“What I do fear is the…exaggerated idea the people have conceived of me. They have a conviction that I am a sort of superman, that no problem is beyond my capacity…If some unprecedented calamity should come upon the nation…I would be sacrificed to the unreasoning disappointment of a people who expected too much.”
President Herbert Hoover, seven months before the stock market crash of 1929 which triggered the Great Depression
I’m thirty-one books into this quest and William Leuchtenburg’s biography of Herbert Hoover is easily the biggest revelation so far. The main thrust of this quest was to read past the headlines and occasional presidential rankings and learn who the American presidents were as people and how they ascended to the height of political power. Herbert Hoover, it turns out, was a sheer force of nature. A bold thinker overflowing with ingenuity and a love of hard work, the Quaker from Iowa would show the world what was possible; and somehow still earn his reputation as one of the worst presidents in American history.
In the late 1890s Bewick, Moreing & Co., a London-based concern that operated gold mines in Western Australia, was looking for an engineer at least thirty-five years old with extensive smelting expertise. Thus, a headstrong college graduate, then all of twenty-two, grew a mustache, bought a top hat and frock coat, lied on his resume, took a train across America and sailed from New York to England for an interview. Herbert Hoover got the job. He traveled the world so often for various mining projects that, when running for president in 1928, many raised the specter than Hoover had not lived enough consecutive years in America to Constitutionally qualify as a candidate. It also made him extraordinarily rich.
The mining work was just prelude to one of the truly monumental feats of modern comestible logistics. In 1914 WWI began and people in Belgium were starving. With the Germans occupying the import-reliant nation and refusing to feed their newly garrisoned prisoners, the United States was forced to intervene. Britain refused to lift its naval blockade unless a neutral third-party came to the Belgian rescue and so the mind-bending task of feeding an entire country during a continental war fell to Herbert Hoover, then living in London. Hoover had to raise a million dollars a week. He then had to buy tens of thousands of tons of food from all over the world, route the logistics of shipments across the oceans to Holland, navigate from there through the Belgian canals and make sure everything landed where it was supposed to, intact and unspoiled. At operational peak, Hoover’s program was feeding nine million French and Belgian people a day, with almost no overhead or loss to fraud. Hoover didn’t just get food, he also procured thread for Belgium’s world-famous lace-makers. He even got cocoa for the kids.
“It has been no part of mine to build castles of the future but rather to measure the experiments, the actions, and the progress of men through the cold and uninspiring microscope of fact, statistics and performance.” Not the most inspiring way to look at humanitarianism, yet “Hooverize” (to economize for the national good) became a verb. As one 1918 Valentine’s Day card read, “I can Hooverize on dinner, And on lights and fuel too, But I’ll never learn to Hooverize, When it comes to loving you.” As the conflict came to a close, a war-ravaged continent continued to look to the Food Czar for help. Hoover controlled traffic on major European rivers like the Danube, Rhine, Vistula and Elbe. He coordinated railways in 18 countries. He rebuilt bridges and highways, reordered currencies, combated typhus, and reopened mines. He did incredible things like swapping two Austrian locomotives for two million Galician eggs. He even fed the Germans after the war! (much to the distress of some at home). Just how much sway did he have in Europe at the time? Hoover effectively manipulated food rations to deny a monarchist coup attempt in Hungary. Famed economist John Maynard Keynes wrote that Hoover was “the only man who emerged from the ordeal with an enhanced reputation. This complex personality, with his habitual air of weary Titan (or as others might put it, of exhausted prize fighter), his eyes steadily fixed on the true and essential facts of the European situation, imported…precisely that atmosphere of reality, knowledge, magnanimity and disinterestedness which, if they had been found in other quarters also, would have given us the Good Peace.”
Most people don’t remember that guy. Hell, they don’t even know that guy existed. I sure didn’t. Most people – and most historians – recall the Hoover that sent Douglas MacArthur and his army onto the White House lawn with bayonets and tear gas to beat up a bunch of WWI veterans who had congregated demanding overdue bonus checks. Most people know about Hoovervilles and how the eponymous president failed (read: refused) to provide relief for a country spiraling into the Great Depression. Herbert Hoover was so stubborn (How stubborn was he?!) that he signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Bill in 1930 despite over 1,000 economists petitioning him not to and senators of both parties denouncing him. The bill set up a protective tariff which (IMAGINE THAT!) resulted in retaliatory tariffs, causing exports to freeze and prices to soar, worsening the already devastating Depression. The bill was so unpopular that many progressives within Hoover’s Republican Party supported FDR in 1932 instead of their boss. Meanwhile, both sponsors of the legislation, Reed Smoot and Willis Hawley, were swept out of office in the next election.
So what’s with the contradiction in comportment? The author notes that Hoover was chronically bad tempered and “quick to take offense, primed to scent conspirators leagued against him, unwilling to control outbursts of rage.” No doubt channeling his Food Czar experience, Hoover once noted that winning a war “requires a dictatorship of some kind or another. A democracy must submerge itself temporarily in the hands of an able man or an able group of men. No other way has ever been found.” Historian Alfred Rollins said of Hoover’s mindset that “Hoover almost always went deep on a problem, but the depth was like a mineshaft, straightly walled by Hoover’s presumptions. Though his views were always well documented, they frequently lacked all understanding of the complex human and social ramifications of the problem. At the moment of their impact on history, Hoover’s narrowness betrayed him.”
He lacked all understanding of human and social ramifications? He basically saved a continent! But Rollins isn’t as wide of the mark as it seems. While Hoover dealt with the logistics of filling voids with needed goods, there is a strong case to be made that he lacked true empathy. Consider Hoover’s decidedly antiquated views on race and immigration. Years in foreign mines had not given him a favorable view of “Asiatics and negroes” whom he thought were of “Low mental order” and that “one white man equals from two to three of the colored races, even in the simplest forms of mine work such a shoveling.” To wit, he said things like, “Unless our Government adopts a most forcible policy, we will have a calamity in China that has not been equaled in the history of the world. Diplomacy with an Asiatic is of no use. If you are going to do business with him you must begin your talk with a gun in your hand, and let him know that you will use it.” And when it came to immigration, the Hoover administration had little regard for universal human rights. Hoover’s people hunted illegal immigrants and deported them, but if the country of origin wouldn’t take them back the administration would simply detain the immigrants incommunicado for as long as a year and a half.
Equally as regressive on the racial front, Hoover pursued a policy in the South that some blame for the mass exodus of blacks from the Republican Party. HH felt that local white elites needed to guide the South and blacks should follow along; not lead or even work side by side. In appointing a commission to explore home rule for Haiti, Hoover did not appoint a single black person. When a seat came open on the Supreme Court, Hoover nominated Circuit Judge John Parker, a man who had once said that blacks voting was “a source of evil and danger.” (The NAACP, along with several Republican senators, among others, killed the nomination.) Lastly, while Commerce Secretary, Hoover was placed in charge of the relief effort to aid victims of the 1927 Mississippi Flood. While this put him squarely in his managerial wheelhouse and was welcomed at the time, Hoover had to fight hard to suppress myriad reports of abuses of blacks in refugee camps across the region to maintain his momentum as the leading presidential candidate a year later.
The headscratchers keep coming. Despite his blind loyalty to Republican tariff doctrine and un-woke views on race and ethnicity, Hoover promoted a flurry of progressive ideas both before and during his presidency. Before being elected president, HH advocated for a Department of Public Works, a federal employment service, home-loan banks, federal minimum wage, 48 hour workweeks, eradication of child labor, improved housing for the poor and equal pay for men and women. Bucking the fiscal conservatism of his adopted party, Hoover had progressive tax ideas, stating, “I would like to see a steeply graduated tax on legacies and gifts…for the deliberate purpose of disintegrating large fortunes.” This from a man who, at the time, was one of the wealthiest people in the country. He also thought poor people shouldn’t pay taxes at all and there should not be excise taxes on necessities like food and clothing. Once he got to the White House, Hoover signed the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929, which set up a revolving fund of half a billion dollars to essentially price fix the market and hold out surpluses, keeping farmers’ incomes steady despite their yields. We still do this kind of thing in America today. Hoover also added two million acres to the national forest reserve, restricted shooting migratory birds and announced (9 days into office) that no more oil exploitation would be permitted on public lands. The man who built a personal fortune in mining cancelled over 12,000 drilling leases during the first year of his presidency.
At the end of Leuchtenburg’s concise biography I am left stupefied. On paper, Herbert Hoover was arguably the most qualified person IN THE WORLD to deal with the Great Depression. Yet somehow, one of the all-time great American minds when it came to business, logistics, efficiency and creative thinking – a man ardently sought by both major parties to be their candidate – became a president renowned for political ineptitude, epic stubbornness, blatant racism and a narrowminded focus that left him blind to a country collapsing around him. I opened this book thinking I’d breeze through the story of an inconsequential leader whose trivia I’d quickly forget. I closed it thinking Herbert Hoover is one of the most fascinating case studies available in human psychology. I’ll circle back to this guy; next time with a much, much longer book.
Trivia
- First person born west of the Mississippi to be president (West Branch, Iowa)
- Sophomore year of college created a huge topographical relief map of Arkansas with a friend for display at the Chicago World’s Fair, where it won a prize
- Graduated in the inaugural class of Stanford University in 1895 with BA in geology
- Foreign policy nerd alert: the Stimson Doctrine was declared on Hoover’s watch
- Hoover Dam was named after Herbert by his Interior Dept. Secretary Ray Wilbur as construction began
- Despite many tries by later administrations to change it (looking at you, Harold Ickes) the name stuck
- Derisively called “Wonder Boy” by President Coolidge who inherited then-Commerce Secretary Hoover from the Harding Administration
- Hoover was known to poach projects, funds, and anything useful he could appropriate from other Cabinet departments
Follow-up Reading
- Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times by Kenneth Whyte
- Herbert Hoover in the White House: The Ordeal of the Presidency by Charles Rappleye
- Six-volume series “The Life of Herbert Hoover” by George Nash