In 1888, the restless Dr. Minthorn announced his resignation from the Friends Pacific Academy. He had taken a new position as partner and president of the Oregon Land Company in Salem, the state capital. The firm had raised $20,000 with which to convert wheat fields in the Willamette Valley into fruit orchards that it would peddle to newcomers from the Midwest.1
Inhabited by Native Americans for ten thousand years, and by European fur traders and fishermen since the sixteenth century, the Oregon Country had been slow to attract settlers and to develop agriculturally. The bountiful Willamette Valley had drawn a trickle of migrants over the Oregon Trail from the east in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, enough to establish Salem as a territorial capital in 1851, but it was only when the transcontinental rail link was formed that full-blown settlement occurred and land prices boomed, creating the opportunity on which Minthorn and his partners intended to capitalize.
The doctor built a handsome house for his family on the outskirts of Salem, as well as a cottage for his mother, who arrived from Iowa with Herbert’s sister, May. Theodore and Bert drove the family’s cow and horses thirty miles overland to their new home as the balance of the Minthorn possessions traveled upstream by riverboat. For the first time since their mother’s death, the three Hoover children were reunited in one locale.
Salem was an opportunity for his fourteen-year-old nephew as well as for Minthorn. Bert chose to leave school and join the Oregon Land Company at a salary of twenty dollars a month, slightly more than he made weeding onions. He worked as an office boy in the firm’s first-floor rooms at the busy corner of Commercial and Chemeketa, running errands, keeping the company stables, and sweeping up at night, and for the first time in his life he began to display some exceptional qualities.
According to a Mrs. Bickford who worked in the land company’s office, Bert was “a funny looking little fellow, with a short neck, and a round head which was always surrounded by a funny little round hat.” He took to his job immediately, applying himself with a diligence he could never muster in the classroom, starting every morning at seven and staying until well after dark. He read all of the company’s correspondence and learned all of its files, organized the partners’ meetings in the evenings, ensuring that all of them received proper notice and that the necessary documents were on hand at the appointed hour. He served as a resource at those same meetings, thanks to an encyclopedic grasp of administrative minutiae—dates, addresses, price points, deliverables. He also found time to pick up some typewriting and rudimentary accounting skills, and to learn the art of blueprinting roads and properties. He took charge of the company’s advertisements, which were placed in a thousand newspapers through the prestigious agency of Lord and Thomas in Chicago. “He was on the jump when there was anything to do,” said one of the company’s partners. “Herbert Hoover,” said Mrs. Bickford, “was the quietest, the most efficient and the most industrious boy I ever knew in an office. He even wore quiet shoes and you never knew he was around until you wanted something, and then he was right at your elbow. He knew everything about the office and the rest of us never tried to keep track of things. It was easier and quicker just to ask Bert about it.”2
Among the investors in the Oregon Land Company were leading Salem politicians and bankers, men of solid connections and large ambitions who drew few distinctions between the public’s interest and their own. The core of their business was their agricultural holdings, the heavenly groves of pears and prunes hyped by Bert’s newspaper advertisements: “No Hot Nights in Summer—Grass Grows All Winter.” The firm soon diversified into residential developments, building houses and outbuildings, a school, and municipal water systems. It operated a hotel, a sawmill, and a flourmill, graded Salem’s roads, and owned the Salem Street Railway. By 1890, its capital stock had swollen to an impressive $200,000.3
The more the company expanded, the more the partners relied upon Bert. As he hurried unnoticed in and out of the land office and along the raised boardwalks of Salem’s commercial district, his attention seldom strayed from business. Once he had absorbed the details and the larger design of the company’s affairs, his orderly mind began to seize on problems and inefficiencies. His newspaper advertisements, for instance, drew customers to Salem from all parts of the country, some of whom were intercepted by rival promoters, so Bert, on his own initiative, began plucking newcomers from the noisy bustle of the railway platform in order to keep them in his own clutches. He offered them cheap boarding in houses he had rented around town, saving the newcomers the expense of hotels, earning their goodwill, and keeping them out of lobbies crawling with hustlers. Bert also made a few dollars for himself by marking up the rentals. Minthorn was impressed that his nephew knew the importance of minimizing risk and closing a sale. “Bert enjoyed business,” he said.4
Not all of Bert’s initiatives succeeded. The company had been studying methods of preserving prunes and other fruits, a line of opportunity that fascinated Bert. He undertook some experiments of his own until one day the offices filled with sulfurous fumes, and employees, gasping for breath, traced the vapors below stairs to where he was absorbed with a pan, produce, and an alcohol lamp. The little laboratory was promptly shut down.
Bert spoke so infrequently that some acquaintances regarded him as “a trifle slow.” The partners of the Oregon Land Company knew better. His uncle described Bert’s role as critical. Another partner marveled at the boy’s presence of mind, recalling a tense evening meeting at the company’s offices where disgruntled investors were raising “a racket.” As the men shouted and threatened blows, Bert slipped to the back of the building and shut off the gas, leaving the raging businessmen in total darkness. They had to light matches to find the door and make their way to the street, by which time they had cooled off. They went home without a fight.5
When he was fifteen years old, the land company upped Bert’s salary to thirty-five dollars a month, a good wage for an office boy. He continued to record his income in his account book, along with his expenditures. His earnings meant a lot to him: they were the fruits of his hard labor and a measure of his growing self-sufficiency. Content as he was in his role at the land company, he still resented his dependence on Minthorn, and he was determined to work his way up and prove himself better than his circumstances. It was his ambition, he later said, “to be able to earn my own living without the help of anybody, anywhere.”6
After some unsatisfactory experiences on a high-wheel bicycle, Bert committed several months’ pay to a newfangled Victor safety bike with two equal-sized spoke wheels and cushioned tires. This single purchase expanded his freedom and independence immeasurably. He rode the bike all day long through Salem’s soggy streets, on business and for pleasure. It became part of his identity, liberating him from four-legged transportation and distinguishing him from his horse-loving uncle. It also connected him with his father, a passionate advocate of machines over beasts.7
This was one of several echoes of Jesse Hoover. Bert attempted to make a business of repairing and selling abandoned sewing machines in Salem; while the local women did not trust the quality of his merchandise, his father would have applauded his enterprise. He also followed the paternal example in matters of faith. He believed in a “good, kind God,” and he did what was expected of him, attending Sunday school, joining the Newberg and Highland Avenue (Salem) chapters of the Friends and participating in a Band of Hope debate on prohibition. He was honest, hardworking, and clean living, even by his uncle’s exacting standards. Religion was not central to his life, however. Minthorn had a vague recollection of Bert falling under the influence of a traveling evangelist at age fifteen. If that was the case, the spell did not hold. Hulda’s spiritual zeal appears to have bypassed all three children.8
After a year in Salem, Bert had yet to make a friend in town. Being passed as a chattel from household to household in his most impressionable years had done nothing to improve his sociability. Eventually, his Sunday school teacher noted his doleful air and introduced him to another solitary boy, Burt Brown Barker, who lived across the river on a vegetable farm with his mother and stepfather, his birth father having left after he was born. Burt’s initial impression was that his classmate was not much interested in friendship. If only out of lack of alternatives, the boys eventually gave each other a chance. Bert would go to Burt’s house in the country, where they would eat watermelons and play checkers without saying a word. Burt’s mother, relieved that her son had found a companion, exasperated herself trying to get Bert to speak.9
Bert, remembered Burt, was aloof, “about as much excitement as a china egg.” He was short and puffy, “what you would call fatty. Never interested in sports….Even when he was playing with you he was not the boisterous, laughing kind—no, not at all. He was a very serious boy, and that’s the reason he didn’t get along with the kids. They didn’t much like it.”10
Over time, as Burt gained his new friend’s trust, Bert revealed that he was acutely aware of the deterioration of his family life, and he spoke of having been passed from one uncle to another. Burt, also living with people who had their own natural children, was sympathetic. “We were on the outside looking in, and we knew it,” he said. “Not that they intended that we should know, because they are not that kind of people, but we just knew it.” Although Bert still had a room in the Minthorns’ home, he chose to sleep many nights in a bed he made for himself in the back of the land office. Burt, too, called Bert’s life “a pretty stiff” existence. “He was just facing life grimly. Very grimly.”11
Smarter and shabbier than the other students in their class, Burt and Bert were both impressed by money and spent hours talking about who had it and what they did with it. Not having any, they saw it as an answer: money and success were antidotes to vulnerability, a means of escape, and necessary to controlling one’s destiny.12
The teacher who introduced Bert and Burt was Miss Jennie Gray, a Presbyterian. She had waltzed into the land office one day, a tall woman in her early thirties with polished manners and a beautiful smile. Finding Bert by himself, she quizzed him about his education. He told her he was planning to take some business courses at a night school about to open in Salem. She asked if he read books and he replied that he sometimes read the morning paper after his boss was finished with it. The truth was that he seldom read. He had never been tempted by Dr. Minthorn’s library of fiction, biography, and history.
Miss Gray invited Herbert to the Salem lending library, an adventure he readily embarked on. She withdrew Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe on his behalf. Herbert’s time between office chores was soon filled with medieval battle scenes, chaste love stories, and the heroic deeds of the Black Knight. The experience must have been tolerable, for he soon returned to the library with Miss Gray and borrowed David Copperfield. Dickens’s story of an orphan prevailing over his cruel stepfather and finding his way to love and happiness hit home with Bert. “I can still remember the harshness of Murdstone, the unceasing optimism of Micawber, and the wickedness of Uriah Heep,” he recalled much later. He began to see literature as a living thing, and he would develop a serious lifelong reading habit, growing up to quote Milton: “A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”13
Bert attended a Sunday school class taught by Miss Gray, perhaps because the Highland Avenue Friends Church was not yet open. She invited Herbert and Burt to Sunday dinners at her home, the only boys in her class so favored. They were astonished that this angelic woman would want to spend time with ragged, friendless nobodies. As Burt put it, they felt like pumpkins among the squashes. He developed a crush on his teacher that lingered into his nineties. Bert, he said, shared his feelings: “He worshipped her, that’s all.”14
The daughter of a wealthy banker, Miss Gray lived in the center of town in a splendid house surrounded by tall trees. The boys were overwhelmed at her table, not knowing how to use the silverware and unable to name the food they were eating. For dessert, she once served them strawberries and cream with confectioners’ sugar, which Burt, mistaking for flour, refused. Bert, who had no better idea what was on offer, gamely accepted and was pleasantly surprised.
Over the meal, Miss Gray lectured her guests on self-reliance, urging them to take responsibility for their futures. She challenged some of their assumptions about money, advising them to develop their character more than their fortunes. She read stories and asked the boys to summarize them and comment. Bert would never volunteer for these exercises although he always responded when asked. “Anything that that woman asked or indicated to him that he should do, he did,” said Burt.15
Miss Gray was another example of Bert’s knack for finding and attaching himself to people who would nurture and take a paternal interest in him. Dinners at her home were a vital part of his education. She encouraged his intellect, bolstered his self-confidence, awakened him to social graces and conversational arts, and introduced him to a material mode of existence beyond Quaker austerities. Some of her lessons were lost on him. He never learned to appreciate a good table or to shine in conversation. He would not forget her kindness, however, and he would always be grateful to her for seeing in him special qualities that he knew himself to be there. In the years ahead, while studiously avoiding West Branch and Dr. Minthorn, Bert on several occasions traveled far out of his way for the purpose of visiting his teachers, Miss Gray and Newberg’s Vannie Martin, women who had taken him up by choice, not out of obligation or need.*
Bert’s family had emphasized education and put aside money for that purpose, but he made his own decision to attend university. Determined to rise out of his subservience, he had been taking evening business courses in Salem, early evidence of a strategic approach to fulfilling his ambitions. A chance meeting with a Quaker mining engineer who stopped by the Oregon Land Company’s offices sharpened the direction of his future studies.
Engineering was an exciting profession in the late Victorian era, a time of railroads and steamships, heavy industry, transatlantic cables, man-made canals, steel skyscrapers, and an endless array of new patents and processes. Engineers, more than soldiers, thinkers, or politicians, were remaking the human experience, creating new sources of power, annihilating time and distance. They were simultaneously shrinking the world and building it up in heroic ways. As a field of academic pursuit, engineering was relatively new, the first American and European technical schools having emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, but what they lacked in stature against traditional arts and science programs they made up for in opportunity and ease of entry. Engineering required a sharp and disciplined mind, and nothing in the way of fortune, breeding, family connections, or social confidence, some combination of which was de rigueur at the leading eastern universities.
Learning from the visiting engineer that mining engineers were comparatively scarce and earned large fees, Bert began collecting college catalogs. With the major East Coast schools beyond his means and capacities, and the Quaker schools suggested by his uncle not to his taste, he set his sights on a new tuition-free college set to open in Palo Alto in October 1891. Over the summer, he traveled to Portland to take the entrance exams for Leland Stanford Junior University. Not surprisingly, given his aborted schooling, he struggled and came up short. He did, however, manage to impress yet another teacher. Joseph Swain, a Quaker and a professor in Stanford’s inaugural math department, administered the Portland exams and admired the tenacity with which Bert attacked plane geometry. “I observed that he put his teeth together with great decision and his whole face and posture showed his determination to pass the examination at any cost. He was evidently summoning every pound of energy he possessed to answer correctly the questions before him. I was naturally interested in him.”16
Stanford, in need of students to fill its dormitories, could afford to take a chance on an ill-prepared applicant who had just turned seventeen. Bert was admitted on condition that he bone up on geometry. He studied every night that summer, grimacing in concentration as he hunched over his books at a corner table in the land office or in the quiet loft of Minthorn’s barn.
On August 29, 1891, a few weeks after his seventeenth birthday, he arrived at Salem station with a ticket for San Francisco. His departure was low key. He had not made a lasting impression during his three years in town. Outside of his own little circle, he had been a ghost on a bicycle. “It would be much easier to tell a great deal more interesting story about almost any other boy I knew,” said one woman who worked at the Land Company. “Bert went his silent way and no one thought much about him.” Bert was nonetheless confident of his prospects as he prepared to board the train. His luggage was light: two suits in a satchel and his bicycle. Grandmother Minthorn joined the doctor’s family on the platform. “I think thy mother would like to see thee now,” she told him. “Thee has always been a good boy, Bertie. I shall always pray that thee does a conscientious work.”17
“Thee will have cause to be proud of me someday,” he promised.18
Accompanying Herbert on his journey was another young man who had failed the entrance exams, Fred Williams, the son of a Salem banker. Williams’s father had offered Hoover, as he would henceforth be known to classmates, modest financial assistance to coach Fred in geometry. The money was welcome. Between his savings and his share of his mother’s estate, which had been carefully tended by Lawrie Tatum back in Iowa, Hoover had just under a thousand dollars to his name. Even at a tuition-free university, he would need an income to keep himself afloat for four years.
After two nights in their Pullman berth, the students alighted in Oakland and ferried across the gray-green bay to San Francisco. A policeman directed them past the wagons and cable cars to the Stanford train for the last leg of their journey, a short thirty-mile ride through the golden foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains. There were yellow poppies along the right-of-way and broad-limbed oaks scattered under the deep blue sky. The warm scents of summer filled the air.
Hoover and Williams got off at Menlo Park and took a hack down a dusty road back toward Palo Alto, which was not yet a station. They were dropped at a construction site that was not yet a university. Designed as a memorial to his late son and dedicated to preparing young men and women for practical lives and useful careers, Senator Leland Stanford’s campus was laid out on eight thousand acres of what had formerly been a horse farm. At its heart was a mission-style quadrangle of intricately carved sandstone. Hordes of carpenters, masons, and painters were still crowding its Romanesque archways and arcades, all of which looked preposterous in the middle of the sun-burnt pasture. They would soon complete their work, however, and in the years ahead the senator’s dream would be realized, raising the tone of the entire Santa Clara Valley.
Swain had given Hoover directions to a country house on the edge of campus where he would board and receive tutoring in his areas of deficiency. He studied hard, took his exams, and failed again, this time in English. Once more, he was waved through to admission on condition that he show effort and improvement. Hoover received the first room assignment under the red-tiled roof of Encina Hall, the men’s dormitory, allowing him to claim throughout his life that he was Stanford’s first student. He had no electricity or hot water until several weeks after classes began on October 1. He did not much care. He was happy. Among other delights, the dining hall offered alternatives to cornmeal and milk, his usual breakfast fare.19
Hoover began his studies in mechanical engineering and switched to geology at the start of his second year, doing the minimum of work in an array of science and humanities courses, and relying on an uncanny ability to absorb large amounts of information in short periods of time in order to pass exams. His career at Stanford was an unbroken four-year run of academic mediocrity. He dropped classes without proper notice or permission and received weak marks overall. Strictly speaking, he did not earn his degree. His conditional pass in English was only removed at the end of his senior year when a friendly professor rewrote one of his essays and submitted it on his behalf as evidence of his competence in the language. This bit of mischief does not appear to have troubled Hoover in the least, and he would always be weak in grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
His personal development occurred mostly outside of the classroom. With his savings and family bequest inadequate to the expense of his room and board, lab fees, and books, he sought employment and found plenty. Even before classes began, he was tending the livestock at his lodgings to pay his way, and for five dollars a week he registered his 558 classmates on their arrival at the university. He won a contract for distributing San Francisco newspapers at Stanford and wrangled a franchise for a San Jose laundry, performing weekly collections and deliveries on his bicycle. (He would eventually sell both of those businesses to other students.) “Am working awful hard,” he wrote a friend. “Have considerable business worked up & 3000000000000 schemes for making more.”20
Hoover landed an important job at the start of his second semester when John Casper Branner, a charismatic teacher and chair of the department of geology at Stanford, arrived on campus. On the strength of his typing skills, Hoover earned twenty-five dollars a month as Branner’s office assistant, a position he would hold until graduation. Aiming to impress Branner, he left nothing to chance. As he explained to a fellow student, “Do your work so that they notice it, and always be on the job.” When assigned a task, Hoover would take off his coat, fix his whole attention on it, and work until it was finished, never repeating mistakes, and asking only necessary questions. Branner noticed:
I’d always employed the working students of my classes as assistants or secretaries. Constantly we received Geological Survey reports and German scientific periodicals. These, as they accumulated, had to be bound. I’d hand them over to the ordinary assistant and he’d ask, “How and where?” “Send them to a binder in the city,” I’d say, and he’d ask, “How?” I’d answer, “By express,” and he’d ask, “How shall I pack them?”—and so on. But with Hoover I’d say, “Get these periodicals bound,” and the next time I’d notice them they’d be back on the shelves and the bill for binding and shipping would lie on my desk.21
At the start of school, Hoover was one of the least prepossessing men on campus. A bout of measles in his second semester affected his eyesight and forced him to wear glasses. He was “very immature in appearance,” said classmate Lester Hinsdale, “probably the youngest looking of us all. He seemed shy to the point of timidity—rarely spoke unless spoken to.”22
Jackson Reynolds, a classmate who would become a leading New York banker, agreed Hoover was “backward.” He would “always have his eyes down on the pavement. He would never look up. If you wanted to say anything to him you always had to speak first.” Nobody, said Reynolds, “would ever slap him on the back.” When students gathered for weekly receptions at Branner’s home, Hoover would sit in a back corner and listen, always seeming ill at ease. On the rare occasions when he did open his mouth, things only got worse. He was blunt, said Mrs. Branner, “almost to the point of utter tactlessness.”23
His maturity, at least in a physical sense, was hurried by the employment Branner arranged for him during his summer breaks. After his freshman year, Hoover was assigned to map a portion of the Ozarks, due south of his Iowa birthplace. He traveled on foot, with his surveying equipment over his shoulder and a rock hammer in his belt. Most nights were spent in the cabins of common mountain folk, farmers and moonshiners, who lived in unmitigated squalor. “Generations of sowbelly, sorghum molasses and cornmeal, of sleeping and living half a dozen in a room,” Hoover later observed, “had fatally lowered their vitality and ambitions.” His own vitality was increased by this adventure. On his return, Theodore noted that his chubby little brother had grown into a tall, slender sophomore, looking “very scholarly” in his glasses. He had also saved almost all of his salary.24
In his sophomore and junior years Hoover came out of his shell, in his own diffident way, making himself useful in student activities. Unable to make the baseball or football teams, he became their manager, scheduling games, collecting the gate, purchasing equipment and uniforms. Unwilling to perform onstage, he ran a lucrative lecture and concert series. Unconvincing as a student politician, he lent his administrative talents to more popular students such as Lester Hinsdale, the class president, and rode their slates to become treasurer of the students’ association. The important point is that he saw himself as a student leader, even if his classmates did not take him that way.
Hoover was successful in most of these endeavors. He introduced new levels of financial controls in his capacity as class treasurer and swiftly cleared an inherited debt of $1,200, prompting the Stanford daily to laud him for his business acumen. The gate from one San Francisco football game against the University of California filled many grain bags with gold and silver coins and was sufficient to finance an entire season. He helped his friends draft a student constitution and wrestle control of campus politics from the fraternity set. Reynolds believed Hoover “acquired quite a phobia about fraternities.” He was not bidden to join one. Instead, he connected with other nonfraternity students who self-identified as “barbarians,” rallying them against the exclusive “frats.” Having spent enough of his life feeling like an outsider and a second-class citizen, Hoover was determined to promote the political ascendancy of his circle.25
His extracurriculars were not without setbacks, such as a money-losing speech by a young congressman, William Jennings Bryan. Hoover nonetheless proved his competence and won the confidence of his peers. He reveled in the role of treasurer, which in his mind made him the general manager of student activities. He turned his pockets into card catalogs of the details of his various operations and took pride in his thrift and his ability to say no. When former United States president Benjamin Harrison attended a Stanford baseball game without a ticket, Hoover confronted him and quietly insisted he pay the admission price. He understood better than most of his classmates the power of purse strings: “I have vertually control of affairs,” he boasted to a friend.26
When classmate Will Irwin, who would gain fame as a journalist, suffered a career-ending ankle injury playing center on Stanford’s freshman football team, he was outfitted with a plaster cast and deposited in his dorm room. Hoover visited him to approve spending on the athlete’s medical supplies. Although in considerable pain, Irwin was intrigued by the odd character of the student body treasurer, who was just under six feet tall, scrawny, at least compared to the men of the football squad, and who dressed in a double-breasted blue suit which was a kind of uniform for him. Said Irwin later:
He had mouse-colored hair as stubbornly straight as an Indian’s, and hazel eyes so contemplative that they seemed dreamy. His round but powerful face had not a straight line in it….He stood with one foot thrust forward, jingling the keys in his trousers pocket; a little nervous trick which he has never overcome.27
Hoover carried his head to one side as he took in Irwin’s cast and obvious discomfort. After consulting with the team masseur, who was acting as nurse, he dispatched Irwin’s roommate to telegraph San Francisco for necessary supplies.
To make conversation and keep up his courage, Irwin tried to make light of his situation and watched as Hoover tried to laugh. A “deep, rich chuckle” originated far down in his chest, Irwin recalled, yet it was strangled “before it came to the surface,” and it died without finding voice. Hoover did not offer the patient a single word of consolation or reassurance during his time in the room. Irwin assumed that Hoover’s sympathies, for he did appear to be affected, were garroted and buried in the same internal graveyard as the chuckle. After a few minutes, Hoover headed for the door and, at the last instant, turned and blurted, “I’m sorry.” Irwin recognized that this minimal expression of emotion was as traumatic for Hoover as a broken ankle.28
The visit with Irwin was characteristic of Hoover in several respects. The first is that he showed up at the hospital. He showed up everywhere, never missing an outing, a game, or a gala. “Went to every ball given,” he told a friend, “in fact quite a social swell. Enjoyed myself better than ever before in my life.” He believed it was “good in every way” for a man to be “a mixer.” He was eventually known and accepted in most circles on campus, and he would make lifelong friends of the likes of Hinsdale and Irwin.29
Second, despite his appetite for company, he was hardly a swell. He could not hold another’s eye, let alone his end of a relaxed conversation. He would have been the last person invited to light up a room.
Third, Hoover was deeply uncomfortable with his feelings. He would always do his best to throttle or otherwise repress them, a telltale sign of anxiety. The word anxious is derived from the Latin word angere, which means to strangle or choke, precisely what Irwin saw happen to Hoover’s chuckle. Hoover succeeded in his repressions to the point where casual observers would wonder if he ever felt anything. It was rare for him to express any emotion beyond unease, and it would have been difficult to tell that young Hoover, at one of his galas, was actually having a good time. While physiology to some extent explains his grim, silent ways, they were exacerbated by his massive sense of vulnerability and his spiritual disquiet. Part of Hoover’s identification with David Copperfield was likely rooted in what Dickens identified as that “old unhappy loss or want of something never to be realized.”30
The truly mind-expanding, destiny-shaping part of Hoover’s college experience occurred over two summers, before and after his senior year. On the strength of Branner’s recommendation, he was hired as an assistant to the renowned geologist Waldemar Lindgren of the United States Geological Survey. Hoover almost missed the opportunity. He and a handful of other students were on a lark in the Yosemite Valley when he received notice to join Lindgren’s party in the California Sierras. Unable to afford a stagecoach ticket, he walked eighty miles in three days to the Stockton riverboats and finally caught up with the survey camp. They were a small team including Lindgren, another geologist, a cook, and teamsters, all traveling on horseback with pack mules and specially built wagons. Hoover was by far the youngest.
A Swedish mining engineer trained in Germany, Lindgren was a vigorous man in his mid-thirties with short blond hair and pince-nez glasses. His specialty was economic geology, or the study of exploitable metals and minerals, a field in which he was a pioneer. He spent his winters in Washington and the rest of his year tramping through the western states in search of ore deposits. He led Hoover from mine to mine, lecturing all the way on engineering lore and practical geology. The seminars continued around the campfire in the evening, accompanied by ham and baked beans. At night, the party slept on the ground, which was crawling with black ants. For Hoover, it was bliss. “I have a fine man to work for and a favorite business to work in, and moreover a grand country to work over,” he crowed.31
The attraction of Lindgren, for Hoover, was similar to that of Branner. The primary masculine influences to this point in his existence had been variations on the strenuous life, from his father to Minthorn. Lindgren was cut from similar cloth, only finer. He was hardworking, practical, and commercially astute. He preached the moral superiority of rigorous fieldwork and held those “damned bureaucrats” in Washington in contempt. At the same time, he operated on a high professional and intellectual plane, with important connections and a record of publication in prestigious journals dating back to his school days. Hoover took Lindgren as a role model and began thinking about graduate studies at Columbia or Johns Hopkins. “I am trying to make a specialty of mining geology for it offers the widest field,” he wrote a friend. “I think it’s invaluable to keep moving. I never stop anyway.”32
Lindgren found his new disciple eager, organized, and capable: “Never have I had a more satisfactory assistant.” He wondered at Hoover’s ability to get to the heart of a matter and solve problems in the simplest possible manner. Lindgren kept him in the field a month into his senior year. Indifferent as ever to his academic performance, Hoover skipped the month with alacrity. He knew he was getting “a whole jug full” of learning and experience, and he was honored when Lindgren included his name in the credits of his published surveys. Not incidentally, he also made enough money to settle his accounts with Stanford.33
Hoover so delighted in his summer adventures that he wrote a series of uncharacteristically exuberant letters to his sister and various female friends chronicling his adventures. Some of these dispatches, including the following hyperbolic description of a feast at a Yosemite hotel, managed to make him sound, for once, like a typical undergraduate:
And even now you may hear of those 7 college boys who ate so valliently that day. For it is one of the legends of the valley. The proprietor is now bankrupt and at Stockton Insane Asylum you may now see a man, once a hotel clerk, who cries out at all times, “The dining room will now close!”34
And similarly:
Had a ball in town last night. Two men were shot in royal mining style and the dancers danced on as if nothing had happened. The blood smeared over the floor became slippery, then sticky and finally brown again. I did not dance. I am timid about arguments on a six shooter basis….As morning approached the whisky became worse in quality and more wicked in result until all were in the gutter.35
Other letters show a little-noticed but unmistakable romantic dimension of Hoover. The shy young man who was failing English, and whose literary style typically ranged from curt to brusque, rambled on for pages about the “almost intoxicating” beauty of his surroundings:
No prosaic description can portray the grandeur of forty miles of rugged mountains rising beyond a placid lake in which each shadowy precipice and each purple gorge is reflected with a vividness that rivals the original. Along their western summits gaunt peaks of similar strength and nobility, vast proportions combined with simplicity and grace, stand out like buttresses and turrets from a great wall, their sides splashed with snow, their passes and lateral ridges covered with a wealth of vegetation which gives the whole an air of solidity and affords a restful contrast from their rugged summits.36
Buttresses and turrets, of course, are not geological phenomena. Despite his empirical training and his talent for the technical aspects of his position, Hoover was seeing himself as the hero of his own Walter Scott novel, a knight of science in a brown duck suit and high-top boots, traversing the burning sands of Nevada and the snowcapped High Sierras in quest of useful knowledge. He was developing a professional swagger: “Don’t worry about anything happening to me,” he wrote his sister, “for we always leave definitely with hotel clerks the route we expect to travel during the day with explicit directions as to what use is to be made of the corpse.” To another correspondent he bragged of a planned descent of the American River Canyon—“a thing people here say is impossible. But they are not geologists.”37
Hoover never exposed much of his inner life to men, not even to his brother. All of the above letters are written to young women, and by his graduation he had quite an audience of female admirers: his younger sister, May; his cousin, Harriette Miles (with whose family he had boarded in Pawhuska); Nell May Hill, an Oregon girl who would also attend Stanford; Marion Dole, a classmate who organized women’s athletics; a Miss Ordway with whom he had “quite a talk” on a football trip to Santa Cruz. Miss Miles also remembered a Miss Rose with whom Hoover appears to have been infatuated. He had a deep need for female comfort and approbation. A clear pattern runs from his mother’s kitchen through Miss Gray’s parlor to his undergraduate correspondence. He sought recognition from men as well, although not at the same pitch of intimacy. It was only these young women who were allowed glimpses of his full sense of self, of the rather dashing and ambitious soul beneath the hard, diffident shell. The letters ring with confidence in his abilities and prospects, however meager his circumstances. To Miss Hill: “Am much puzzled wherefrom I will derive the income to go on next semestr as my wad will last until just Xmas. But trust to my usual luck I suppose.”38
Although well supplied with female companionship, Hoover was still looking for more on his return for his senior year. He informed Miss Hill of a new presence in Branner’s department: “We have a young lady taking Geology as a specialty now, a very nice young lady, too.”39
Lou Henry was a freshman from Monterey, the daughter of a banker who had given her a single name of a single syllable and raised her as a son. She could ride, climb trees, fish, and hunt with a rifle and a bow. At five foot six, she looked taller still, thanks to a pile of brown hair. She had blue eyes and a broad gap-toothed grin. Like Hoover, she was a Branner acolyte. Captivated by a guest lecture he had delivered in Monterey, she had convinced her parents to allow her to study geology at Stanford, thus becoming the only woman in the program.40
It was in Branner’s presence, in a geology lab, that Lou Henry first laid eyes on Herbert Hoover. She knew of him already by reputation. As Branner’s right hand and a two-time president of the Stanford geology club, his name often came up in conversation. What she had heard of his capacities did not match what she saw at their meeting. She had expected someone brawny and domineering, not the speechless young bumpkin before her. He was not altogether unattractive to her, despite the uncombed hair and careless dress. His summers had left him tanned and fit, his shoulders were broadening, and his restless eyes and twitchy manner were softened by the roundness of his face.
When Branner left the lab, the two students fell into conversation. Within a week Hoover accompanied Lou to her first party at the university, and from that point on they were frequently in one another’s company. He learned that Lou could keep pace with the young men in the geology club, effortlessly climbing rocks and vaulting fences. He learned that she had been born in Waterloo, Iowa, seventy miles from West Branch, and that she was a lot of things he was not: friendly, playful, gracious, self-possessed. She could laugh and dance, and she belonged to a sorority. Everyone found it easy to talk with Lou.
With the help of a generous number of credits granted for his summer work, the same sort of leg up that had allowed him to gain admittance to the school in the first place, Hoover graduated in the spring of 1895 at the age of twenty with an AB in geology. It cannot be said that Stanford made a man of him. His most valuable qualities on walking out its doors were the same drive and intelligence he had brought from Oregon four years earlier. Stanford had nevertheless been good to him. He was fortunate to have landed at a new university with a pragmatic mandate and a relatively meritocratic ethic. The academic and social rigors of an established eastern college might have crushed him. As it was, he had received a decent grounding in his chosen science, a thorough introduction to the profession of mining geology courtesy of Branner, and the freedom to make his way outside of class. Most of all, the university gave him a sense of belonging that he had not really known since the destruction of his own family in West Branch. The community embraced him without regard for his quirks, his awkwardness, or his humble origins.
None of his classmates would have selected Hoover as the most likely among them to succeed. There were plenty of promising students on campus. The thin ranks of Stanford’s football team alone produced an impressive number of lawyers, surgeons, politicians, and bankers. Hoover had gifts, including an orderly and retentive mind, implacable energy, a growing self-regard, resourcefulness bordering on wizardry, and the capacity to inspire trust in his superiors. Wrapped as all this was in a lusterless package, void of pedigree, magnetism, or conspicuous achievement, few gave him a second glance. “He was not the kind of a feller around whom stories stick,” said a classmate.41
Even Branner, who knew his pupil as well as anyone at the moment of his launch from Stanford, demurred when asked decades later if he had appreciated Hoover’s potential: “We can’t see far around the corners of life.”42
* Miss Jennie Gray eventually married, unhappily, bore two children, and divorced. One night in 1913 she stepped off a streetcar in Salem and was struck by a meat truck. She died instantly. Burt Brown Barker, a graduate of the University of Chicago and Harvard Law, broke the news to his old friend. Evangeline Martin lived until 1928. Hoover bought her the first radio seen in Newberg and supported her financially in her later years.