Herbert Hoover

31st US President (Republican), 1929-1933

BORN: August 10, 1874, West Branch, Iowa

DIED: October 21, 1964, New York City

POLITICAL CAREER: Secretary of Commerce, 1921-1928; President, 1929-1933

FIRSTS: First Quaker to be president. First president born west of the Mississippi.

ON POLITICS: "We in America have had too much experience of life to fool ourselves into pretending that all men are equal in ability, in character, in intelligence, in ambition. That was part of the claptrap of the French Revolution. We have grown to understand that all we can hope to assure to the individual through government is liberty, justice, intellectual welfare, equality of opportunity, and stimulation to service."

--American Individualism, 1922

ON HIMSELF: "You can’t make a Teddy Roosevelt out of me." "My boyhood ambition was to be able to earn my own living, without the help of anybody, anywhere."

ORPHANS: Herbert  and his brother and sister in 1881, the year after their blacksmith father’s death at the age of 34. His mother taught school and Bible lessons and took up sewing. Two years later she, too, died at 34. Herbert was put on a train to Oregon with two dimes in his pocket, and brought up by his stern Quaker maternal uncle, a country doctor, and his aunt. He never graduated from high school. At 14, his uncle took him out of school to be an office boy in his new land sale company. Hoover learned typing and bookkeeping and polished his math in night sessions at a business school. A visit to a Cascades mine got him excited about engineering. His favorite book was David Copperfield. He recalled, "As gentle as are the memories of the times, I am not recommending a return to the good old days. Sadness was greater, and death came sooner."

ADVENTURER: At 21, he pushed a car in the lower levels of a Nevada gold mine for $1.50 a day on a ten-hour night shift. At 23, he sweated as a manager In the Kalgoorlie gold fields of the west Australian desert. On a camel trip, he liked the look of the Sons of Gwalia prospect and bought it for his British bosses. It turned out to be fabulously wealthy. At 24, he married Lou Henry, a geologist and banker’s daughter he met at Stanford, and took her to China. They got caught in the Boxer Rebellion. Lou worked in a hospital with a Mauser .39 on her belt. Herbert stood night watches, built barricades under gunfire, got food and water to 600 trapped Chinese Christian refugees and saved their lives from a hot-tempered British captain. The Hoovers were a team out of Indiana Jones. As First Lady she liked to drive 90 mph down mountain roads. He add to his wealthy by following ancient Chinese maps to an abandoned silver mine in Burma; complete with fresh tiger tracks inside.

YOUNG TYCOON: He flunked every entrance exam, except math, for the new Stanford University, but a Quaker professor got him into the "pioneer class" in 1891 and a tutor got him up to scratch. He was a student tycoon. He turned a profit on a laundry agency, a baggage service and a newspaper route, hustled for tips as a waiter, typist and handyman, made money for baseball and football teams, and as junior treasurer cleared the entire student body of debt. He also won a campus battle against snobbish fraternities. Studies suffered, but by 27 he was hailed as the highest salaried man of his age in the world. He earned a then phenomenal $30,000. By 1918 his worth was estimated at $4 million.

HUMANITARIAN: "This man is not to be stopped anywhere under any circumstances." This was the order the Germans eventually wrote on Hoover’s passport after he had browbeaten all the warring nations not to get in his way in saving Belgium from starvation. As head of the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) from 1915, he fed 7 million Belgians and French. He took no pay, gave part of his own fortune and risked his life crisscrossing the Atlantic.. From 1918 to 1923 he got food to the Russians. When someone complained that it would help the Bolsheviks, he banged on the table: "Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!"

REBUILDER: Hoover was one of the key Americans in the rebuilding of Europe. Of his role at Versailles, John Maynard Keynes said: "He was the only man who emerged from the ordeal of Paris with an enhanced reputation." In 1920, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said: "He is certainly a wonder, and I wish we could make him nt. There couldn’t be a better one."

THE CHIEF: The mining appellation stuck to him in seven driving years as secretary of commerce. He was hot for new technology.  In 1927, he had his voice and face transmitted to New York over three telephone wires in the first public demonstration of television, He pushed radio. When listeners complained of interference, he was photographed with a one-tube set he to find out for himself. He helped the emerging airlines and cajoled industry into standardization of everything from screws to bottle nipples. He set safety rules for railroads, automobiles, cement, elevators and much else. He wrote a manual for new homeowners and a voluntary building code.

VISIONARY: After World War II, he raised $325 million, mostly from America, to nurture 15 million stricken children in Europe. Hoover may have saved more people from a slow and horrible death than anyone else in world history.

- Harold Evans, The American Century, 1998

Added 12th Month 5, 1998

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