The Herbert Hoover of historical memory is a distant person, mostly recalled as the president who presided ineffectually over the early years of the Great Depression. Kenneth Whyte’s fine full-life biography reminds us that Hoover was himself a man of action and a remarkable American success story. Charles Rappleye provides an authoritative account of his presidency.
Born to Quaker parents in 1874 in the small town of West Branch, Iowa, Hoover was orphaned at the age of 9 and sent off to live with relatives in Oregon. He did not attend high school—he worked and took business-related night classes—but at 17, he left his foster home for Palo Alto, California, where he worked his way through Stanford University, majoring in mining engineering and becoming a student leader.
Employed after graduation by Bewick, Moreing, an international mining company, he managed mines in Australia, California, and China. Along the way, he married his college sweetheart, Lou Henry. The couple experienced the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and were besieged in Tientsin before being rescued by the international force that put down the insurgency. The experience, Whyte believes, left Hoover convinced that Asians responded only to force.
By his mid-thirties, he was a managing partner of Moering, based in London. He had achieved considerable wealth and, Whyte writes, “used work, reading, and ceaseless activity to keep from being trapped alone with his thoughts and emotions.” Retiring from Moering and remaining in London, he became an independent mining consultant. The venture supported a large townhouse, servants, and governesses for his children. “The engineer,” he believed, had emerged as a new social type with special responsibilities. By then a major donor to Stanford University, he may have aspired to its presidency.
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 transformed Hoover’s life. Working with U.S diplomats, he helped organize transportation home for stranded U.S. citizens. Then he turned his attention to Belgium. The Germans, ignoring a declaration of neutrality, had used the country as a highway into France. Expropriating Belgian agricultural production to feed their army, the invaders created an artificial famine. Hoover established a relief program that provided almost the entire food supply for seven and a half million Belgians. He got grudging assent from Britain and Germany, raised the money, oversaw the effort, and made himself an internationally renowned figure.
When the United States entered the war in 1917, he returned to his country to assume leadership of the Food Administration, which mobilized American agricultural production. Linking food conservation to wartime patriotism, he galvanized an effort that did much to feed the Allies as the war went into its decisive phase. The effort, Whyte believes, “was progressivism incarnate,” employing the regulatory power of government for the good of humanity. The end of the war and the postwar peace conference at Versailles brought him back to a ravaged Europe on the verge of mass famine. Hoover, British prime minister David Lloyd George declared, became “food dictator to the world.” Acting on his own authority, he distributed relief to former enemy nations as well as the Allies. John Maynard Keynes thought him one of the most admirable figures at Versailles, but his bluntness irritated President Woodrow Wilson and marginalized him.
Admirers promoted him for the presidency, but he declined to make a serious bid, instead campaigning for Warren G. Harding in 1920. After Harding won a sweeping victory, he made Hoover the secretary of commerce. Hoover served in the post for seven and a half years with distinction, making the Commerce Department “both a producer and a clearinghouse of relevant information on the U.S. economy.” When the nation experienced a sharp but brief postwar recession, he convened a conference on unemployment that he invited to consider the then-daring idea of counter-cyclical public works—that is, increasing rather than reducing government spending on infrastructure during the economic downturn. Under Harding and then Calvin Coolidge, Hoover became the strongman of the cabinet. His projects ranged from flood control and hydroelectrical power to the regulation of commercial radio and civil aviation. Along the way, he authored American Individualism, a well-received attempt to reconcile rugged individualism with social order. By 1928, he was the inevitable Republican nominee for president. He defeated Democrat Alfred E. Smith in a landslide.
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The stock market crash and onset of the Great Depression came midway through Hoover’s first year in office. Like most politicians and economists, he was slow to grasp its importance. A Federal Farm Board, established to support agricultural prices, was overwhelmed by the depth of their collapse. The industrial economy declined apace, creating mass unemployment. Many Republican politicians supported an increase in tariff rates as a barrier against cheap imports. The result, the strongly protectionist Smoot-Hawley bill, raised rates sharply. A thousand economists signed a petition demanding a veto. Hoover privately described the bill as “vicious, extortionist, and obnoxious”—but signed it. He could not, Charles Rappleye tells us, “turn his back on a measure endorsed by a clear majority of his own party.”
Rather activist by previous standards in dealing with the economic crisis, he accepted an Agricultural Marketing Act that sought to support farm prices by dumping surpluses overseas. He also tried to speed up public works projects, but these moves had little success. As the economy continued to decline, banks collapsed and homeless workers panhandled on the streets of large cities. Hoover, determined to go no further, vetoed bills to establish a larger federal public works, provide agricultural subsidies, and make early payment of a federal bonus for World War I veterans. The Republicans took a drubbing in the midterm elections of 1930. By 1932, homeless workers in many cities were calling their makeshift shantytowns Hoovervilles. The president waged a hopeless campaign for reelection against Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Politically, Hoover never recovered from his 1932 defeat. The Republican party moved on to Alf Landon, Wendell Willkie, Thomas E. Dewey, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. But as political memory of the Depression waned, Hoover experienced a revival of sorts as the head of a commission on government efficiency under Harry Truman. Establishing an office and living quarters at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel, he spoke occasionally on current issues and in time became a respected Republican elder statesman. Widely eulogized at his death in 1964, Hoover’s life demonstrated the reality of the cherished American faith in opportunity and upward mobility, and his career suggested both the possibilities and ultimate limitations of technocratic governance.
Alonzo L. Hamby, emeritus professor of history at Ohio University, is the author of Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century.
