Hoover: Once hailed as 'Great Humanitarian;' But Later Blamed for the Great Depression

By LINDA LOTRIDGE LEVIN
Rhode Island Library Report

HERBERT HOOVER Presidential Library and Museum. Photo: Hoover Library

                                     The Herbert Hoover Library and Museum
    On his 88th birthday August 10, 1962, former President Herbert Clark Hoover flew to the small Iowa town of West Branch, where he had been born, to dedicate his library and museum. Chronologically, this should have been the first of the thirteen Presidential libraries overseen by the National Archives, but it was, in fact, the third to be constructed, and a fourth, the Kennedy Library, was in the planning stage. The reasons for the delay in honoring Mr. Hoover with his own library were as complex as the man for whom the library and museum honors.
    By the time he left the presidency in 1933, Hoover was reviled by the public, blamed with causing the Great Depression, and it took several decades for the tarnish to be scrubbed from his image. Even today, when Americans think of him, (if they do at all), they associate him with the Depression.

                            Who was Herbert Clark Hoover?

HOOVER on a ship, Jan. 11, 1917. Photo: Hoover Library

    Herbert Hoover was born in 1874 in West Branch, which had been settled by Quakers in the mid-19th century. His father was a blacksmith, and his mother a homemaker. When Bertie, as he was called, was six years old, his father died. Four years later his mother died, leaving Bertie and his two siblings orphans.  Bertie, the eldest child, was sent via train to Oregon to live with his eccentric uncle, whom he later described as “a severe man on the surface, but like all Quakers kindly at the bottom.” 

    There he spent summers leveling patches of trees, milking cows, and splitting logs, and by the age of 14, he was working as an office boy in his uncle’s real estate company and studying at night.     
Bertie was eager to attend Stanford University, which had just opened its doors in a hayfield in a place called Palo Alto, California. Against his uncle’s wishes, Bertie applied to this new school but failed the entrance exam. However, with tutoring in Palo Alto the summer before classes began, he managed to enter its inaugural class and began his studies in geology. It was at Stanford where he met his future wife, Lou, and discovered his passion for mining engineering.  
    After his graduation in 1895 and engaged to his classmate, Lou Henry, Herbert set out with $40 in his pocket to earn a living, ironically, during a severe economic depression. Once he and Lou were married, the two began an adventure that led them to Australia, China, South Africa, Peru, and England, with Herbert - soon to be known as the Great Engineer - overseeing a variety of aspects of mining, and Lou setting up households and giving birth to their two sons, Herbert Jr. and Allan. In the years leading up to World War I, Hoover became enormously successful and very wealthy.

    When the war broke out in Europe in 1914, the Hoovers were living in London, and when thousands of American tourists were stranded there, the United States ambassador to Great Britain asked Hoover to use his formidable organization skills to help them get home.
    Hoover set up an American Committee, loaned money to those stranded money, and secured passage for about 120,000 Americans on ships sailing to the United States. He then organized relief to the Belgians, whose country had been invaded by the German Army.
     He was wildly successful, saving more people from starvation than Hitler and Stalin together would murder, thus cementing his national and international reputation. Years later, the man dubbed the Great Humanitarian told one of his biographers that he believed his decision to aid Belgium in her worst hour had been “the worst mistake of my life,” because without this, he said, he never would have been elected president.            
    When Hoover returned to the United States, his organizational skills led President Woodrow Wilson to appoint him head of the Food Administration, a position he held throughout the war. His insistence that households conserve food and any supplies needed for the war became known as Hooverizing, and by the end of the war, Hoover was indeed a household word.

"The man dubbed the Great Humanitarian told one of his biographers that he believed his decision to aid Belgium in her worst hour had been 'the worst mistake of my life,' because without this, he said, he never would have been elected president."

PRESIDENT and Mrs. Herbert Hoover. Photo: Hoover Library

In 1919 he established the Hoover Institution at his alma mater “to make and preserve peace, and to sustain for America the safeguards of the American way of life.”
    When Warren Harding was elected president in 1920, he asked Hoover to be his secretary of commerce. If he had never been elected president, Herbert Hoover would have secured an important place in American   

 history because of his work before and during the war and as commerce secretary under Harding and his successor Calvin Coolidge. The secretary promoted partnerships between government and business, calling it “economic modernization” and leading President Harding to call him “the smartest geek I know.” In fact, there were times during his years as secretary of commerce that his ideas and stands on business and government gained him more notoriety than those of either president he was serving. Hoover’s standing in the country was at an all-time high.

                           The 31st President of the United States
    President Coolidge, who had come to the presidency when Harding died suddenly in 1923, decided against running for a second full term. Hoover was a leading Republican candidate to succeed Coolidge, but his performance in the first few primaries was lackluster. Nonetheless, he was nominated on the first ballot at the Republican convention that summer and won the November election in a landslide, garnering more votes than any other GOP candidate had ever polled. He won every state except five.  (One of these was Rhode Island.)
    In his acceptance speech a week after the convention ended, Secretary Hoover said: "We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of this land... We shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this land."
     When Calvin Coolidge left the White House in March, 1929, the Depression was underway. It was Herbert Hoover’s challenge to bring order to the economy, and at first glance this man known for his skillful efficiency and organization who strongly believed in the popular Efficiency Movement appeared to be just the right person for the job.
  But sadly it was not long before, according to the Hoover Library and Museum, President Hoover became a scapegoat for every problem facing the nation. He was a man of contradictions: He was ambitious and talented and yet he was contemptuous of change.

"Herbert Hoover was a shy, self-contained man who shunned public displays of bravado, not necessarily positive qualities for a politician and in particular the president of the United States. He was a dull, ponderous public speaker who preferred to focus on statistics and facts. Coupled with that, he had an aversion to the press that grew deeper and more hostile as his presidency progressed."

       Within thirty days of his inauguration, Hoover announced an expansion of federal civil service protection, canceled private oil leases on government lands, and directed federal law enforcement officials to focus on gangster-ridden Chicago, leading to the arrest and conviction of Al Capone on tax evasion charges.     He added more than five million acres of national parks and forests, created the Veterans Administration, and established a Federal Farm Board to support agriculture prices.
    Then the stock market crashed in the fall of 1929. The causes were many, and they included lack of regulation of banks and overproduction of post-war consumer goods, leaving a glut of products on the market.
    Herbert Hoover was a shy, self-contained man who shunned public displays of bravado, not necessarily positive qualities for a politician and in particular the president of the United States. He was a dull, ponderous public speaker who preferred to focus on statistics and facts. Coupled with that, he had an aversion to the press that grew deeper and more hostile as his presidency progressed. He was the first president to assign a secretary to deal exclusively with the press, and at first, he held regular press conferences with questions being submitted in writing, just as his predecessors had done. 

    But as the economy grew more dire, Hoover’s conferences were less frequent, and when he did hold one, he rarely answered reporters’ questions.
    It did not help Hoover’s reputation that as more and more Americans fell into poverty and eventually became homeless, they congregated in shantytowns, dubbed  Hoovervilles, their “homes” made of cardboard or tin, or they slept on park benches keeping warm under newspapers that became known as Hoover blankets.
    Others stuffed their coats with newspapers and used these Hoover blankets to keep out the cold. Photographs of these conditions proliferated in the newspapers and magazines. By June of 1932, an army of World War I veterans, called the Bonus Marchers,  many of them unemployed, gathered in a Hooverville near Washington, D.C., demanding promised cash payments related to their war service.
     Despite the fact that the country was in shambles, Hoover decided to run for re-election . Unfortunately he found himself campaigning against the charismatic governor of New York, a man named Franklin D. Roosevelt. President Hoover lost the election by a wide margin.

                                             Defeat and Exile
        One of his biographers called the years between March 4, 1933, and 1945 when Franklin Roosevelt died, Hoover’s  “wilderness years.” When he left the White House, the badly defeated Hoover was reviled by the public. Even Time magazine, a Republican-leaning publication, referred to him as President Reject.
    Bitter over his defeat and feeling as if the voters had not appreciated his work as president, he spent those twelve years writing books, opposing New Deal policies, and working with a variety of philanthropic organizations.
    A kind of rehabilitation occurred when Harry Truman assumed office after Roosevelt’s death and asked the former president to tour what was to become West Germany and present a status report. As a result, Hoover, the man once called the Great Humanitarian, set up a school meals program in the American and British occupation zones, feeding more than three million hungry German youngsters.
    Two years later, Truman appointed Hoover to a commission, eventually called the Hoover Commission, whose purpose was to reorganize the federal executive departments and  find ways to correct inefficiencies and reduce waste. He was appointed chairman of a similar commission under President Eisenhower, Truman’s successor.   

PALO ALTO home overlooking Stanford University campus, designed by Lou Hoover. Photo: Hoover Library

Hoover spent the remainder of his life writing and working with various organizations, including the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. His wife, Lou, who had traveled the world with him, served as first lady, designed and overseen the construction of their large modern home overlooking the ocean in Palo Alto, died of a stroke in January, 1944, at the age of 69.
    On October 20, 1964, Hoover died in New York where he had kept a suite at the Waldorf Towers. He was 90 years old.  

       Materials for this piece came from the following sources:
 Books:
    Smith, Richard Norton, An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.)
    Lyons, Eugene, Herbert Hoover, A Biography, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1964.)
    Nelson, W. Dale, Who Speaks for the President, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1998.)
 Web Sources: 
    www.hoover.archives.gov (home page for the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum).
     www.hooverassociation.org/ (additional information on the library and museum)
    www.nps.gov/heho/ (information to help plan a trip to the library and museum)
    en.wikpedia.org/wiki/herbert_hoover and related Wikipedia sites
  E-Interview:
    Cary A. Wiesner, historian, Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, [email protected]

    Linda Lotridge Levin is a professor of journalism at the University of Rhode Island and author of several books, including The Making of FDR: The story of Stephen T. Early, America’s first modern press secretary. Next in this series on Presidential Libraries and Museums is Franklin D. Roosevelt.
© Copyright Linda Lotridge Levin