Photographs of Lou Henry as a young woman are not what one would expect of a Gilded Age banker’s daughter. Lou posing with a rifle. Lou on horseback with a rifle. Lou in a Stanford sweater with a rifle. Lou posing with a rifle and a freshly killed deer. Lou balancing on a railing, jumping hurdles, and ice skating. Lou taking target practice with a bow. Lou perched with a fishing rod on a rock in the middle of a trout stream. She is frequently seen in male company, and she is plainly comfortable as one of the boys. Her dress is simple, long skirts and blouses, no jewelry. She wears her brown hair bundled high. She is not a beauty. She invariably looks cheerful and confident, with direct blue eyes and a crooked smile.1
The Henry family had migrated from Iowa to Texas, then to Kansas and Whittier, California, before settling in Monterey. Lou’s father, Charles D. Henry, pursued a middling career in banking and lived for the outdoors. He raised his eldest daughter to consider herself the equal of any man. She and her younger sister, Jean, had been sleeping under the stars for as long as either could remember. A bright and popular girl, Lou was successful in school and active in literary and scientific clubs. She had an independent streak, not unlike Hulda Hoover, and chafed from an early age at her assigned gender role, writing letters on female equality and universal suffrage, protesting that “idiots, maniacs, and jailbirds” could cast ballots while women could not. In a high-school essay entitled “The Independent Girl,” she expressed impatience with female conformity and stated a desire to marry “a spirit equally as independent as her own,” someone with whom she would “unite forces and with combined strength go forth to meet the world.”2
Life as an independent girl in the 1890s was difficult. After graduating from normal school, Lou worked briefly as a teacher and a cashier at her father’s bank before convincing her parents to allow her to study geology at Stanford. Her college years were a satisfying whirl of sports, theater, study, and sorority life. She impressed her friends and professors with her sweet nature and her penetrating, skeptical intelligence. Her brains and competence, however, were not enough to gain her the professional footing she sought. She had hoped to succeed Hoover as Branner’s assistant in the geology department, but the assignment went to a male student. Nor could she find a job in her field on graduation, despite Branner’s assistance. She vented her frustration in a letter to a sorority sister, wondering if the “AB” in her degree stood for “A Boy”:
What wouldn’t I give just about now to be one! They would not want me to stay meekly at home—I would not still have to face that old question of how far obedience is dutiful and I would have something to work for.3
By the autumn of 1898, Lou was killing time rolling bandages as a volunteer in the Spanish-American War effort and lamenting her lack of prospects. She had not seen Herbert Hoover for almost two years and his letters to Theodore suggest that she may have refused his proposal of marriage before he sailed for Australia. Just what was said in subsequent correspondence is only partially known, due to his destruction of a portion of their letters, but somewhere along the way they began to talk of marriage. It does not appear to have been a passionate courtship: in a letter from Stanford to Australia, Lou attempted to “bridge the physical distance” between them with an exhaustive account of the challenges of organizing a university athletics day. Neither was demonstrative in any sense of the word.4
More importantly, they were compatible, quite comfortable in each other’s presence, and they shared many interests. They were the same age, twenty-four. Lou had always said that she wanted a man “who loves the mountains, the rocks, and the ocean like my father does.” Her mother said she was so fond of travel that Hoover’s lifestyle seemed ideal to her. Lou struck Bert as self-respecting, clear-headed, bold, and cheerful. She answered his profound need for companionship and female approval, and she was intelligent enough to understand his worlds of commerce and science, his drive and ambition. She was also a beacon of stability at a time when he was somewhat unhinged. It seems clear that they were each other’s best option.5
On the occasion of his reassignment by Moreing, Hoover cabled Lou a brief message: “Going to China via San Francisco. Will you go with me?” She answered with a single word.6
Hoover could not escape the outback fast enough. “I am damned glad to get out of here,” he wrote Theodore on November 2, 1898. “My whole stay here has been a nightmare in a dozen regards.” He admitted to clashes with Williams and claimed to have resigned, although it is evident in the same correspondence that all was not right between Bert and Bewick, Moreing. Notwithstanding some brief noises about the lure of the Orient, he acknowledged that Tientsin was a hardship post, a “two-year siege in northern China.” He was without salary until he started his new job. The company was only picking up his travel expenses. Times were tight, and Theodore, now a junior at Stanford, would have to be economical. Bert added that he was arranging to take the long route to Peking, via Suez, London, New York, and San Francisco, with the intention of marrying in Monterey. “Don’t ever tell May,” he insisted.7
Hoover left Australia on December 11, 1898, with an armload of books on China. He stopped long enough in London to see fog so thick that the street lamps were lit at noon, and long enough in San Francisco to smoke a fifty-cent cigar with a former classmate at the luxurious old Palace Hotel. He arrived at the end of January in Monterey with its green lawns and dazzling blue bay and met his in-laws for the first time in his capacity as prospective son-in-law. They appear to have met once before, although the circumstances are uncertain. Hoover had boasted to his friend Miss Hill of having spent a week changing from tennis flannels to full dress suit at the home of a lady friend, perhaps Miss Henry. Mrs. Henry had only the vague recollection of a single meal in his company.8
The Henrys were not prepared to like Hoover. They had forbidden their daughter to live on the fourth floor of her residence at Stanford out of fear for her safety, and now he was washing up in Monterey with the intention of whisking her halfway around the world. After a few days, they apparently warmed to him. “I think we all liked him about as much as Lou did,” said Mrs. Henry by way of endorsement. The week before the wedding was a frantic muddle of last-minute preparations, introductions, fittings, dinners, travel bookings, and packing. The marriage license had to be fetched from Salinas, the county seat, a day’s return journey from Monterey. The couple had no pastor; they were to be married by a Dr. Thoburn from Palo Alto, but he died six weeks short of the appointed date. The Henrys, nominally Episcopalian, could not find a replacement. There were no Quaker ministers nearby. The only man of the cloth available in Monterey was a Roman Catholic priest of Lou’s acquaintance, Father Mestres. He agreed to preside.9
Shortly after noon on February 10, Herbert Hoover and Lou Henry were married at the Henry home in matching brown traveling clothes, a simple dress for Lou, cinched at the waist, and a three-piece suit for Bert, with a bowtie, sketchily assembled. Theodore was present. May, too, was permitted to attend. Bert and Mrs. Henry stood in the bay window of the living room as soft music played and Mr. Henry brought Lou through the little hallway and gave her to her man. The independent girl vowed to love and honor, and made no mention of obeying. Lunch was served, including two meat dishes that Father Mestres consumed to the horror of the Catholic serving staff (it was a Friday). The speeches were notable for their brevity. Pictures were taken outside amid the palms and pepper trees, Lou sometimes wearing a bowler hat, other times her father’s Western hat.
When the fine horses and carriage that had been arranged to convey the newlyweds to the station failed to arrive on time, they rushed off in a hack to catch a two o’clock train that would carry them to San Francisco for their next day’s voyage to China. It was an apt beginning to their lives together. The newlyweds would continue to scramble along at a breakneck pace for decades to come.
China at the turn of the twentieth century was a crippled empire of 300 million, its military weakness having been exposed five years earlier when the Japanese relieved it of Korea in a brief, one-sided conflict. That defeat had touched off a great and unscrupulous competition among Germany, Russia, France, Britain, and Japan for possession of China’s vast resources. The prizes were land, ports, mines, railways, and cargoes of tea and silk, some of them purchased, others simply taken. At the start of the new century there were 672 foreign companies fattening themselves in China, half of them British, few of them alert to the increasingly volatile environment in which they operated. The young Chinese emperor Kuang Hsu had tried to brace China’s sovereignty by embarking on a feverish program of modernization but his reforms were unpopular; the Chinese people were more anxious to see the foreigner driven into the sea than to adopt his ways, and the Empress Dowager, who had placed Kuang Hsu on his throne, shared their sentiments. China was on the verge of upheaval.10
A typical adventurer, Charles Algernon Moreing saw more opportunity than danger in China’s distress. On his visit to the country in 1898 he made two crucial connections. One was Gustav Detring, a well-placed Chinese-speaking German who had formerly served as commissioner of the Maritime Customs of China in the city of Tientsin. Moreing and Detring struck an informal alliance to pursue commercial opportunities in China. Detring also introduced Moreing to Chang Yen-Mao, director-general of the Kaiping mines and director-general of mines for the provinces of Chihli and the district of Jehol. Chang’s company had administrative control of the vast Kaiping coal mines northeast of Tientsin but had neither the capital nor the expertise to develop them fully.
Moreing, working through Detring, arranged a loan of £200,000 (US$1 million) to Chang and the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company to expand the Kaiping mines and build an ice-free harbor at Chinwangtao. The Englishman tried to negotiate himself a share of equity in the company but Chang would not bite, so Moreing settled instead for a steep 12 percent rate of interest on his loan. It was Chang who asked Moreing to recommend a mining engineer who could survey a number of gold mines in his realm, creating the opening for Hoover.
Strictly speaking, Hoover was to work as a technical adviser to Chang, who would pay his salary of $12,500. Hoover appears, however, to have joined Chang on questionable pretenses. Moreing, still coveting Chinese mining properties, wrote the British Foreign Office that Chang wanted to develop gold mines with British money and expertise, and that Hoover would manage the operations, suggesting that his young charge was intended for a role well beyond technical adviser. Moreing also granted Hoover a percentage of his profits in China, an arrangement likely unknown to Chang. Hoover told his brother that he would “have charge” of Bewick, Moreing’s Chinese business. In all of his correspondence with friends and family, he presents himself as an agent of Moreing rather than of Chang. These conflicting understandings of his role would soon lead to immense problems for all concerned.11
The newlyweds signed the register on the SS Coptic as Mr. and Mrs. H. C. Hoover and sailed from San Francisco on February 11, 1899. Lou kept a travel diary and when she was not looking, her husband would fill it with playful imitations of her observations and emotions. She had her picture taken with leis in Honolulu and in a rickshaw in Kyoto. She did not much like Japan. Its pagodas and lantern shops and exotic costumes did not meet the romantic expectations raised by Gilbert and Sullivan. Lou found the people small, ugly, unkempt, and unhappy.12
Their mutual friend George Wilson, a casualty of Hoover’s ill-fated Australian coup, was now following his classmate to China on the promise of a position. He arrived in Shanghai in mid-March. “I rushed up to the hotel register on arriving,” he wrote Hinsdale, “and sure enough, my worst fears were soon realized—Mr H.C. Hoover and Wife—as large as life.” Disturbed at the fall of a fellow bachelor, Wilson had no intention of following suit: “To bring a wife to China is far worse than to ship whole fleets of coal to Newcastle. You can buy them up here like sheep.”13
The Hoovers proceeded from Shanghai to Tientsin, where Bert required only two weeks to assemble his staff and organize a two-month inspection tour of mining properties. He left Lou at the Astor Hotel in the foreign compound on the outskirts of Tientsin to adapt to local customs and currencies and set up house. She found a stately fifteen-room blue brick residence on Racecourse Road, with a wide veranda, arched windows with bamboo curtains, and a grape trellis climbing almost to its gray-tiled roof. Lou could look out her front window and see rickshaws clattering up and down the elm-lined street. She decorated with paneled screens, rattan chairs, and her husband’s collection of geographic photographs of the American West. She hired the usual multitude of Chinese servants, including a number-one boy, a number-two boy, three houseboys, a rickshaw boy, a cook, a groom, and a groom’s assistant.
Bert, out in the field, was also surrounded by servants, much to his annoyance. Accustomed to traveling light, he had been browbeaten by his Chinese handlers into outfitting an entourage befitting his station: a hundred Chinese cavalrymen and their officers, advance heralds, rear guards, grooms, cooks, interpreters, mules, ponies, and carts. The cooks were instructed to prepare him Western food so that Chang’s investment in his salary would not be wasted by illness.
On this and subsequent journeys, Hoover drove his caravan from mine to mine through the interior of China, reaching north to Mongol camps little changed since Marco Polo’s time. He saw the Great Wall and the Yellow River and the Gobi Desert but for the most part kept his nose in his books. He devoured Chinese history and in deference to his hosts sampled Confucius and Mencius. He heaped on Plato and Shakespeare, Goethe and Schiller, not to mention the French—Balzac, Dumas, Zola, and Montaigne. At each new mine, Hoover was greeted with banners and firecrackers. The mine works were typically walled and protected against marauding bandits by uniformed guards. He would descend into stopes and tunnels, appalling Chinese managers who believed it beneath their dignity to root around in the dirt.
He was disappointed at the scale of the mines, as well as their inefficiencies. The technology in use was primitive: hand pumps and bamboo buckets carried by throngs of laborers who were short on competence and expert at loafing. The amount of corruption and petty fraud, Hoover wrote Detring, was sickening. The Chinese were addicted to the squeeze, a complex system of graft they had come to view as a sacred right. Hoover was baffled at their lack of enthusiasm for mechanization and orderly administration. Lou reported that “the utter apathy of the Chinese to everything, their unconquerable dilatoriness” was almost heartbreaking to her energetic husband.14
Lou sometimes joined Bert’s expeditions, and in remote locations she drew crowds of children curious to see a white woman. She followed him down into mines, again to the perturbation of the Chinese managers who, after she resurfaced, would exorcise with drums and firecrackers the demons she was believed to have left in the deep.* “China is great fun,” she wrote to family friends. “Just as queer as it can be….To us they are one great joke, from the time the ‘boy’ wakens us in the morning by bringing tea to our rooms, to the last thing we hear at night, which is the watchman’s rattle or great gong which he sounds industriously to let thieves know where he is!”15
Bert, too, was amused by their setup: “Our No. I Boy is more jealous of my interests and more proud and insistent on my rank than I am - and our physical, mental and moral welfare are jealously guarded.” He marveled at the resourcefulness of the staff. “All you need to do is wave your hand and anything you want will appear.” He learned that his Chinese name was Hu-hua. His wife’s was Hoo Loo.16
Although his domestic servants were an improvement over his mine laborers, Hoover shared the prevailing European conviction of Chinese racial inferiority. He would write of “the simply appalling and universal dishonesty of the working classes, the racial slowness, and the low average of intelligence.” He initially joined Lou in practicing Chinese for two hours a day but gave it up before long and never advanced beyond rudimentary communications (she gained a basic competence in the language). His efforts to understand the Chinese and their culture were largely limited to his reading.17
George Wilson also complained of the rotten management of the Chinese, of gold thieving and bloated payrolls, of money wasted on celebrations and firecrackers. Still, unlike Hoover, he developed an affection for the country: “I like the place, the life, the people, the climate, the birds, the wondrous flowers, the grand sunrises, the novelty, the antiquity, in fact it all has a deep real interest for me.”18
Lou, too, tried to appreciate and understand her surroundings. Her interest in the Chinese language was considered odd by Europeans in Tientsin (an unsurprising attitude for a community that built golf courses in Chinese graveyards). She bought Ming and early K’ang Hse blue and white porcelains, some of which were exquisite, and she collected macabre photographs of prisoners being tortured and executed in the streets of the city.19
The foreign compound where the Hoovers lived ran for a mile along the Peiho River, two miles outside the native city of Tientsin. It looked like a European theme park with its jumble of embassies, banks, shops, and residences in architectural styles representing more than a dozen nationalities. The British were the dominant community within and they kept up an active social scene into which the Hoovers plunged. Lou was popular, creating “her own atmosphere” at parties, according to her husband, who felt like a “wet crow” by comparison. They bought ponies to race at the local track and asked Theodore to send them a carriage from San Francisco, “a ‘nobby’ affair, as fully ‘swell’ as has been recently evolved.” There were a sufficient number of Americans in China for the Hoovers to organize an alumni association of seven Stanford graduates.20
As in any marriage, there were accommodations to be made between husband and wife, and Lou, having taken a domineering mate, did much of the accommodating. She accepted the priorities of his business as the organizing principle of their life together. Never one to care about clothes in college—her parents had begged her to spend on her wardrobe—she now wrote her mother with orders for dresses, patterns, and materials to please her husband and make herself presentable in society:
There are two things Bert likes that you may utilize. One is that he wants to see me in a black satin dress! But I can’t think of any way to have it made that won’t make me look too old—as tho’ I were assuming too much dignity for my years. I think that will doubtless have to wait. But if you happen to run across a “youthful” style and trimmings for black satin—!
Bert also liked to see her in white and red, and she wore a lot of both her first summer in China. He wore his blue serge suits on every occasion. They went to bed in matching flannel pajamas with big sailor collars and silk cuffs.21
For his first meeting with his official employer, Chang Yen-Mao, Hoover was picked up in Chang’s cart, with its silk-carpeted floors and mules in silver harness, and conveyed to a red brick mansion surrounded by a high wall. He was met in solemn greeting by the tall, impassive Chang, who wore a peacock-blue gown with rose, emerald, and purple trim, and tall black velvet boots embroidered in gold. The chain around his neck held a hundred amber beads and his crown-shaped winter hat of sable had a peacock feather and a ruby finial signifying his precise status as a mandarin. Chang took his blue-serged visitor inside and sat him amid teak tables where they engaged in the timeless ceremony of offering and refusing hospitality, and offering again, and finally accepting. They shared tea and cakes and lychee nuts.
During his stays in Tientsin, Hoover spent considerable time in Chang’s company and, from the outset, he bombarded the mandarin with proposals for new ventures. He honed in on the Kaiping coalfields, among the world’s largest, stretching for more than twenty miles northeast of Tientsin. Hoover considered them, by Western standards, the only successful mining venture in China. Nine thousand men worked three separate collieries, managed by the Chinese with assistance from European and American engineers. Thanks to Moreing’s loan, a fourth colliery and an ice-free port were now under construction. Hoover, believing the current operations to be primitive and woefully inefficient, asked Chang to consider Moreing’s offer to combine the four collieries and the new port into a joint Chinese-English venture, and offered as an inducement more of Moreing’s capital, expecting in return control of any such enterprise. Without “absolute control,” he had written Moreing, “the game is not worth the candle.” Hoover realized that under Chinese law, the mines belonged to the emperor, and that Chang could not sell them to foreigners. He made additional proposals of comprehensive reforms to Chinese mining law, allowing foreigners expanded rights under government supervision.22
In the midst of these discussions, Hoover deliberately made his own murky position still murkier. He sent a letter in confidence to R. A. F. Penrose Jr., the American mining financier, describing his role in Tientsin as “consulting engineer, chief engineer, foreign advisor…I don’t know exactly what, to Chang,” and made no mention of Moreing. He said he has been “thinking on subjects intrigue-esque,” and suggested that the rights to operate the mines could be transferred to an American-led syndicate if Penrose were interested. The Chinese, he said, would prefer U.S. interests over the British because of the latter’s territorial ambitions. He described the opportunity as “unparalleled” and “worth the gamble.” He frankly revealed that his own object was to secure his position as a leading mining figure in China and to make money. This breezy betrayal of his patron, Moreing, came to nothing. It did reveal, however, Hoover’s capacity for duplicity, at least where Moreing was concerned.23
Unfortunately for all of his schemes, the tide of opinion in China was moving against further concessions to outsiders. Several months before Hoover had arrived in the country, the reforming young emperor was placed under house arrest and effectively dethroned by the Empress Dowager, who throttled his modernizations and moved to stop alien businessmen and diplomats from treating her realm as a complimentary buffet. New rules were introduced, unfriendly to foreign capital. Control and management of joint ventures was limited to the Chinese, with foreigners consigned to technical roles, and stiff royalties introduced on foreign profits.
Chang, reading the wind and enjoying control, was cooler than ever to Hoover’s endless proposals for consolidations and mine modernization. He praised Hoover’s abilities and character, raised his salary, expanded his role at the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company, and installed him as chief engineer at the newly created Mining Bureau for Chihli, but he would not be subordinated. Hoover pressed and complained and secretly wrote Moreing of his hopes that political unrest in China would overthrow the government and produce new opportunities for Western capital. He tried to nudge Chang by threatening to quit. The mandarin stood his ground as he would continue to do, until he had no choice.
June 1900 in Tientsin was an unbearable month of hot winds and high humidity. Banks of black and purple clouds rolled in from over the Pacific, drenching the foreign compound with lightning and torrential rains. Hoover was recovering from influenza and Lou from a sinus infection when all of northern China exploded.24
The Boxers were a populist, quasi-religious sect resentful of the rapacity and arrogance of “foreign devils,” whether of the commercial, military, or missionary variety. Its adherents practiced magic and martial arts and believed that they held the powers to deflect gunfire and raise the spirits of dead soldiers to fight at their sides. The movement swept toward Peking and Tientsin like a whirlwind, offering hope to destitute and downtrodden Chinese.25
Traveling in great mobs, the Boxers were vicious with the foreigners and Christian Chinese in their paths. The famous Times of London correspondent George Morrison reported horrifying scenes of “women and children hacked to pieces, men trussed like fowls, with noses and ears cut off and eyes gouged out.” His interpreter privately recorded much worse: “Many were found roasted alive, and so massacred and cut up as to be unrecognizable.”26
The foreign settlement at Tientsin, backing onto the river and walled at one end, was dangerously exposed. Its defenses consisted of two small cannon, a dozen machine guns, and about two thousand foreign soldiers protecting seven hundred foreign civilians, including three hundred women and children, and thousands of Christian Chinese. On June 14, as Hoover helped build barriers at the entrances to the settlement out of sacks of sugar and grain, a howling, dancing horde of Boxers, twenty-five thousand strong, descended next door on Tientsin proper. They torched the French cathedral and turned the sky an ominous red. The mob attempted to light up the foreign compound as well until machine gun fire dispelled their delusions of invulnerability. The foreigners were not seriously challenged until five thousand imperial Chinese regulars sent to disperse the Boxers instead joined the rebellion and trained their artillery on the compound. By June 18, the Europeans were reeling under a constant barrage of shells. Bullets ricocheted off buildings and littered the streets. Fires were breaking out everywhere, choking the compound with smoke. Above it all was the ever-present threat of a mass attack by shrieking Boxers. “There must have been a million of them,” Wilson wrote Hinsdale, “and they all carried firebrands.” Demoralized Westerners began asking each other if they would shoot their wives to spare them worse when the hordes broke through.27
Hoover fought fires in the settlement and delivered food and medical supplies on his bicycle, hugging the brick walls along the street to avoid gunfire. Reporters on the scene observed that he seemed to be moving on the double quick, furiously jingling the change in his pockets and chewing nuts without shucking them. Lou, unwilling to join other women in the safety of the basement at city hall, ran bicycle errands of her own, a .38 Mauser strapped to her hip. She also stood night watch and volunteered at a makeshift hospital at the social club.
With the disruption of rail and telegraph service, Tientsin was cut off from the rest of the world throughout the siege. As reports of the Boxer frenzy spread overseas, American and European newspaper readers feared the worst for the tiny foreign settlement, and Stanford faculty and students read that several of their most talented alumni were probably dead: “It is almost certain that they have fallen victims to the savage ferocity of the Mongolian hosts, unless they managed to make their escape previous to the bloody massacre, which is not likely.”28
In fact, casualties were light in the foreign compound. It was Hoover’s employer, Chang Yen-Mao, who came closest to dying during the attacks. As a recognized ally of the Western devils, Chang was no friend to the Boxers. At the start of the uprising, he hunkered down at an estate in the foreign compound and waited for European troops and Chinese regulars to restore order. The defection of the imperial army unnerved him, however, in part because it stacked the odds against the foreigners, and also because it suggested that his patron, the xenophobic Dowager Empress, was encouraging the rebellion. Word soon spread in the foreign settlement that Chang was hedging his bets. He was believed to have entered negotiations with Chinese military officials to save his own skin and was said to have attempted a midnight escape from the foreign settlement by boat. Although there was no firm evidence against him, the harried Europeans were in no mood to sort fact from rumor: they arrested Chang on charges of communicating with the enemy and threatened him with execution.
On June 23, two thousand reinforcements reached the foreign settlement, temporarily lowering the threat level, although eighty thousand Chinese troops and several hundred thousand Boxers were now camped in the vicinity. Gustav Detring took advantage of the moment to visit Chang in his confinement. Hoover may have dropped by as well. Both men depended upon the mandarin for their livelihoods, and both had been arguing with his captors for his release.
As artillery boomed in the distance and shells burst randomly across the foreign concession, Detring and the imprisoned Chang worried over the future of the Kaiping mines. While reports from the field were incomplete, Detring was able to inform Chang that the Boxers had seriously disrupted their coal operations, scaring off miners, burning buildings, halting production and sales. The Chinese Engineering and Mining Company, already undercapitalized and heavily indebted, now faced a revenue collapse and its share price was plummeting. Worse, the most likely outcome of the Boxer uprising appeared to be an aggressive response by European armies, the collapse of the Chinese government, and the parceling out of Chinese assets to foreigners. Russian and Japanese troops were already said to be exploiting the chaos, planting their flags on the collieries and helping themselves to coal. Running out of options, Chang signed over his power of attorney to Detring and instructed him to seek protection for the company under the British flag on the best terms he could manage.29
Detring left Chang and called upon Hoover with the suggestion that they reorganize the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company into a joint Sino-British concern with a fresh injection of Moreing’s capital. Hoover needed no convincing. They began plotting to deliver a piece of the greatest industrial venture in China from Hoover’s employer, Chang, to his true boss, Moreing.
The preliminary deal they cobbled together would see the new company registered under British law, and its capital expanded to 1 million shares at a par value of one pound each. Existing Chinese shareholders would receive 375,000 of those shares in exchange for their equity. British investors would inject of development capital into the company within ninety days. There were, in addition to these terms, several understandings.
Detring and Hoover understood that Moreing and his fellow promoters would get roughly 200,000 shares to cover their expenses and services, although nothing to this effect was put in writing. They understood that the disposition of the remaining shares would raise the capital necessary to develop the company. Again, they put nothing in writing. They appear to have also understood that Detring and Chang would profit from the deal, yet once more, they put nothing in writing. And they discussed leaving Chang as director-general of the company, forming a board of directors in China and an advisory board in London, which would have suited the Chinese, but, of course, it was not written down.
Detring and Hoover backdated such paperwork as did exist to make it appear as though the reorganization of the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company had preceded the Boxer uprising. They feared that an agreement cooked up during the crisis, enabled by a power of attorney granted by an imprisoned Chang, would lack legitimacy in the eyes of other coal-hungry nations. They were undoubtedly right.
Hoover knew he had leverage over Detring and Chang, who could either accept hard terms with Moreing or risk losing the mines to the Russians or Japanese. He drove a hard bargain for his English master. Detring wanted a sale binding on Moreing; Hoover insisted on a nonbinding option to purchase. Hoover in turn bound Detring not to deal with anyone else while Moreing considered his option.
Hoover also took care of himself in the negotiations. Detring wanted to convey the deed for the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company directly to Moreing. Hoover said that he could not commit his employer and insisted the deed be made out to him as trustee. A welcome benefit of this arrangement was that Moreing would have to treat Hoover as a signatory and a responsible party to the deal, not as a mere courier of documents. This was crucial for a young man looking to secure his future. Detring worried that Hoover, given the trusteeship, might simply run off with the company. He may or may not have known about Hoover’s earlier scheme to take over Chang’s operations with American capital. An English lawyer involved in the negotiations observed, “neither of these men seemed to trust one another very much.” In the end, Detring had no choice but to grant Hoover the trusteeship.30
Written in haste, the Detring-Hoover pact was seriously flawed. Leaving aside the backdating and violations of Chinese law restricting foreign ownership of assets, the negotiators had failed to address two crucial points. First, who, precisely, would manage the new joint enterprise: Chang and the Chinese, Moreing and his employees, or some joint administration? Chang expected that he would remain as director-general and that Moreing’s involvement would be in an advisory rather than a managerial capacity. Detring and Hoover understood that Moreing and his designates would run everything.
Secondly, the deal stipulated that current shareholders in the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company would receive 375,000 of the million shares in the new company. It was silent on the disposition of the remaining 625,000 shares. Detring and Hoover assumed that Moreing would want 200,000 shares for himself and use the rest to raise capital, but there was enough uncertainty as to what would be required to finance the new company that they thought it best to leave London a free hand.
Detring and Hoover finished their negotiation on July 30, by which time the siege had lifted, not without causing a scene in the Hoover household. Lou, probably a better shot than most of the men in the compound, had refused to join an evacuation of women and children when the first relief troops arrived, leading to a heated exchange with her husband. Frederick Palmer, a Collier’s correspondent who since reaching Tientsin with the relief contingent had been bunking with the Hoovers, thought that Lou reveled in the havoc. She posed for a photograph with one of the settlement’s cannon. She did not flinch as shells landed in her garden and stable, and when one blasted through her second-story back window and exploded at the foot of her stairs, Palmer and another journalistic guest rushed through the smoke and lime to find Lou calmly finishing a game of solitaire in her parlor. Lou would afterward write a friend: “You missed one of the opportunities of your life by not coming to China in the summer of 1900…you should have been here,—at the most interesting siege of the age.”31
Bert had one last adventure of his own in the waning days of the siege, joining the five thousand foreign troops, including American regiments, who advanced under fire to liberate Tientsin’s native city from Boxer control in the final days of the conflict. He was a guide, not a combatant. “I was completely scared, especially when some of the Marines next to me were hit,” he later wrote. “I was unarmed and I could scarcely make my feet move forward. I asked the officer I was accompanying if I could have a rifle. He produced one from a wounded Marine, and at once I experienced a curious psychological change for I was no longer scared, although I never fired a shot.”32
On August 4, 1900, Bert and Lou left the still smoking city of Tientsin for Shanghai, bound for London. He wired Moreing before departing the mainland: “Have obtained necessary agreement signed placing under offer to you Kaiping.” He cabled a single word to Lou’s father in Monterey: “Safe.” The young couple spent six weeks on a German mail boat grinding over the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. The food, the service, and the weather were all horrible. Hoover at least had the satisfaction at the end of the journey of delivering to Moreing a deed for the most coveted industrial prize in the Celestial Kingdom.33
Hoover was not long in London. He explained the documents to Moreing and relayed his unwritten understandings with Detring and Chang. Moreing professed delight at the deal, although his lawyers and his proposed investing syndicate studied its details and wanted “slight alterations.” It was requested, for instance, that a phrase authorizing a reorganization of the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company by “such means and agencies as are ordinarily used and usually regarded as proper” be rewritten as permitting such terms and conditions as “Herbert C. Hoover may think expedient.” Hoover was sent back to China to gain approvals for the alterations from Detring and Chang, armed with financial inducements should they resist.34
Stopping in New York on his return journey, Hoover, in an interview with local newspapermen, inadvertently revealed something of the mind-set he would take back to Tientsin to complete his work. Arguing for a forceful U.S. response to the disorder in China, he said: “Our whole policy has been to pat a rattlesnake on the head. 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.”35
Back in Tientsin on January 10, 1901, he explained to Detring the changes requested by Moreing and the inducements on offer: fifty thousand shares in the new company for Detring and Chang each. The German agreed without consulting the mandarin. Rather than call attention to the alterations and risk undoing their July 30 agreement, Hoover and Detring again resorted to backdating. They stealthily rewrote the July 30 document and had it certified at the British consulate as a copy of the original. They also decided that the transaction should be expanded to include not only the property of the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company but all the coal seams geologically connected with its mineshafts. In other words, Moreing and friends were to be granted an exclusive monopoly to the entire Kaiping basin, or about five times more coal than was originally contemplated.
By such methods, Hoover and Detring succeeded in protecting the Kaiping coal mines from other predatory powers. Brandishing their paperwork, they chased German soldiers off of their wharves, replaced Russian troops at Kaiping properties with British soldiers, and set about reorganizing the management of the coal works. Hoover meanwhile chased down one more significant detail to legitimize the transaction.
In an effort to pass muster under Chinese law, Moreing and his investors wanted Chang’s official seal of approval on their agreement. Having been freed from confinement with help from Detring and Hoover, and having noticed that his assets were now under British guard and no longer in imminent danger of being swallowed by the Russians or Japanese, Chang balked at this step. He scrutinized the July 30 terms and protested that he had only authorized a joint Sino-English venture, not an outright sale of his company. He said that he had no right to alienate the mines from the Chinese crown. He also asked for more money for himself, assurance that he would be director-general for life, and that a Chinese board of directors would be installed to manage the mines. He was concerned for the income he and other Chinese parties received from the company. He told Detring that he was now deeply suspicious of the motives and character of Herbert C. Hoover. The stage was set for what would become known as the “four days’ row.”
On February 21, 1901, Detring, Hoover, various diplomats, and a Moreing lawyer began putting the screws to Chang in a series of all-night meetings. Chang’s announcement that he would return to Shanghai on the 24th to be with his ailing wife lent a sense of urgency to the talks. According to a British consul, all involved “lost their tempers, fell out, fell in again, and generally made their lives miserable.” Chang later testified that he was told by the Europeans that he would be crushed and his mines seized if he did not grant his seal.36
On the last day, Hoover, who had kept a low profile due to Chang’s mistrust, brought his own interpreter into the room to ensure that the mandarin got the full force of his message. In a three-hour tirade, he accused Chang of reneging on their agreement and acting in bad faith, and he allegedly threatened to keep him from visiting his sick wife until they came to terms. Hoover, by his own admission, became “very heated” and displayed what one observer called a “dangerous” level of excitement. Chang complained that Hoover was insulting him and causing him to lose face. He received an apology and the discussion resumed.37
The impasse was finally broken when the Westerners agreed to give Chang more money and also to meet most of his demands. The new terms were embodied in a memorandum to be executed in concert with the transfer agreement. It declared that Chinese and foreign shareholders would have equal rights, that a board of directors in London would work cooperatively with another board in China, the latter bearing responsibility for managing the assets in China, with Chang secure as director-general of the company in China. These stipulations seemed to resolve the issue of Chang’s alienating crown properties.
Hoover told Chang that the memorandum, and not the transfer agreement, would be the ruling document in the transaction, and that it would be binding upon the company. Taking heart from this explanation, Chang affixed his seal. Hoover, who privately considered the memorandum to be worthless, thanked the mandarin and, together with representatives of Belgian partners in Moreing’s syndicate, used the seal to assert control over all of the assets of the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company. Ignoring their commitments in the memorandum, the Westerners pushed aside the Chinese and installed themselves as managers with what Hoover called “complete control” over operations. To get the property of the old company registered in the proper consulates as assets of the new company they needed the title deeds, which Hoover acquired, in his own words, by “main force.” Angered by unauthorized disbursements, he seized “by violence” sums of cash in the company’s possession.38
What exactly he meant by “violence” and “main force” is unclear. One report had him waving a revolver and threatening to shoot Chinese employees who failed to meet his demands. This is not wholly implausible given his earlier public comments about armed diplomacy with Asiatics.
While questions about his dealings in Tientsin would dog Hoover for the rest of his life, the context of his actions in these early months of 1902 is important, if not exculpatory. The Chinese throne was hiding in the interior of the country, and only the crudest pretense of civil authority remained in effect across the land. Russians and Japanese were raping and pillaging their way through the northern provinces while ruthlessly competing with Germany and France in a postrebellion spoils scramble for mines and ports. Against the standards of these other powers, Hoover’s actions were almost enlightened: he was at least preparing a legal gloss for his hustle, a precaution not obviously necessary at the time. And from a strictly commercial point of view, Hoover did succeed in securing the property of his Anglo-Belgian masters in a frightening and chaotic moment. He pulled off what has been called “the largest transfer of property to foreigners in the history of China,” while at the same time introducing new financial disciplines at the company, sweeping out as many unproductive employees as he could, installing new managers where possible, and getting an industrial giant back on its feet regardless of the circumstances.39
As all of this transpired, Charles Algernon Moreing was back in London doing violence of his own to notions of fair play in international commerce. He registered the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company as an English limited liability company, excluding from its articles of association any mention of Chinese management and Chang’s ongoing role. These omissions appear to have shocked Hoover, who had left London under the impression that Chang and the Chinese would be included, and who had assured Detring and the mandarin that they were.
Through a series of deft maneuvers, Moreing also distributed to himself and his mostly Belgian associates 625,000 of the new company’s million shares at a par value of a pound each. This stock, more than three times the 200,000 shares that Detring and Hoover had agreed was fair promotional profit, and representing almost two-thirds of the firm’s equity, was handed out for no cash consideration whatsoever. The net effect was to water down the 375,000 shares that had been dealt to the original Chinese shareholders in exchange for their equity in the old company. Having given away the 625,000 shares that might have been sold to raise capital, Moreing next saddled the new company with a £500,000 debenture at 6 percent to fund its expansion and to clear its debts (most of which were owed to Moreing and associates, and most of which were paid off with premiums).
Again, even Hoover was stunned. The new company, in his estimation, did not need anything like £500,000. The large sum would be a drag on its profits and the recovery of its operations. He wondered why Moreing would not sell shares to raise capital, considering that the company’s stock was trading on the Chinese market at two or three times par. It was an excellent question.
In September 1901 twenty-seven-year-old Herbert Hoover and his wife sailed out of China together for the last time. If he was in any sense outraged at his master’s ransacking of the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company, he did not move to stop it. Rather, he returned to London and strengthened his ties with Moreing, signing on as a “pardner” in the firm. He needed the position and the money. As he wrote his brother:
I have carried one deal through and it may be two years before I realize anything from my shares. I hope for a moderate competence then. Meantime I am living on a pardnership that is all hopes and no cash so that I would be jolly hard up had I not made a few thousand dollars on a speculation here.40
In the same letter, Hoover asked Theodore to sign a promissory note for all of the money he had ever received from him. In another letter, he told Theodore that he was uncertain of his future income: “at present it is nil.”41
On their way to London, the young couple stopped in San Francisco, where Bert sat for an interview with a former Stanford mate now on staff at the Chronicle. He made sufficient mention of his China earnings to get headlined as the “highest salaried man of his years in the world” at $33,000 per annum, an absurd assertion given his confessions to his brother. All that can be said in Hoover’s defense is that his salary was indeed impressive on paper, but given the upheaval in China, he had collected little of it since the summer of 1900. The article also described Bert as “long, spare and squinty,” much to Lou’s amusement and his own annoyance.42
Hoover asked Theodore to ensure that the Stanford alumni network know he had attained a partnership in one of the world’s great mining syndicates as a reward for winning the Kaiping mines, which he termed “a jolly good deal.” He would not see it that way for long.43
* Hoover’s servants spread rumors that he could look into the ground and find gold because his eyes were green.