. So when the Depression descended, and the first lady mobilized her considerable contacts to alleviate its effects among the poor, she refused to publicize her efforts, one reason her accomplishments are so little known today.

Lou Hoover’s rural upbringing made her prefer local solutions and private philanthropy to nationwide governmental relief programs, as more likely to spare the dignity of recipients. When Herbert Hoover established the President’s Emergency Committee on Employment (PECE), its women’s division included close associates of Lou Hoover’s such as Lillian Gilbreth (the author/mother in Cheaper By the Dozen). Ironically, Young notes, its New Deal counterpart, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, originally had no women’s department.

All through her term as first lady, Lou Hoover continued her earlier work with the Girl Scouts as part of her mission to counter the ill effects of modernization. Her insistence on fairness, or civil rights, moved her to expand Scouting to American Indians.

With the onset of the Depression, she used the Girl Scouts to provide local relief. She was so proud of her Girl Scouts that she unintentionally condescended to the opposite sex during a radio address, when she said, “Not for a moment are we minimizing what the men and boys have done! That we know, and it is marvelous.” Membership in the Girl Scouts rose during the Depression as girls realized their power to alleviate hardship. Young suggests that Lou Hoover’s work with the Girl Scouts “probably did more for the young women who participated in it than it did to address the national economic malady.” Still, in a time when women were being fired wholesale to give scarce jobs to men, it was no small thing to give young women a sense of worth.

Lou Hoover underestimated the unprecedented scope of the Depression, although she did more than any previous first lady to combat an economic and political crisis. In any case, her aversion to publicity made it difficult for her to expand her programs beyond her immediate sphere of influence. Surprisingly, while the Hoovers worked at complementary jobs during the Great War, Young says that the president “rarely leaned on Lou for policy support” during the Depression.

After her husband left office, Lou Hoover continued her work with private organizations, still believing that the downturn was the result of abandoning traditional values. Young notes that even though New Deal programs were more successful than the Hoovers’ voluntary activism, they “did not bring about full recovery from the Great Depression.” Both strategies, she argues, attempted to address the economic and social dislocations of modern life. Through her work with the Girl Scouts, “Hoover reminded Americans of the importance of community service in their increasingly anonymous, modern world.”

Although Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt were very different, Lou Hoover and Eleanor Roosevelt had many similarities. If her husband had not been swamped by the Depression, Lou Hoover’s abilities and activism might have won her a share of the admiration that has all gone to ER.

Lou Hoover was one of the first modern women to try to balance age-old values about caring for children with hopes of self-fulfillment and dreams of a career. Nancy Young notes that Hoover’s career “serves as a poignant reminder” of the difficulty of living in the midst of a social shift: Her life departed dramatically from 19th-century norms, but from our perspective in the early 21st century, Young says, “Hoover’s accomplishments seem somehow incomplete.”

Young’s work combines meticulous research with good analysis to create a vivid portrait of a sympathetic, interesting, and unfairly overlooked pioneer among the high-achieving women of our time.

Kristie Miller is author, most recently, of Isabella Greenway: An Enterprising Woman.