Hoover’s retirement may have been largely a charade, but his life did change significantly on his break with Bewick, Moreing. For the first time since Stanford, he was free to do as he pleased. His pace did not slacken—he still lived liked a man whose parents had died young—but his independence allowed him a greater variety of experience. Opportunities for new forms of work and the pursuit of personal interests multiplied. All this, together with the development of his family life, improved finances, and a secure and enviable standard of living, somewhat settled his soul. He would remember the period from 1908 to 1914 as perhaps the happiest of his existence:
Pre-war England was the most comfortable place in which to live in the whole world. That is, if one had the means to take part in its upper life. The servants were the best trained and the most loyal of any nationality. The machinery for joy and for keeping busy doing nothing was the most perfect in the world….To London came the greatest music, the greatest drama, the greatest art, and the best food in the world. The polite living in city and country breathed hospitality itself. Over our years of sojourning, we became greatly attached to our house on Campden Hill and to the stream of American and British friends with whom we came in contact. We spent many happy times there.1
The rented home on Hornton Street, Campden Hill, a respectable section of Kensington, was called Red House. It was a commodious early-nineteenth-century manor with eight rooms, including a morning room, a billiard room, and an oak-paneled library with a great fireplace and glassed-in bookcases. The walnut-paneled dining room had a small dais for speeches and performances. In the large garden, surrounded by a crumbling high wall, were an ancient mulberry tree and a fishpond with a fountain.2
The Hoovers filled the house with expensive furniture, Bert’s mountain of books, Lou’s Chinese ceramics, and a large dog, as well as a butler, a maid, a chauffeur, a cook, a nurse, and a governess. The dining room saw plenty of action. The Hoovers dressed for dinner and entertained most evenings, keeping an open-door policy for traveling Americans, notably Californians and Stanford alumni, many of whom Herbert would bring home unannounced.
“One met at their house,” said Mary Austin, a literary friend of Lou’s, “people from the ends of the earth—from China, Australia, and South Africa, from Russia and the Balkans, mining and engineering people. Their house was always open to these stray visitors and there was an immense amount of interesting and informative talk going on about their table, thoroughly American talk, and a great deal also that was rather boring.”3
Hoover was an unlikely candidate for this manner of entertaining. He seldom took the time to enjoy his food, and was once clocked swallowing five courses in eleven minutes flat. His cellar was one of the best in Kensington, although he was not a big drinker. Lou would invite the renowned pianist Francis Grierson to play for guests, a pleasure lost on her husband’s tin ear. Nor did Bert much care for conversation. His fund of small talk was perpetually overdrawn, and if he interacted with the guests at his elbows, it was typically in a series of grunts or nods. If he wanted to make a point, he made it in a flat voice and then stopped abruptly as if, as one friend noticed, someone had pulled his plug. If aroused, he would speak with force, sometimes veering into tactlessness, pursuing minor differences of opinion so harshly and indignantly that his victims nursed grudges for the rest of their natural lives. One acquaintance considered him the bluntest man in Europe, another “the rudest man in London.”4
Hoover could work up a sort of loquacity when the mood struck him. Once, dining at another’s home, he lost himself in descriptions of the military dimensions of the Boxer uprising. He grabbed knives, spoons, and forks to represent ports, mines, and fortifications. As the story progressed he brought glassware, saltcellars, and cruets into play, disrupting the entire table service, oblivious to the maid at his elbow waiting to serve him a plate of food. It was Lou who finally interrupted: “Bert, suppose we get on with dinner.”5
She tried her best to make up for husband’s social deficiencies, with mixed results. While one acquaintance said she could speak as long and as intelligently as the moment required to any given ear, others rated Lou’s conversational arts only a modest improvement on Bert’s and described her as “decidedly inept socially.” The one point of agreement was that she always made an effort and, whatever her shortcomings, she was warm, utterly unpretentious, and as gracious as her husband was brusque. She dressed simply and elegantly, favoring beads of stone or metal (“bits of geology”) over jewelry. She avoided high heels and cosmetics, and there was invariably a dog at her feet.6
A guest at the Hoover table would have been pardoned for wondering why Lou persevered with their entertainments when her husband seemed to find them agonizing. One answer may be that he believed it was the right thing to do. Consciously or not, he had created around his own dining room table a replica of the Minthorn home in Salem, with himself replacing his uncle as the reticent head of an extended family of friends, associates, investors, customers, travelers, and relatives.
Hoover also hated to eat alone. However annoying he found some of his guests, dining by himself was worse. An empty table upset his equilibrium. The unwanted ate alone, outsiders ate alone, friendless teenaged orphans in Salem ate alone. Lou understood this and surrounded him with other minds and voices to keep him occupied and out of his funks. Whenever possible, Hoover would live, eat, and travel in a flock, preferably one of his own making, and with himself as the center of attention.
Yet another impetus for heavy traffic at mealtime was ambition. The Hoovers’ social climbing was primarily Bert’s idea. He had no aristocratic pretensions, but he wanted the respect of the better classes, and he wanted connections. Anne Martin recalled him coming home from work while Lou was entertaining at tea. He “cast a supercilious eye about the room as though he were weighing the social importance of every guest—and was greatly dissatisfied with the result.” Lou entreated her well-established friends to share their titled acquaintances, and Bert sought to have his wife presented at court. Neither effort was successful.7
Hoover held Lou responsible for their inability to make a splash, and Lou acknowledged to Mary Austin that she might not be the right woman to help him realize his social ambitions. Indeed, she was not blameless: her habit of inviting dull people who might like meeting someone interesting was kind to the former and vexing to the latter. All the same, she doubted that Bert could do better with anyone else, and she was right. Men of Hoover’s profession, pedigree, and disposition were not in high demand at the better tables in London. Stanford friends who saw the Hoovers during this period noticed that Lou had been a positive influence on Bert’s social development. She had “changed him a good deal,” said Jackson Reynolds, who saw her offer tender instructions on how to handle situations. “Now Bertie,” she would volunteer, “don’t you think this would be better?”8
Another pleasure afforded Hoover in his new life were nights at the theater. Gilbert and Sullivan and Shaw were favorites, along with Shakespeare. He had more time to read, ending most evenings with a book in his hand. He ran through his growing collection of history, politics, and biography at the rate of a volume a day. Saturdays and Sundays were often spent with the children in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, tea on the grass under trees, model boats on the round pond. Hoover was fond of the zoo in Regent’s Park. He liked to smoke a cigar under a California redwood in Kew Gardens.9
An additional weekend activity was the country picnic, with Bert piling everyone into an open car driven by his chauffeur and motoring out to pick beechnuts and wildflowers in the forest. He would find a brook, take off his shoes and socks, and spend the afternoon moving mud and stones and timber to divert the stream—an engineer even in repose.10
There was time for sightseeing, as well, with the Hoovers following the trail of William the Conqueror in 1066, and making a nighttime pilgrimage to observe a comet at Stonehenge, Britain’s oldest engineering project. Bert’s eyes watered at the sight of Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey at dusk, and he was similarly moved by the Speech House in the Forest of Dean, home to the Free Miner’s Mine Law Court. He never lingered on these excursions. Once he had seen what there was to see, he was back in the car, ready to move on.11
Some of his discretionary travel took the Hoovers outside of Britain, often in the company of friends, most often Edgar Rickard, the lugubrious publisher of a mining magazine started with Hoover money. The two families pooled any windfalls that came their way into what they called a “Seeing Cairo Fund.” A rule of the fund, which topped out around $5,000, was that once the date of departure had been settled, the destination would be decided only a few hours beforehand. The couples saw great swaths of Europe and Russia in this manner.12
One activity that had fallen off the Hoover calendar entirely was Sunday worship. Hoover does not appear to have frequented a Quaker meetinghouse after leaving Oregon, and no other church had taken its place. Neither he nor Lou was religious, and he admitted to intimates that he did not think much about his faith. He retained some of the Friends’ ethics, including a distaste for display and ceremony, a horror of idleness, a neighborly sense of duty, a concern for the suffering of others, and a relatively tolerant attitude toward religious and racial differences. If he happened to be in town for Christmas he would dress up as Santa Claus and dole out books to the children and servants. He celebrated Easter with egg hunts. His adult life was secular to an extent that would have shocked his mother, although perhaps not his father or Dr. Minthorn.13
Despite Bert’s complaints of having been passed around from relative to relative as a child, the Hoovers adopted the English custom of leaving the rearing of their children largely to nurses and governesses. Bert did love the boys. He taught them how to hammer gold quartz and pan it out like a forty-niner in their garden fishpond. He occasionally wrote them playful letters from distant locales. The boys were not in any sense a preoccupation, however.
Lou, too, kept a busy schedule, serving as an executive of the Society of American Women in London and playing an active role in the Lyceum Club, which organized lectures on such topics as Hilaire Belloc, Swinburne, and women’s suffrage. She would sometimes leave the children with nannies in blue uniforms and white caps or with her parents in California so that she could travel with Bert. She even made side trips of her own, sprinting off to Tasmania or Egypt to collect rock samples for Dr. Branner. Regardless of how much time she spent out of the house, Lou was an alert and caring mother, and she doted on her husband. Each morning at the breakfast table, she would casually ask, “What do I do for you today, Daddy?”14
Lou kept a circle of friends separate from her husband’s. His tended to be business associates and journalists, while she was attracted to characters. Her Stanford classmate Anne Martin showed up rather suddenly in London, seized with a passion for the women’s suffrage movement. She bought a hammer and joined protests, smashing windows and policemen along the way. Bert, who had always considered Martin an “inoffensive pedantic nonentity,” was baffled by her behavior. He bailed her out of jail twice, over her objections, and ultimately convinced her to buy a return ticket to the United States and seek martyrdom to the women’s cause on familiar ground.15
Lou was also close to Mary Austin, the freethinking writer, clairvoyant, and compulsive namedropper. Austin had been a stalwart in the artists’ colony at Carmel, with Jack London and Lincoln Steffens. By the time she reached England, she could (and did) boast of publications in the Atlantic and productions at the New Theatre in New York. She entertained Lou with gossip about the amorous adventures of her acquaintances Upton Sinclair and H. G. Wells. Bert was scandalized at Austin’s familiarity with Wells, who had sired a child outside of marriage. “Herbert Hoover,” Austin later wrote, “has the usual American man’s prejudices against variation in conduct from the absolute norm of middle-class life.”16
Whatever he thought of her morals, Hoover was fascinated by Austin’s creative talent and myth-making capacities. It had occurred to him that he, or at least his kind, might be a worthy subject for the stage. The artist and the miner discussed his life and work and how it might be dramatized. “Seriously, I am interested in this matter,” Hoover wrote her. “I’ve whiled away many idle hours constructing a drama to represent to the world a new intellectual type from a literary or stage view—the modern intellectual engineer—there’re more possibilities than you think.”17
Hoover mailed Austin a print of a copper mine furnace to serve as a backdrop for his prospective play. The front elevation, he envisioned, would fill the whole back of the stage. The furnace would be a noisy beast, spitting and blowing smoke like a ship’s boilers. The plot would revolve around the efforts of a team of bold engineers attempting to construct a great copper mine where others had persistently failed. There would be resistance to their engineering genius, as well as sabotage and death:
The equipment of these great copper mines has been in progress for two or more years….A furnace has been built…and will treat 5,000 tons a day—employ 10,000 men. Their professional future and the financial success of the enterprise depends on this furnace. The criteria of success will be the actual flow of metal from the furnace. The day arrives when the smelter is to be “blown in.” It has been charged some hours before. They stand by and moralize on their future and the probabilities of the monster chewing up metal. They evince proper stage anxiety….
Suddenly the foreman from up on the furnace stage (screams) announces she is ready (furnaces are also females). The chief engineer takes the honor (or delegates it to the ultimate victim) of the first tap. Everybody stands on one foot. He dashes along, opening the spouts (there are about 40 of them). The glowing metal ripples out, sparks; (water over red light). Everybody cheers, dance a minuet. But at the last hole a breastplate blows out. Great cloud of fumes, yellow smoke; victim dies either on or off the stage as you like.
Austin was unconvinced. A thoroughgoing primitivist, she had difficulty with his notion of a heroic engineer. He complained that she was “trying to make a villain out of [the engineer], which won’t do.” He insisted that the lead role be a martyr, and argued that the physical, intellectual, and educational passages of a successful man could never produce a bad person. If the play needed a “semi-civilized villain,” a man who mistreated his wife, it would have to be the metallurgist or the foreman, he argued, not the engineer. He could never make Austin see it. Hoover so wanted the world to view this romantic portrayal of himself and his profession that he supported Austin financially for several years. She strung him along, warning on the one hand that genius could not survive “on a crust in an attic,” and on the other that an artist’s independent spirit could not be purchased. A good part of the money he gave her went to build an extension on her cabin.18
Years later, Austin would write that Hoover had fallen into a habit of crossing the Atlantic and telegraphing her to have breakfast with him and listen to him talk about his great plans for the future. He insisted that he did not want to be “just a rich man” but was otherwise unsure of what to do with himself. “Things came up in his mind and turned over, showing white bellies like fish in a net,” wrote Austin. She answered him with flattery, suggesting that there would never be a ready-made position for a man of his enormous capacities, and that he would have to simply jump in somewhere and “elbow some small fry out of the way.”19
Hoover’s school-days habit of confiding to several women at a time seems to have carried into adulthood. Austin and Martin independently related that he would solicit their admiration by revealing his dreams and accomplishments. He does not seem to have been after anything more than approval. Austin doubted that his stiff sense of propriety “permitted him to play around much.” She nevertheless wrote, in this period, the novel A Woman of Genius, in which an engineer, not unlike Hoover, achieves fulfillment by running away with an artist, not unlike Austin.20
Hoover could afford to indulge Austin and his theatrical dreams, for he was becoming rich. Early in his post-Moreing career, with his income approaching $100,000 annually, he had moved his office down the street to the still more respectable address of 1 London Wall. Several other, mostly American, mining engineers and executives, including brother Theodore, joined him there. They worked on friendly terms, without a partnership or formal organization—no direct ties that would contravene Hoover’s restrictive covenants. Operating in every corner of the earth, Hoover and associates laid the foundations of a lasting fortune.
Theodore remembered his brother as the lodestar figure in the group, standing head and shoulders above the others, working the hardest, dominating by his intellectual powers and sound judgment. He also thought Herbert’s uncompromising need to run the show was selfish. It was always “his team and his game,” an attitude that sometimes drove off talented individuals with leadership capacities of their own, yet there was nothing anyone could do about it. Herbert built a community of loyalists, allowed himself few peers, and took orders from none. He would bicker, fight, and lose his temper at challenges to his absolute control.21
Hoover described his occupation in these years as an “engineering doctor to sick concerns,” which was a deceptive phrase. He was doing little technical work or on-site mining. His activities were mostly financial. He had developed a specialty in rescuing distressed mines through corporate restructurings and consolidations with injections of new capital. Because of his reputation as a superb operator, he had no problem raising money or floating new ventures, and he worked with some of the most illustrious names in London mining circles. He claimed to find sheer joy in creating productive properties out of mines that other operators had failed to make pay. Much of the pleasure undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that he rarely risked his own money. He would receive for his services large fees and grants of shares that he would habitually sell early, at a premium.22
His colleagues were mesmerized at Hoover’s facility in financial matters. “[He] would have the answer while the rest of us were trying to understand the problem,” said one associate. “In the first place, he always came to a meeting thoroughly prepared and that gave him a big starting advantage. In the second place, he had an almost encyclopedic memory. And in the third place, his mind moved like chain lightning when his own financial interests were involved.”23
Reported Walter Liggett, Hoover had a “gift of juggling corporate assets in such a manner that insiders almost always benefitted,” whatever happened to the capital of the original shareholders. He was masterful at wielding write-offs and preference shares with multiple voting power on the grounds that new capital was required to avert bankruptcy. His favorite deals were those so complicated no one else could figure out how they worked.24
On top of this, Hoover could keep mental maps of dozens of mines in his mind and, by one account, follow the progress of each shaft like a blindfolded chess master. He liked to receive telegrams from these properties and, without opening them, noting only the date and address, predict the level of the mine and the cost per ton of ore. He was usually correct.25
His intellectual capacities and powerful will made Hoover a fearsome negotiator. Arriving at the table with shirtsleeves rolled up, abrupt and aggressive, he had a singular talent for stripping away nonessential information and getting directly to the root of things, and he knew how to close. He possessed what one businessman said was a curious dynamic force that could compel the most reluctant person to put signature to paper.26
In addition to his fees and share grants, Hoover made money in stock market speculation, using information gleaned from his own operations and from his vast network of connections in the mining world to buy and sell shares for personal profit. He shared offices in New York and London with the famous American miner A. Chester Beatty. They swapped inside information about mine performance and impending deals, often trading on joint account to their mutual benefit. Although insider trading was not illegal at the time, Hoover did not want to be seen gambling on the market. He would speak contemptuously of stock jobbers, the parasites and “idiots” who wagered on short-term swings in share prices, creating bubbles and market inefficiencies. His own speculations he considered sound and respectable transactions based on professional insight and judgment. In reality, the only difference between Hoover and the average punter was his earlier access to information. He traded in his own name, his wife’s name, and in friends’ names. Despite his privileged position, he once had to confess to Theodore that he had been speculating on his account without his knowledge and that all of his money was gone. As a result of the loss, Bert discharged all of Theodore’s indebtedness to him.27
For all of his stock juggling and wagering, Hoover still made the bulk of his fortune the hard way, on a small number of long-term endeavors that required every ounce of his technical skill, financial wizardry, and strength of character before yielding fantastic wealth. He and his colleagues would examine hundreds of possible plays, thoroughly investigating dozens of them, before seizing the one or two opportunities on which to concentrate their efforts. A prime example of this approach was a zinc operation in Western Australia, begun while he was in the employ of Bewick, Moreing. It was well known that the silver mines at Broken Hill had, over the years, produced mountains of tailings rich in zinc. Alert to rising prices for zinc and new methods of separating it from ore, Hoover arranged to purchase 5 million tons of tailings and went to work. He raised capital to try new separation processes. He went through several cycles of investment and failure, all to the accompaniment of screaming shareholders, before generating regular dividends. It was a reckless adventure in all respects but one: the Zinc Corporation eventually became one of the longest-running and most financially successful operations of its kind in the world.28
Hoover first learned of the mine that would produce his biggest payoff from ancient Chinese manuscripts that told of fabulous silver deposits in Burma on the road to Mandalay. On his way home from investigating tin mines in Penang in 1904, still in the employ of Bewick, Moreing, he chanced to meet on board his steamer a railway contractor who knew Burma and spoke of gigantic abandoned works deep in the jungle. Hoover visited the site a year later, lodging in Hsipaw, the capital of the Shan state of the same name, whose structures were all built from bamboo. He traveled by rail and horseback over glistening green mountains to the lost mines. They were vast, extending over a three-mile area, with pits a thousand feet long and hundreds of feet deep. The Chinese had worked the site from 1400 to 1850, taking the most accessible silver. Hoover saw an opportunity to extract much more.
Burma would give Hoover some of the better stories from his mining years. On one plunge into the low, narrow tunnels dug by the Chinese, crawling through the mud with a candle in hand, he noticed fresh tiger tracks in a long shallow puddle ahead of him. His exit was as quiet as it was quick. The tiger, he said later, “was not of an inquisitive turn of mind and did not come out to greet us.” He also succumbed to malaria in Burma. Bedridden for several weeks with chills and fever, he suffered delirium and began babbling incoherently in verse. His travel mates worried that he was losing his mind. Happily for poetry, the fever soon burned out.29
The Burma Mines, Railway, and Smelting Company was registered in 1906, with Bewick, Moreing as a leading shareholder. Within two years Hoover was managing director of the company and, for a change, he invested his own money, acquiring 18 percent of the mine. He built a smelter and a fifty-mile railroad and worked the ore from different directions and at various depths, overcoming caving ground and water seepage and labor shortages before, at last, a two-mile-long tunnel seven hundred feet below the old workings opened the most bountiful seams. Hoover called it the Tiger Tunnel. The mine was astonishingly rich. Over thirty years, it would produce 135 million ounces of silver and over a million tons of lead. A hundred thousand Shans and Chinese would find employment at the works, a source of pride to Hoover, who considered the Burmese the most cheerful people in Asia.30
Hoover’s zinc and Burma projects were massive, long-term, multimillion-dollar undertakings requiring technical and managerial talents few industrialists in any field could match. As he approached the age of forty, Hoover was without question one of the great miners of his age. His path was littered with dry holes, lawsuits, and ruined investors, some of them the inevitable outcomes of an inherently risky business, others the special products of Hoover’s ways. His capacities for action and accomplishment were nevertheless undisputed, and his services remained in high demand, earning him some of “the largest engineering fees known to man.” He would take directors’ fees up to $5,000 a year from eighteen separate companies with a total share capital of $55 million and 100,000 employees spread around the globe. He would soon estimate that he was in position to amass personal wealth of at least $30 million.31
No one watched Hoover’s mounting good fortune with more chagrin than Charles Algernon Moreing, and it had not escaped his notice that his former partner was, on occasion, and without the express written consent of Bewick, Moreing, practicing as a miner and engineer well within the confines of the British Empire and other locales claimed by Bewick, Moreing as its own. Hoover had also been poaching top talent from Bewick, Moreing, and he was caught spying on the company through a disloyal corporate secretary who, on dismissal, was engaged by Hoover at 1 London Wall. Moreing brought suit against Hoover in 1910 for violating his restrictive covenants. It was settled out of court to Moreing’s advantage.32
Hoover’s decision to avoid an open trial was likely influenced by the weakness of his case, not to mention his concern for public relations. He had been working hard to put his Moreing-era scandals behind him and to establish himself as a respectable leader in the mining industry. As part of these efforts, he had published his first book in 1909.
Based on a series of lectures he had given at Stanford and Columbia, Principles of Mining is a technical treatise covering everything from machine drilling to cavage to stoping, valuation, bookkeeping, and risk management. By no means a leisurely read, it does offer insight into Hoover’s professional mind through lectures on the necessity of efficiency, and on the business leader’s need to keep firm control of his working environment. There are also modest political statements in the book, including a description of labor unions as a natural antidote to the concentration of capital in large firms: “The time when the employer could ride roughshod over his labor is disappearing with the doctrine of ‘laissez faire’ on which it was founded.” The latter statement is somewhat at odds with Hoover’s union-busting in Australia, as well as his blasé attitude toward indentured labor, a practice he would introduce to Nicaragua in 1913. He generally believed in paying good wages, nevertheless.33
Among the book’s idiosyncratic touches is Hoover’s attempt to end discussion of the capacities of different races of workers, a common debating point in early twentieth-century mining, by quantifying a racial productivity gap. He deemed one white worker equal to two or three of the colored races in simple tasks like shoveling, and as high as one to eleven in the most complicated mechanical work.
Perhaps the largest statement made in Principles of Mining is that the supreme manifestation of professionalism in engineering in 1909 was an executive who operated much like Herbert Hoover: “The mining engineer is no longer the technician who concocts reports and blue prints. It is demanded of him that he devise the finance, construct and manage the works which he advises.” The commercial aspects of the work “cannot be too strongly emphasized,” Hoover insists. “The industry is conducted for commercial purposes, and leaves no room for the haughty intellectual superiority assumed by some professions over business callings.”34
This was an important point for Hoover, though he was a geologist by training and a businessman by inclination. It would always please him to present himself as an engineer, a leading member of an expansive, upwardly mobile profession. Numbering seven thousand in his boyhood, the ranks of engineers in America would expand twentyfold by the middle of his life, and in this time they would claim such impressive feats as the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal. A broad definition of the profession emphasizing its commercial phases only enhanced Hoover’s sense of belonging and his claim to leadership. Most prominent figures in the engineering community considered themselves a species of businessman, and they accepted Hoover wholeheartedly as one of their own.35
Not satisfied with positioning himself as the epitome of the modern engineer, Hoover also squeezed into the final pages of Principles of Mining a description of the “new intellectual type” he had wanted to bring to the stage with Mary Austin. The engineer is a creator, forsaking the comforts of civilization for the mountains and deserts where he works his art. He receives little public acclaim, because he does not advertise himself, yet year by year his profession rises in dignity and importance as the world learns the identity of the real brains behind industrial progress:
To the engineer falls the work of creating from the dry bones of scientific fact the living body of industry. It is he whose intellect and direction bring to the world the comforts and necessities of daily need. Unlike the doctor, his is not the constant struggle to save the weak. Unlike the soldier, destruction is not his prime function. Unlike the lawyer, quarrels are not his daily bread. Engineering is the profession of creation and of construction, of stimulation of human effort and accomplishment.36
Principles of Mining did not much interest the press, apart from organs beholden to Hoover. It was a significant achievement nonetheless. It would become a standard text in many engineering schools and it remained in print throughout Hoover’s lifetime, fulfilling his ambition to have an intellectual as well as a practical career in the manner of his mentors, Lindgren and Branner. It also kept him at his desk long enough to gain thirty pounds in the writing.
Hoover was as unlikely an author as he was host of the Red House dinner club. He had no respect for literary craftsmanship. Writers were just so many more specialists for hire: “You can get a man to write anything for five pounds a week,” he told the author and diplomat Brand Whitlock. His own grammar and syntax were poor, his spelling remained abysmal, he was sloppy with dates and details, and he plagiarized without blinking. He wrote in a hurry, on top of all the other work in his life, so it is not surprising that Principles of Mining needed to be rewritten almost in its entirety by its publishers.*, 37
Despite all of this, Hoover had begun chipping away at a still grander literary project while Principles of Mining was rolling off the press. He had long shared with his wife and brother an interest in the history of science. During their time together in London, Lou gave Theodore a copy of Robert Boyle’s 1672 classic, An Essay about the Origins and Virtues of Gems, triggering a familial mania for collecting old and rare books on mineralogy, mining, alchemy, technology, and mathematics. The three of them spent many afternoons between 1908 and 1914 in London bookshops. Herbert and Lou alone assembled a library of 912 volumes, including Georgius Agricola’s De Re Metallica, the first important attempt to gather between covers the world’s knowledge on mining and metallurgy.38
The Hoovers knew the value and the lore of Agricola’s masterwork, how it had been published in Latin in 1556 and chained to church altars in old South American mining camps, where priests translated it for workers. They also knew the book had never been published in English. They decided to undertake the task themselves. Lou’s proficiency in Latin and German (Agricola’s native tongue), as well as her scientific training, made her an indispensable partner in the enterprise. A principal reason the book had never been translated was its difficulty: the author’s Latin was riddled with medieval German vocabulary and forgotten technical terms. The Hoovers worked away at the translation in spare moments over five years, sitting on opposite sides of a desk in the Red House library, their reference works piled between them. In 1912, after four painstaking revisions, they were ready to publish.
The translation, hand-printed on sixteenth-century linen paper in the same fonts as the original, featured reproductions of Agricola’s 289 woodcut illustrations. The American Historical Review called the book a “noteworthy monument of patient and intelligent scholarship.” Their achievement won the Hoovers a special gold medal for distinguished service from the Mining and Metallurgical Society of America.39
The authors deserved accolades for the book, an honest labor of love, and a valentine to a profession they both held dear. Hoover would often quote Agricola on the subject of mining as “a calling of peculiar dignity” and he and Lou, with humility and respect, would take their places in its long traditions of knowledge and practice. At the same time, and less humbly, Hoover would complain incessantly of the lack of respect for engineers in Britain, where they were viewed as plumbers or carpenters, not high-minded achievers. He would never entirely lose his obsession with legitimating the profession and, by extension, himself.40
As early as 1907, before he had left Bewick, Moreing, Hoover was telling friends that as much as he loved mining he had taken what he could from the profession. The day-to-day challenges of the engineer had lost their novelty, and as the years passed, his dissatisfaction deepened. Money was not an issue. “If a man has not made a fortune by forty he is not worth much,” he is reputed to have said. His point was that making money is not difficult if that is all one wants to do. By his late thirties, he was worth several million, with perhaps ten times that amount in sight. It was far more than he needed. He liked to live comfortably and he enjoyed the freedom and independence his wealth afforded him, but he was still enough of a Quaker to disdain diamonds and yachts and ostentatious display. As he had told Mary Austin, he wanted to be more than another rich man.41
He also wanted out of England, long having been ambivalent about the country. Its attractions were many, including the fact that many of his friends and associates were English. He himself was so thoroughly Anglicized that some in the mining world mistook him for a Brit, and his letters were idiomatically as English as they were American. From 1907 to 1910, Hoover had made only a single trip to his native land. Yet in his heart he was thoroughly American. He would gather his family and his English domestic staff on the Red House lawn every Fourth of July to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and as much as he wanted to be accepted in London, he knew he did not fit. He had no patience for the English social season, class distinctions, titles, and inherited wealth. He was sensitive to the underside of industrial England and the squalor in which the vast majority of its citizens lived. It also irked Hoover that the British condescended to Americans, and to engineers, treatment that he tended to answer with belligerence.42
Hoover had managed to stomach English ways while he was building his career. Now, with it built, he was fed up. “I am disgusted with myself,” he wrote an American friend, “when I think how much better off you people are who stuck by your own country and place. When you walk down the street you meet a hundred men who have a genuine pleasure in greeting you. I am an alien who gets a grin once in nine months.” This might have struck the British as rich coming from so saturnine a personality as Hoover.43
His preferred mode of escape from mining and England, he told his college chum Will Irwin, was to get into the “big game” somewhere. By the big game he meant public service. Newspapers were a possibility. Long fascinated by the business, Hoover had closely watched the progress of William Randolph Hearst, a fellow Californian, whose chain of dailies was leading the industrialization of the American press and gaining its owner an influence unprecedented for a private citizen in America. Hoover had an agent scout for newspapers in New York and Washington that might serve as a centerpiece for a chain of his own.44
A move to the academy was also a possibility. Thanks to his eminence in mining circles, Hoover’s name routinely arose in searches for deans of mining and engineering schools at universities including Columbia. Politics, too, seemed open. He had been promoted by a friend as a candidate for governor of California, and Stanford president David Starr Jordan wrote letters of recommendation to the White House on his behalf. Jordan described him to President Taft as a millionaire retiring at age thirty-seven and looking to return to America:
I would like to call your notice to a young man, available for executive service, and who possesses the greatest of talent for work in that line….He is a very presentable man, of quiet, frank manner, but carrying conviction whenever he speaks. He has lately declined the deanship of the Columbia school of mines….In short, should he enter public life in any capacity, he is a man who will make himself felt.45
Hoover’s motives for this dramatic change of direction were several in addition to his stated reasons that he had run through his chosen field and desired to return to the United States. His noncompetition settlement with Moreing must have been on his mind, limiting as it did his prospects in mining. His rueful note in Principles of Mining that the public took scant notice of engineers was further argument for change: Hoover was hungry as ever for recognition and approbation. A move toward public service, like his earlier efforts to disentangle himself from Moreing and obscure the record of the Chang trial, would also help to burnish his reputation and to bury memories of the devil he had been. Hoover’s acute sensitivity to criticism and personal attack, together with his two breakdowns at the height of his troubles, suggest that his conscience was bothering him. Although he rarely admitted to transgressions, he had to know that he was not living up to his professed moral code.
But above all of this was one other crucial factor: Hoover’s genuine desire to do good. It is a sometimes difficult motive to credit, given his preoccupation over two decades of adulthood with his own advancement, yet his commitment to public service would prove so deep and enduring that it had to stem in large part from a sincere desire to be of useful service to his fellow man. It makes more sense when one considers the number of voices and examples from his formative years that encouraged Hoover to devote himself to the public good. Although he was no longer a practicing Quaker, the Friends’ ethic of community service ran strong in his family. His father and his Uncle Minthorn had both been public servants and community leaders with a demonstrated concern for the welfare of others. His mother, especially, had put her dedication to her ministry above her children and her own health. He had heard her celebrated on her passing as a woman tried and proved by service, a builder and a doer of deeds who had lived a worthy and useful life. His grandmother had prayed on his departure for Stanford that he would do “a conscientious work.” His beloved Sunday school teacher, Miss Gray, had urged him to find a purpose beyond accumulating wealth. That message had been echoed at Stanford, where President Jordan encouraged students to get into “the game” of useful service, a phrase Hoover adopted as his own.46
Service, moreover, was in the air. It was something of a mania in the first decades of twentieth-century America. Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and every postprandial gasbag at the nation’s multiplying lodges, clubs, and fraternal orders sang hosannas to the noble men and women who contributed to social betterment through community service. The Rotarian motto—“he profits most who serves best”—had become a national ethic. Everyone was expected to give and to belong.47
Under the combined weight of these influences, it is doubtful that Hoover could have been satisfied with the course of his life without at some point answering the call of service. There is, in fact, considerable evidence that Hoover was always headed for a career in public service, whether he realized it or not. His dedication to business and his sometime ruthless ways had never prevented him from looking after chosen others. Indeed, he gave more than most. While working his way through Stanford, he had found time for campus politics and student activities. As soon as he began making money he sent assistance to friends and family attending school or down on their luck. He had supported Rowe’s widow and children, and he had secretly paid the salary of a favorite Stanford librarian for several years. He kept his home open to friends and strangers alike, running Red House almost as an unofficial American consulate in London. He maintained an active presence in various trade associations, wrote articles on professional and educational themes not directly relevant to his commercial interests, and made two fine book-length contributions to the sum of industrial knowledge. He donated more than five hundred books on China, including rare Jesuit publications, to Stanford and made a major contribution to a fund-raising campaign for a students’ union building. Theodore would call his brother’s benefactions “far beyond liberal” and “unwisely lavish.”48
Stanford won the honor of Hoover’s first large-scale attempt at public service as a post-mining career. He still considered the university “the best place in the world,” and it meant something to him to remain a part of the Stanford community. He joined the Stanford board of trustees in the autumn of 1912 in circumstances as cloudy as the awarding of his geology degree seventeen years earlier. He escaped a residency requirement by claiming immediate plans to relocate to San Francisco, knowing full well he was at least a year away from leaving London.49
Once installed on the board of trustees, he led a campaign to reinvigorate a campus that had been slumping after its initial years of rapid progress. He thought it deficient “in a very great proportion of the departments.” He urged an upgrading of academic staff, too many professors being “of the humdrum order,” and to this end he introduced some of the highest salaries in the country (he had been surprised to learn that assistant professors could not afford domestic help). He arranged for his friend and mentor David Starr Jordan, the only president in the university’s first two decades, to be kicked up to chancellor and replaced with the geologist John C. Branner, another Hoover mentor. That Branner was two years from retirement some took as a signal that Hoover eventually wanted the presidency for himself, which was true.50
Accustomed to years of command, Hoover had no compunctions about ruffling feathers at Stanford, including those of his new president. He and Branner feuded publicly over the advisability of closing their expensive medical school, with Hoover prevailing by coaxing trustees to the “nay” side. Less successful was his attack on tenure, which he considered a protection racket for the weak and lazy and an outrage on the sanctity of higher education. Tenure survived.51
In the midst of these reform initiatives at Stanford, Hoover elbowed his way into another opportunity to serve. Leading citizens of San Francisco, anxious to revive a local economy still prostrate from the calamitous earthquake of 1906, were organizing a Panama-Pacific International Exposition for 1915. The official occasions for the affair were the celebration of the opening of the Panama Canal and the commemoration of the discovery of the Pacific Ocean by Balboa in 1515. The city fathers were anxious that King George V and other European potentates attend the exposition.
Hoover invented a role for himself as leader of the charge overseas. He lobbied Arthur Balfour, leader of the Conservative opposition in Parliament, and lent his car on weekends to Sir Edward Grey, the Liberal foreign secretary. He courted this “noodle-headed” peer and that “empty-headed” peer, and countless European worthies. Hard as he worked, he could not overcome the simple fact that Congress had voted in 1912 to give preferential rates for U.S. shipping through the Panama Canal, an act of favoritism the British took as unfriendly and an insurmountable obstacle to a royal visit. Europe’s other leading power, Germany, was also loath to celebrate the opening of a prejudicially priced tollway.52
By the summer of 1914, Hoover had gone down swinging on the exhibition bid. Eager to depart London, he had begun organizing the permanent relocation of his family and his business headquarters to San Francisco. He was shopping for a California newspaper and had hired an architect to build a posh house with an elevator in Presidio Heights when along came the worst calamity in the history of mankind and his plans once more scattered like clouds.
* Hoover appears to have had mixed feelings about his writing. He believed he deserved to be published, but his assessment of his literary talent can be gathered from a note attached to an article intended for the North American Review: “Enclosed some rot on China.” (Hoover to Mr. Allan, 1901, Correspondence, Lou Henry Hoover Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum.)