Since his departure from the White House in 1933, it has often seemed that Herbert Hoover is the Rodney Dangerfield of American politics: He gets no respect. On the left, he has long been castigated as a presidential failure: a dour and rigid reactionary who did little to combat the Great Depression. More recently, on the right, he has been denounced as a protectionist and progressive whose misguided interventionism converted the economic downturn of 1929 into a calamity, paving the way for a descent into a collectivist quagmire under Franklin Roosevelt. Routinely rated by many historians as a mediocrity in the Oval Office, Hoover has become a political orphan, unwelcome in liberal and conservative pantheons alike. Particularly in popular folklore and mythology, he survives as a symbol of hapless ineptitude and hard times.
Glen Jeansonne is determined to liberate Hoover from these perceptions. A professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he has written well-received biographies of Huey Long and Elvis Presley, as well as numerous other books, including a recent study of Hoover’s presidency. In Herbert Hoover he has found a subject far less flashy than Elvis or Huey Long, but deserving of far more scrutiny—a man he dubs “the most versatile American since Benjamin Franklin.”
Jeansonne is hardly the first person to have written a biography of Hoover. But here he has composed the most comprehensive one-volume biography of Hoover to date, and in terms that will come as a revelation to many readers. And what an amazing story he has to tell. Born in Iowa in 1874 to Quaker parents and orphaned before he reached the age of 10, Hoover never graduated from high school. Yet he managed to enter Stanford when it opened in 1891 and graduated with a major in geology: his entree to his chosen profession of mining engineering. From then on, his rise in the world was meteoric: By the age of 24 he was superintendent of a gold mine in the desolate outback of Western Australia, and one of the best-paid young men in the world. By 27 he had managed a gigantic coal mine in northern China and, with his intrepid wife Lou Henry Hoover, had survived a harrowing brush with death in the Boxer Rebellion. By 1914, at the age of 40, Hoover, based in London, had traveled around the world five times and had business interests on every continent except Antarctica. He was worth well over a million dollars and stood at the pinnacle of his profession.
After the outbreak of World War I, Hoover, still in London, founded and directed the all-volunteer Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB), a private, but ultimately government-subsidized, institution that imported and provided desperately needed food supplies to more than nine million Belgian and French citizens trapped between the German Army of occupation and the British naval blockade. His 1914 emergency relief mission quickly evolved into a gigantic humanitarian enterprise without precedent in world history: an organized rescue of an entire nation from starvation—in the middle of a war. By 1917, he was an international hero.
When the United States entered the war against Germany, Hoover left day-to-day supervision of the CRB to others, returned home to America, and became head of the U.S. Food Administration, a specially created wartime agency of the federal government. “Food Will Win the War” was his slogan. It was Hoover’s job to direct food conservation campaigns, prevent runaway inflation of food prices, and devise policies that would ensure an exportable surplus of foodstuffs to America’s beleaguered allies. As food administrator and a member of Woodrow Wilson’s war cabinet, he became one of Washington’s most important officials.
At the close of hostilities in 1918, Wilson dispatched Hoover to Europe to organize food distribution on a continent lurching toward catastrophe. There, for 10 grueling months, he coordinated American-led efforts to organize the distribution of food to suffering people in more than 20 countries. A little later, between 1921 and 1923, Hoover’s American Relief Administration (ARA) administered a massive relief program in the interior of Soviet Russia, where a horrible famine—Europe’s worst since the Middle Ages—had broken out. At its peak of operations, the ARA fed upwards of 10 million Russian citizens a day.
Between 1914 and 1923, Hoover directed, financed, or assisted a multitude of international relief endeavors without parallel in the annals of mankind. The monetary value of this aid, measured in today’s currency, exceeded $60 billion. Tens of millions of people owed their lives to his exertions. As someone once said, Herbert Hoover was responsible for saving more lives than any other person in history.
Acclaimed as the “Napoleon of Mercy,” Hoover came home in 1919 to stay, his mining career now behind him. He was only 45 years old. In 1920, he attempted—fitfully and furtively—to gain the Republican presidential nomination; he did not succeed, but he impressed the winner, Warren Harding, who invited Hoover to join his cabinet.
During the 1920s, Hoover ascended still higher on the ladder of public esteem. As secretary of commerce under Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he became one of the three or four most important men in American public life. The range of his interests and influence was staggering: It was said of Hoover that he was secretary of commerce and undersecretary of every other department. He even took time to write a book, American Individualism (1922), in which he expounded his understanding of America’s exceptional sociopolitical system and principles. In 1927, with Coolidge’s approval, Hoover orchestrated the rescue and rehabilitation of more than 600,000 victims of a tremendous flood on the lower Mississippi River—the worst natural disaster in American history. The very next year, with his reputation at its zenith, he was overwhelmingly elected president—and without ever having held elective public office.
Now came the harrowing ordeal of the White House years and Hoover’s struggle to defeat the Great Depression. During his tormented presidency, he strained to return his country to prosperity while guarding its traditional political moorings, only to be repudiated at the polls. In March 1933, the man hailed a few years earlier as the “Great Humanitarian” left office a political pariah, maligned and hated as no other American leader in his lifetime.
And then, astonishingly, Hoover rose slowly from the ashes of his political immolation. Instead of retreating in silence into the political wilderness, the former president boldly reentered the arena and refused ever after to fade away. In 1934 he published a second book of political philosophy, The Challenge to Liberty, which trenchantly critiqued the New Deal and other forms of statism and launched its author on what he called a “crusade against collectivism.” Raising high the alternative banner of “historic liberalism,” Hoover became the intellectual leader of the Republican party in the 1930s and relentless opponent of what he perceived as the New Deal’s assault upon a free society and the constitutional order.
For more than three decades, in fair political weather and foul, Hoover stuck to his guns and his principles. He was an eloquent and unashamed exponent of what we now call American exceptionalism. He built up his incomparable archive and nascent think tank, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, which he came to regard as his greatest benefaction. He seemed indefatigable; even in his 80s, he worked up to 12 hours a day. Between the ages of 85 and 90, he published seven books—not counting two enormous memoirs of his postpresidential years that did not get into print until long after his death.
When Hoover died in 1964, he had lived more than 90 years, including a full half-century in the public eye. It was a record that, in sheer scope and duration, may be without parallel in American history, and this is the action-packed and multifaceted life that Jeansonne depicts with sympathy and verve in this fast-paced biography.
The author is particularly effective in delineating Hoover’s extraordinary accomplishments as secretary of commerce and his daringly activist response to the Great Depression—a record wholly at variance with the legend that he was passive. Although conceding that Hoover “lacked political skills” and committed certain policy errors, Jeansonne insists that the embattled chief executive was “both human and humane” and “does not deserve to be pilloried as the scapegoat of the Great Depression.” And while some on the left have portrayed Hoover as a timid, inflexible ideologue, Jeansonne sees him differently: “He was too intellectually honest for the times, which were saturated with hypocritical intrigue.” The Hoover Jeansonne presents is a man of exceptional intelligence, resourcefulness, and rectitude—an idealistic Quaker who persevered in adversity and, by the end, earned himself a strong measure of redemption.
As Hoover scholars well know, it is challenging to compress his astoundingly productive life between two covers. For the most part, Jeansonne performs his daunting task satisfactorily—although there were times when I might have wished that the book had been a bit longer and dealt with various topics in greater detail. Drawing largely on existing scholarship and some early journalistic biographies, the author has produced a spirited reappraisal of a figure once described as “an enigma easily misunderstood.”
No doubt, some will take issue with aspects of Jeansonne’s revisionism. For example, he frequently refers to Hoover as “the Quaker” and asserts the centrality of Hoover’s birthright Quakerism in the formation of his character, temperament, and philosophy—an issue on which biographers have differed over the years. He does not mention recent scholarship pointedly questioning Hoover’s conduct as a mining engineer and financier in Australia, China, and London before 1914. It would have been helpful if Jeansonne, whose own account of Hoover’s business career is highly laudatory, had addressed this critique. Herbert Hoover: A Life also contains a number of (mostly minor) inaccuracies that should be corrected in a second edition.
Still, Jeansonne has achieved what I take to be his principal objective: an accessible, informative, and sympathetic biography of Hoover for the intellectually oriented general reader. Above all, he punctures the lingering stereotype of Hoover as a cold, uncaring chief executive who did too little to relieve the nation’s economic and social distress.
In an age of glib soundbite certitudes that pass for knowledge, this is a useful contribution. But what of the other (conservative) stereotype that Hoover was a meddlesome progressive who did too much and, thereby, made the Depression much worse? Today’s conservative/libertarian indictment of Hoover’s presidency boils down essentially to three complaints: that in 1929, just after the Crash, he pressured business leaders into a foolish freezing of wage levels, in defiance of free-market economic orthodoxy; that in 1930, he caved in to political pressure and signed the ruinous Smoot-Hawley tariff; and that in 1932, he sought and signed into law, at precisely the wrong time, a massive tax increase, arguably exacerbating the Depression.
Jeansonne seems aware of the dissatisfaction with Hoover on the right—he cites Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man (2007) and Murray N. Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression (1972) in a footnote—but other than (correctly) stressing Hoover’s fiscal conservatism, aversion to bureaucratized government, and preference for localized and voluntaristic measures, he does not confront the conservative case against Hoover systematically. He does state that the Smoot-Hawley tariff “did more harm than good” and that Hoover should have vetoed it—while suggesting that the tariff’s economic importance has been exaggerated. He says nothing about the ultimate provisions, and alleged consequences, of the 1932 tax hike, but does note that the federal government that year was “trapped in a vise.” Tax receipts were plummeting while government expenditures for public works and relief were rising, at a time when nearly everyone (and not just Hoover) believed in the necessity of a balanced budget.
As for Hoover’s wage-freeze policy of 1929-31, Jeansonne properly highlights it as an example of Hoover’s unprecedented presidential activism in response to the Crash; but he seems unfamiliar with the recent contention (by free-market economists) that Hoover’s policy, however well intentioned, led to a disastrous increase in unemployment.
But Jeansonne more than compensates for this lacuna with his perceptive treatment of Hoover’s postpresidential years, when the onetime Bull Moose Progressive—now outflanked by those far to his left—became an outspoken paladin of the right. Before nearly anyone else, Hoover discerned the intellectual challenge posed by the New Deal, and fought it unceasingly, on the plane not of name-calling but of ideas and principles. Hoover believed that he was engaged in a fateful contest for the American mind and political soul, a contest demanding every ounce of his formidable energy. And he did not flinch.
Jeansonne may raise some eyebrows with his claim that Hoover was “the single most important bearer of the torch of American conservatism” between his presidency and the advent of Ronald Reagan. But he has a point. In the larger sweep of the 20th century, Hoover, the unflagging anti-New Dealer, contributed mightily to the critique of ever-aggrandizing statism, a critique now integral to American conservatism. It was one of his most enduring legacies and worth remembering today. Moreover, thanks to Professor Jeansonne, we now have a new and welcome opportunity to reexamine the remarkable life of Herbert Hoover: engineer, humanitarian, statesman, philanthropist, and political philosopher. He left plenty for today’s Americans to ponder—and respect. ¨
George H. Nash, author of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (1976), has written several volumes on the life of Herbert Hoover.
