During his time at Commerce, Hoover would prove himself expert at the boarding house reach, gobbling up new assignments, responsibilities, and offices, often directly from the plates of his cabinet colleagues. He considered all things involving markets, transportation, the workplace, and statistics within his domain. He proposed to transfer at least sixteen agencies from other departments to his own, including Treasury’s Bureau of Customs Statistics and the War Department’s Panama Canal. Most of these grabs were repulsed, including a brassy lunge at the new Bureau of the Budget (later the Office of Management and Budget), which Harding rightly kept for himself. Hoover would eventually succeed in moving a small number of agencies to Commerce: the Bureau of Mines and the Patent Office, both from Interior. Others that he was unable to acquire and still felt he needed, he simply replicated.
His rapacity did not endear him to other members of the cabinet. Agriculture Secretary Henry C. Wallace railed against “that man” in Commerce. The farm sector accounted for roughly half of the U.S. economy and for decades after the war it would suffer from an excess of supply and weak demand. Hoover felt a personal stake in these problems, having stoked production during the war in response to looming shortages. He wanted Wallace to content himself with managing food production in the narrowest sense, allowing Commerce to oversee distribution, marketing, and anything else that did not occur directly on the soil. He opposed a Wallace scheme to introduce marketing cooperatives to manage farm surpluses as too bureaucratic and championed an array of policy alternatives, none of which got off the ground.1
Hoover tackled two other crippled industries, coal and railroads, with similar zeal. Overexpansion in both sectors had resulted in ruthless competition and nationwide labor strife. He proposed conferences, panels, studies, negotiations, pacts, and legislation. He generally acted as though the Interior, Labor, and Justice departments were not competent to carry their files.
Much to the annoyance of the State Department, Hoover fielded his own foreign service, a corps of commercial attachés who roamed the globe in aid of American business. The attachés were proficient in such fields as foreign law and international transportation. They acted as guides and consultants for manufacturers and producers seeking to expand their markets. They could do anything for an expanding merchant short of closing his sales.
Hoover loved his attachés, fitting as they did his favorite narrative of the trained expert as public-spirited superhero. He cooperated with a friendly series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post, later published as a book by Isaac Marcosson, that celebrated the derring-do and “real romance” of the Commerce attachés: they “have risked the glaciers of the Andes, and braved the fevers of Ecuador; they have been wrecked on the headwaters of the Amazon; they have encountered bandits beyond the Great Wall of China, all to the end that fresh fields be opened up for the products of American farm and factory.”2
Beneath this storybook rhetoric was a serious purpose. Hoover understood that the American way of life was dependent on foreign markets for rubber, tin, coffee, and other materials it could not produce itself. “The quantity of such products that we can import,” he said, “depends in turn upon the volume of goods we can export and exchange.” Foreign trade secured vital imports, opened export markets, and improved the quality of life of Americans. At a deeper level, Hoover was attempting to accomplish through trade what he had been unable to manage through the Versailles Treaty and League of Nations. He wanted America to engage with the world and help lead Europe back to prosperity. He continued to fret about economic and political instability on the Continent and the mounting isolationism of his countrymen. He preached the virtues of a global outlook: not only did the modern economic system depend upon trade, but open markets and international cooperation also provided “the incalculable social values of an enlarged national mind, opportunity and development of world unity and mutual interest, and thus peace.”3
That his reaching aggravated his cabinet mates never seemed to bother Hoover. Rather, he complained of the strain their protests caused him: “The main trouble is too much effort to conciliate my political colleagues by giving them ideas which they exploit and spoil instead of definitely taking the headship myself.”4
Harding welcomed Hoover’s active participation and constructive approach to the economic problems facing his administration and remained true to his promise of allowing his commerce secretary an expanded scope of duties, notwithstanding the awkward dynamics in the cabinet. At times the two men freelanced together, to notable effect.
The American steel industry’s refusal to abandon the twelve-hour workday had become a national embarrassment by the early 1920s. Hoover led the administration’s campaign to convince steel companies to adopt eight-hour shifts. He commissioned professional studies and held meetings with steel executives. His triumphant blow was a public letter challenging Elbert Gary, chairman of U.S. Steel, America’s first billion-dollar corporation, to show leadership by reducing hours and giving the American people “pride and confidence in the ability of our industries themselves to solve matters which are so conclusively advocated by the public.” The letter was written by Hoover and issued under Harding’s signature. Gary was sufficiently embarrassed to announce the change within weeks.5
As with the unemployment conference, Harding several times abandoned convention and imposed Hoover on the business of other departments. He brushed aside Interior Secretary Albert Bacon Fall to appoint Hoover chair of an interstate commission to decide the fate of the Colorado River. Harding felt that Hoover was the right man for the job, and indeed he was. He had been captivated by waterways since boyhood. There is no other way to explain the endless hours of leisure he had spent splashing about in creek beds, moving mud and rocks to create channels, pools, and waterfalls to no real purpose other than his happiness. He was fascinated by America’s great rivers—the St. Lawrence, the Tennessee, the Mississippi, the Columbia—and their potential for transportation and hydroelectric development. He developed an ambitious plan for nine thousand miles of navigable river corridors running to every point of the compass and drastically reducing the distance between America’s producers and consumers. He was devoted to his vision for a St. Lawrence seaway linking the Great Lakes to the Atlantic that would relieve the strain on west-to-east rail traffic at harvest time. The seaway meant “more to me than almost anything else in the world,” he would say, but it was decades ahead of its time and went nowhere in the twenties. He would have more luck in the Southwest.6
Almost 1,500 miles long, the Colorado River flows from the Rocky Mountains through the arid lands of Arizona, draining seven states before spilling into the Gulf of California. At the time, it ranked third in water volume among American rivers, and it had a nasty habit of flooding. The governments of the Colorado’s basin states could agree that it needed to be controlled for safety, hydroelectric power, and irrigation needs. There was tension, however, between the upstream states that wanted the power dam and the downstream states, led by California, seeking a steady flow of water for agriculture. State leaders managed to agree to a regional compact that would locate the dam and allocate water rights under federal supervision. Hoover was applied to the project in part because he was the only member of the cabinet, aside from Hughes in State, capable of delivering an agreement, and also because Interior’s Fall considered it a lost cause and Agriculture’s Wallace thought America already had more agricultural land than it needed.
Leading negotiations among the affected states, Hoover focused the discussion on a Bureau of Reclamation report that favored a dam in Nevada’s Boulder Canyon. He untangled a thicket of riparian rights stretching from Wyoming to Mexico and arranged for the protection of native land rights. It was taxing work. The governors of the seven states reminded him of the combatant governments at Versailles: the stakes were smaller, but the mistrust was similar. A solution emerged based on the principle of dividing the water fifty-fifty between upper basin states and lower basin states. In less than a year, Hoover collected seven signatures and was able to announce that the Colorado had been “freed from a generation of litigation, strikes and arrested development.”7
The Colorado River Compact was a critical step in the development of the Southwest, a region that would lead America in growth in the twentieth century. It was also a gratifying accomplishment for a man who had begun his career pushing carts beneath the arid surface of those same states.
His emphasis on development, combined with successes like the Colorado deal, allowed Hoover to claim ownership of the word progress in Washington throughout the Harding era. He became the administration’s point man for distinctly modern problems. When the millions of automobiles spit out from Detroit’s production lines at a rate of one every ten seconds produced a disturbing increase in highway carnage, Hoover stepped forward with a plan to coordinate national traffic safety standards. When a nascent airline industry suffered from a lack of public confidence in the safety of air travel—entirely warranted given the early attrition rate of airborne postal workers—Hoover asserted a broad federal authority to improve navigation systems and runways, inspect planes, and license pilots. His Aeronautics Branch would produce dependable commercial aviation by the end of the decade and evolve over time into the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). When an explosion of new radio stations including 790 commercial stations and almost seventeen thousand amateur broadcasters created anarchy in the airwaves, Hoover granted himself authority to issue licenses and assign frequencies. Federal control of commercial broadcasting was by no means a certainty at the dawn of the industry. His Federal Radio Commission (later the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC) made it so.8
Harding embraced Hoover as the necessary leavening agent in an otherwise cautious administration. He understood the limits of his own call for normalcy. A purely reactionary approach to governance would not sit well with business interests in his own party, and it would not play with boosters anywhere, and Harding knew boosters, having joined every service club in Marion. America still liked a builder. People wanted a vision of growth and prosperity and an exciting future, and Hoover brought that to the Harding team. The president was so indulgent of his commerce secretary that he sometimes supported his projects outside of government, even when they conflicted with the spirit of administration policy.
Taking Wilson’s lead, Harding had refused to recognize the Soviet Union, stating among his reasons that the Soviets had refused to assume the czar’s debts and responsibilities, and that they could not be counted on to protect American life or property. As a practical matter, nonrecognition meant a refusal to engage the Soviet Union on any matter. In the summer of 1921, however, reports reached America of crop failures and imminent famine in the Volga River region.
Hoover had some experience of Russia as a miner and an investor. He had sold his holdings in the country months before the 1917 revolution, narrowly escaping the nationalization of his assets. During the Versailles talks, he had written an influential memo in response to President Wilson’s request for advice on how to manage the new Bolshevik regime. He had advised Wilson to offer food in return for an end to Soviet aggression against other nations, a proposal accepted by the Council of Four.* His familiarity with Russia and its food situation allowed him to be quick off the mark when the famine reports reached Washington, along with requests for aid. Hoover recommended to Harding and Secretary of State Hughes that the United States send food to Russia under the auspices of the American Relief Administration, which Hoover still headed. Hughes was reluctant. He wanted to kill Bolshevism through strict quarantine. Pounding his fist and conjuring images of starving children, Hoover convinced Harding to ask for $10 million to purchase grains for Russia.9
ARA representatives negotiated terms of engagement with the Soviets on August 19, 1921, and within ten days an advance guard of relief men arrived in Moscow. By the end of year their number would swell to two hundred, overseeing eighteen thousand aid stations. The House Republicans did bring forward a bill authorizing a $10 million purchase of corn and seed grain. Although exactly what Harding had requested, Hoover thought it insufficient. He appeared before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and browbeat it into doubling the amount: “We feed milk to hogs and burn corn under our boilers while there are millions of children who will starve unless we help. The American people spend $1,000,000,000 a year for tobacco, cosmetics, and like un-essentials. Twenty millions would not be a great drain on a nation that can afford to do that.”10
Russian relief would prove less popular than the Belgian variety, with the left accusing Hoover of seeking to undermine communism with capitalist aid and of being primarily concerned with unloading surplus U.S. grains overseas, and the right charging him with rescuing and legitimating the shaky Soviet regime. Hoover gave the same answer to all critics: “Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed.”11
Maxim Gorky, in Italy nursing his tuberculosis, wrote Hoover personally: “In the past year you have saved from death three and one-half million children, five and one-half million adults. In the history of practical humanitarianism I know of no accomplishment which in…magnitude and generosity can be compared to the relief you have actually accomplished.”12
The scope of Hoover’s activities in Commerce was stupendous. Singlehandedly doing enough work for an entire cabinet, he was said to be “Secretary of Commerce and Undersecretary of everything else.” The range of his interests at any given moment could make him look scattered and undisciplined, a victim of his own administrative gluttony. Even friends wondered if he was trying to do too much. Was it really the place of government, the journalist Mark Sullivan asked, to tell people which variety of screw to use?13
Yet there was a certain coherence to Hoover’s activities. Long days of reading on steamships and trains, and many hours of reflection on the similarities and differences between the cultures and economies he had experienced, had left him with a comprehensive view of the kind of America he wanted to effect. His vision considered the discrete roles of the individual, the community, and government, the Constitution, and the unique problems and opportunities of modern American life. It was informed by a deep concern for the social and economic welfare of the average worker. It was a surprisingly elegant vision of America, and it can be observed close to the surface of every project Hoover undertook at Commerce, even his niggling obsession with standardization.
To Hoover’s understanding, standardization of screws and bricks was not about efficiency for its own sake. Standardization was a means to several ends: lowering the costs of manufactures, providing consumers with less expensive goods, allowing Americans to more easily satisfy their basic requirements, and, by doing so, opening doors to new worlds of progress and human expression.
His vision was explicit in Hoover’s attempts to standardize the American hearth. Home ownership had dropped slightly between 1900 and 1920, due in part to scarce construction during the war. As many as one-third of Americans lived in crowded and ill-equipped rental properties. Hoover worked with the American Institute of Architects to produce plans for standardized houses made of standardized building materials with the aim of reducing the cost of building by a third. He backed the Better Homes Movement as it embarked on a nationwide celebration of home ownership: its demonstration models of the new standard homes with modern plumbing and the latest electrical appliances were shown in more than a thousand towns and cities. Hoover also succeeded in promoting improved mortgage terms for consumers. He produced model zoning ordinances and municipal building codes to support best practices among developers and local administrators, literally shaping the houses and neighborhoods that generations of twentieth-century Americans would dream about and live in.14
Literature produced by the Commerce Department explained its higher purpose: standardized homes satisfied the basic needs of families efficiently and inexpensively, allowing them greater freedom to pursue happiness as they saw fit, in fulfillment of the promise of the founders. The owner of a standard home, stated one pamphlet, “works harder outside the home; he spends his leisure more profitably, and he and his family live a finer life and enjoy more of the comforts and cultivating influences of our modern civilization.”15
This was the vision behind every standardization initiative Hoover pushed: “The man who has a standard automobile, a standard telephone, a standard bathtub, a standard electric light, a standard radio, and one and one-half hours less average daily labor is more of a man and has a fuller life and more individuality than he has without them.”16
Consistent with this line of thinking was Hoover’s mission to standardize the American child, which was not as horrifying a project as it might sound. The aim was not to homogenize the young and erase their individuality but to provide for the basic needs of children so they could develop to their full capacities, a strategy Hoover believed would produce as rich a variety of healthy human types as might be found in the plant kingdom. Hoover knew that many children suffered physical, psychological, and educational deficiencies as a result of their environments. He had witnessed in Belgium and as head of the European Children’s Fund how hunger and destitution stunted the growth of young bodies. He was aghast at U.S. government reports that 80 percent of American draftees had carried some manner of mental or physical defect, which to him seemed a horrifying waste of human potential.17
The question of how he, as commerce secretary, could address issues of child welfare was delicate. Hoover wanted to advise parents and health officers on minimum standards of health and well-being for children, and to establish benchmarks for their normal or natural development, but he had no mandate for this sort of work. To the extent that any department of the Harding administration could claim an interest in child welfare it was Labor, home to the U.S. Children’s Bureau. Further complicating matters was Hoover’s belief that these issues were best managed locally. Parents, volunteer organizations, and community health authorities needed to retain frontline responsibility for children, taking guidance and encouragement from the national level. He maneuvered himself around these obstacles by assuming the presidency of the volunteer American Child Health Association (ACHA).
The ACHA was a loose association of sixty-odd private organizations scattered across the country. Hoover, in a by now familiar pattern, centralized it into a single national organization firmly under his thumb. He staffed it with “scientifically trained men and women,” many of them recruited from the American Relief Administration. He used his stature and fund-raising abilities to absorb or sideline rival groups in the child welfare space and soon came to dominate the field. He used his flair for publicity to create a sense of urgency around the state of America’s children and to shame officials into building local health clinics and hospitals, using variations on his oft-stated argument that a country that spent a “billion dollars on ice cream, cosmetics, and chewing gum” could afford to support this worthwhile cause.18
Although Hoover’s concern for the well-being of children was often dressed in data and analysis and presented as an efficiency issue, it went deeper than economics. There was a personal motive. Here, as in Belgium, Germany, and Russia, he was identifying in some visceral way with deprived children. He made impassioned pleas for attention to their emotional as well as their physical requirements: “the need for wise love and understanding, for protection against such psychic blights as fear, and the abuse of primitive emotions such as anger.”19
Child welfare went to the heart of Hoover’s vision of social progress and his hopes for a more compassionate America. Minimal standards of physical and emotional care for children allowed them a fair chance to realize their full capacities. “If,” he said, “we want this civilization to march forward toward higher economic standards, to moral and spiritual ideals, it will march only on the feet of healthy children.”20
Hoover’s conviction that civilization advanced through standardized living did not meet universal approval. It was attacked on economic grounds: some, like his friend Mark Sullivan, saw standardization as an unwarranted imposition on the normal operations of free markets. It was attacked on legal grounds: the antitrust division of Harding’s Justice Department saw Commerce’s promotion of industry-wide cooperation on standards and practices as anticompetitive and an invitation to collusion at the expense of consumers. Most searchingly, it was challenged on philosophical grounds: there was something incongruent, even faintly absurd, in these postwar years about the notion of civilization marching on to higher ideals and new summits of achievement by any means.
Intellectuals were keenly aware that Western civilization had just finished marching ten million souls to their death and that the destruction had occurred in spite of, indeed partially because of, the West’s technological prowess, economic might, and soaring ideals. The lost promise of Wilson’s peace and the continuing economic and political crises of Europe mocked every hope of a better world throughout the Harding years. Disillusionment and pessimism were the drugs of the moment. “The dead season,” said Keynes. “A botched civilization,” said Pound. “All Gods dead,” added Fitzgerald, “all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”21
These minds were profoundly distrustful of political and social institutions, the men who ran them, and the masses they served. The year 1922, the midpoint of Harding’s term, was the nadir of postwar pessimism, producing monumental expressions of lost hope and cultural ruin, the most magnificent, of course, being Eliot’s The Wasteland. A more prosaic effort was Harold E. Stearns’s Civilization in the United States, a collection of essays by leading American intellectuals—Lewis Mumford, H. L. Mencken, Van Wyck Brooks—all competing to offer the bleakest assessment of the times. Their collective conclusion was that America did not have a civilization worth the name. Its heritage and its traditions had “withered in our hands and turned to dust,” wrote Stearns in a deliberate echo of Eliot. He complained of the “emotional and aesthetic starvation” of postwar America, the mania for regulation and material organization, the spiritual impoverishment that was robbing the citizenry of “true art and true religion and true personality.”22
If Stearns’s book levels indirect criticisms at elements of Hoover’s managed and standardized society, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, also published in 1922, is an uproarious full-on assault. The hero of Lewis’s novel, George Babbitt, is a midwestern realtor in a “standard suit” who worships the god of progress. He lives in a standard house decorated to “the best standard designs,” and he keeps a standard book beside his standard electric bedside lamp: “These standard advertised wares—toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters—were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom.”23
This became the standard intellectual view of the modern middle-class American: a soulless consumer with poor taste and a lazy mind, reveling in the materialism of a rapidly improving economy, imbibing philosophy at Rotarian lunches and experiencing literature in Reader’s Digest (which also debuted in 1922). Rather than think for himself, the average American was content with doing whatever was “the thing to do,” turning his back on creativity, liberty, and the traditions of American individualism. As Mencken famously put it that same year, “The American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages.”24
Hoover, too, published a book in 1922. American Individualism is a short work, not quite a classic of political philosophy, yet one of the more thoughtful efforts ever to come from the pen of a practicing American politician. Rather than scorning the masses, he addresses them directly. His subtitle is “A Timely Message to the American People.”25
The author is determined from the first page to answer the prevailing mood of alienation and despair with optimism and commitment. Where others find no heritage on which to rebuild their lost civilization, he lays out the glory of the national character and makes a compelling case for why its best days are still ahead. American Individualism is an attempt to hold a moral center in a demoralized world, written by a man who had experienced as much of the Great War’s devastation as any other American author.
The greatness of America, Hoover argues, resides in its singular conception of individualism. It holds that human progress stems from the intelligence, character, and courage of individuals. Individual yearnings for self-expression, individual desires for achievement and creation, represent the constructive instincts of mankind. Because civilization is based upon the attainments of the individual, and because every person contains the divine spark of the human soul and thus the potential to make a worthy contribution to life, it follows that it is in the best interests of society to ensure equality of opportunity for all. Every citizen should have the liberty to give all that is in him to give. Every individual should be free “to take that position in the community to which his intelligence, character, ability, and ambition entitle him.”26
It is emphatically not a philosophy of every man for himself. “No doubt,” he wrote, “individualism run riot, with no tempering principle, would provide a long category of inequalities, of tyrannies, dominations, and injustices.” The tendency of big business, big government, or entrenched social classes to crush individual initiative must be curbed.27
Hoover offered two primary ways of protecting individualism. The first and most important was organizing for social mobility. Governments and communities must conduct themselves to provide a decent standard of living for all, not for a single class. “Education, food, clothing, housing, and the spreading use of what we so often term nonessentials, are the real fertilizers of the soil from which spring the finer flowers of life,” he wrote. The powers of the state needed to be extended and tuned to keep pace with the growing complexity of American life and to ensure that the many benefited and were not dominated by the few. Every practical problem of government, every new piece of legislation, needed to meet two tests: “Does this act safeguard an equality of opportunity? Does it maintain the initiative of our people?”28
The other means of protecting individualism was to “glorify service as part of our national character.” The American people, Hoover asserted, have always recognized that individualism needed to be tempered by a sense of community. They have looked beyond their own needs and venerated public service. Hoover wanted to cultivate that “enlarging sense of responsibility and understanding” that comes with service. He was encouraged by the proliferation in the early decades of the twentieth century of chambers of commerce, service clubs, trade associations, and labor unions. He recognized that these organizations contained variable mixes of altruism and self-interest. They nevertheless encouraged connections and reciprocity among individuals, the growth of community, and the accumulation of social capital. They offered individuals an opportunity for self-expression and participation in things larger than themselves, and they trained the leaders of tomorrow.29
In one of the most widely excerpted sections of American Individualism, Hoover noted that of the twelve-man executive, comprising the president, the vice president, and the cabinet, nine had earned their own way in life and eight had begun their careers with manual labor. All of them had lived to see a world in which the vast majority of Americans had far higher standards of living than their forefathers. That proved to his satisfaction that America still worked and that Americans could look forward to a better future. Hoover took umbrage at the notion that America’s best days were behind it, directly challenging the belief of the pessimists that the nation’s dynamism had died with the closing of the frontier at the end of the nineteenth century:
There will always be a frontier to conquer or to hold as long as men think, plan, and dare….There are continents of human welfare of which we have penetrated only the coastal plain. The great continent of science is as yet explored only on its borders, and it is only the pioneer who will penetrate the frontier in the quest for new worlds to conquer.30
The ideas in Hoover’s book are not original. His notion of brotherly individualism traces back to the Founding Fathers. Thomas Paine had posited that individuals were innately sociable and that given their liberty they would construct a world where cooperation and harmony were the norms. Great achievements would follow. Brotherly individualism had been the working ethos in generations of Quaker and Protestant communities in America, including West Branch, where it was practiced with aplomb by Jesse and Hulda Hoover. Hoover’s conception of equality of opportunity deliberately echoes and expands upon Lincoln’s call for every man to have “an open field and a fair chance.” His emphasis on community service is true to the principles of Benjamin Franklin, who celebrated volunteer firehouses and police forces as examples of individuals pulling together to provide for the practical public good, and to those of Thomas Jefferson, who said, “There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the boundaries which his nature and fortune have measured to him.”31
The idea of a limited but essential role for government also has deep roots in American thought. Paine held that individuals and local communities were capable of solving most of their own problems. God had granted them reason, innate decency, and the gift of practical decision making to do so. They would resort to government only as a sad necessity, when some powerful individual or group interfered with the natural flow of harmony and benevolence. At that point it was entirely legitimate for government to step in and secure for individuals their inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Hoover added equality of opportunity to those inalienable rights and maintained that the complexity of modern society, specifically in the economic realm, required government to occasionally step in with a regretful foot.
Although well received, American Individualism would never gain the intellectual currency enjoyed by more defeatist views of American life, which would hold sway even as the nation regained its social equilibrium relative to the immediate postwar years, and as the economy turned from broken to booming in the second half of Harding’s term.
On a drizzly July Fourth, to the accompaniment of a navy band playing “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” Herbert and Lou Hoover boarded the USS Henderson in the small Pacific Northwest port town of Tacoma for the second leg of Warren Harding’s great American tour of 1923, a thousand-mile cruise up the Inside Passage to Alaska. Harding had already been on the road for two weeks aboard the Superb, a private Pullman car that was part of a special ten-car train with a presidential portrait fastened above its cowcatcher. He had delivered an important address on foreign policy in St. Louis, operated a wheat binder in Kansas, fed a bear in Yellowstone Park, and joined a Native American powwow in Meacham, Oregon. He had bloviated bareheaded at so many sunbaked stops along the way that his face was burned and his voice strained.32
While Hoover was not aboard the train for the cross-country portion of the trip, his influence had been felt along the way. Harding delivered a speech in Denver on the need for the United States to accept its dominant position in the world and exert leadership in international affairs. It was straight from the Hoover songbook, objecting on moral and strategic grounds to the notion of America “as a hermit nation.” The alternative to engagement, said the president, was a selfish insularity. Americans were in danger of becoming a “sordid people,” reveling in their material existence at home while turning their collective back to their neighbors. The way forward was to commit “to something more of international helpfulness, so that [we] may be ready to play [our] part in the uplift of the world and in the movement to prevent in the future conflict among the nations.”33
Gratifying as it was for Hoover to have helped the president to a more internationalist position, it was to no avail. The whistle-stop tour had been designed in part to crack the determined mood of isolationism in the country, yet even Harding’s cautious suggestion that the United States consider membership in the Permanent Court of International Justice, or World Court, outside the control of the League of Nations, was unacceptable to Senate Republicans and, likely, to the majority of Americans.
The winding waters of the Inside Passage afford some of the most beautiful scenery on the planet, but Hoover saw little of it in the president’s company. As the Henderson glided through blue fjords, past misty rain forests and gigantic glaciers, the two men sat for hand after monotonous hand of bridge, playing as many as ten hours a day, a schedule Hoover found excruciating but that the president found tranquilizing. Hoover understood that Harding needed rest. Even before the tour, his energy was sapped to the point where he could no longer make it through eighteen holes of golf. He had difficulty sleeping, and his blood pressure, never low at the best of times, was elevated. High office had taken its toll, so Hoover endured the bridge.34
Harding’s term had not been without satisfaction. He had weathered the worst of the 1921 depression, restored business confidence, set Washington back on a sustainable fiscal track, and at least partially met his objective of restoring a sense of normalcy to the country. He had also maintained his hold on both houses of Congress in the 1922 midterm elections, and he was positioned for renomination in 1924. His troubles, however, had been mounting. The Republican Party, and primarily its Senate caucus, remained fractured and multifariously mutinous. The coal industry and the railways remained crippled, agriculture remained depressed, and labor strife seemed endless. On top of this, adding immeasurably to Harding’s burdens, were the misdeeds of some of his closest colleagues.
In February, he had demanded the resignation of his friend Charles Forbes, director of the Veterans Bureau, who had been selling government supplies to associates on the cheap and otherwise plundering his office. In March, Charles Cramer, Forbes’s accomplice and the general counsel of the Veterans Bureau, had shot himself in the head after the launch of a Senate investigation into their activities. In April, the Wall Street Journal had raised concerns about Interior Secretary Albert Fall’s favorable leases of naval oil reserves to friendly parties. Teapot Dome, an obscure Wyoming geological formation marking one of the oilfields, was on its way to infamy. May brought still more trouble, this time in the domain of Attorney General Harry Daugherty, Harding’s chief political adviser and poker pal. Harding had demanded that Daugherty distance himself from his aide-de-camp, a shady character named Jesse Smith who was suspected of influence peddling and pillaging government property. Smith committed suicide on May 30, two weeks before the president set off on his tour. “My God, this is a hell of a job! I have no trouble with my enemies. I can take care of my enemies all right,” Harding complained to William Allen White. “But my friends, my God-damn friends…they’re the ones that keep me walking the floor nights.”35
Hoover would later recall a quiet moment aboard the Henderson in the privacy of the president’s quarters when a worried Harding asked him what he would do if he were president and learned of a scandal on his watch. “Publish it,” Hoover replied, “and at least get the credit for integrity on your side.” Harding told Hoover that he had uncovered irregularities in the Justice Department involving the late Jesse Smith. Hoover probed, but the president would say no more.36
That Harding took Hoover into his confidence, even to that limited extent, is testament to the bond between them, as is the very fact that the Hoovers were invited on the Alaska voyage. None of the president’s poker circle had made the Henderson’s passenger list. It seems that Harding was belatedly sorting good friends from bad and leaning more on his strongest secretaries. The only member of the cabinet who matched Hoover’s stature in the president’s eyes was the Secretary of State. Harding had trusted Hughes to stay behind in Washington and “sit on the lid.”37
The purpose of the Alaskan swing was to sort out an administrative tangle: no fewer than five cabinet officers and at least two dozen bureaus were bickering over management of the land and its rich resources. Hoover saw a meaty role for Commerce in Alaska. He would also discharge a personal burden while there. Henry John Minthorn was dead. He had passed in the fall of 1922 at age seventy-six, having lived a full life until the very end. His financial reversals in 1893 had done nothing to undermine his phenomenal energy and curiosity. He had rebuilt his medical career in Iowa, returned to Oregon for new business opportunities, and ventured to Alaska to join a community of Quakers ministering to the native community. Widowed at a late age, he had taken a second wife, herself a Quaker missionary in the northern territory. At the age of seventy, suffering from the cancer that would eventually kill him, Minthorn had enrolled in an optometry course at the University of Kansas.38
The good doctor’s relationship with his nephew had never improved, and contact between them had been rare. In the spring of 1922, Minthorn had written a “Dear Bert” letter lobbying on behalf of Alaska fishermen who were having trouble getting their product to market. There was not a single personal note in the full-page letter. Hoover’s return was only slightly warmer: “Glad to know that you are still able to produce such well thought out documents….I hope you are well and happy.”39
It was only with his uncle on his deathbed that Hoover reconsidered his hard feelings. The bitterness he felt at having been a chore-laden outsider in his uncle’s home, the resentment he had nursed over the great taskmaster’s discipline, simply melted away. “Will you convey to Dr. Minthorn,” he wrote an intermediary, “my great solicitude for his recovery and ask him if there is any wish that I could fulfill for him.” The reply was brief: “Dr. Minthorn sends his thanks for your kind communication and his loving regards, with his blessing.”40
Hoover could not leave it at that. His uncle’s impending demise seems to have forced him to reflect upon their relationship. He was at last prepared to admit that Minthorn, for all his flaws, had exerted a tremendous influence upon him, had fostered his interests in business and community service, had taught him the appeal of a strenuous life, and the meaning of achievement. Hoover’s habits of intellectual curiosity, constant motion, and a communal table are all traceable to his uncle. Hoover’s mature life reflected more of the doctor than any other man. It was of little matter that Minthorn had raised him out of duty and necessity rather than out of tender love. He had raised him and made a man of him, and Hoover now rushed to acknowledge that fact.
A day after the above exchange of correspondence, informed that Dr. Minthorn was failing fast, Hoover took the unusual step of preparing a declaration to the press on a personal matter. The relations and affections between uncle and nephew, he said, were deeply founded: “He was, in fact, my second father.” When Minthorn finally died on October 11, Hoover admitted in another public statement that he owed his uncle “the greatest of affection and obligation.”41
He met his uncle’s widow in Metlakatla, his first stop in Alaska. She joined him for part of the three-week tour by ship and train around the state. Harding golfed, no more than one round a day, and made brief speeches. Hoover fished and attended public meetings. Everyone benefited from the bright, long days and from being far from Washington.
It was only when the Henderson turned back to the mainland that the president’s mood darkened noticeably. He appeared so weak during stops in Victoria and Seattle that his party told the press he had eaten tainted shellfish and rushed him down the coast to San Francisco by rail. Hoover wired ahead to his friend Ray Lyman Wilbur, president of Stanford University and a medical doctor, asking him to meet the train with a heart specialist.42
On July 29, Harding made it up the front staircase of the Palace Hotel without assistance and immediately retired to his room. He was seen by a succession of doctors over the next several days. He swung back and forth from lucid and cheerful to desperately ill. Hoover joined the small crowd wearing out the hotel’s carpets outside the president’s room. He was worried for Harding’s health. He was worried for the future of the administration. He was worried that the president might be incapable of delivering a foreign policy address on July 31 that was to be a powerful statement of support for U.S. membership in the World Court. Hoover, who had high hopes for the speech, and who had been informed by Wilbur that statistically Harding’s chances of surviving were not one in ten, made sure that the text was released to the press. We have only his word that the president authorized the release.43
On the afternoon of August 2, Hoover visited the anteroom of Harding’s bedchamber and found it empty. He stepped out to the hall and asked the Secret Service if there were physicians in with the president. There were. Hoover returned to the anteroom and stood outside the partly open door and listened as the doctors tried to revive Harding with stimulants. Fifteen minutes later, Wilbur emerged from the bedchamber and pronounced the president dead. Doctors on the scene believed he died of a cerebral hemorrhage. The death certificate would say apoplexy. Mrs. Harding refused an autopsy.
Hoover quickly released a statement that would stand as one of the best tributes to his fallen leader:
When he came into responsibility as President he faced unprecedented problems of domestic rehabilitation. It was a time when war-stirred emotions had created bitter prejudices and conflict in thought. Kindly and genial, but inflexible in his devotion to duty, he was strong in his determination to restore confidence and secure progress. All this he accomplished through patient conciliation and friendly good will for he felt deeply that hard driving might open unhealable breaches among our people. We have all benefited by the success of his efforts.44
He accompanied the president’s body back to Washington, and prepared himself for a new leader.
* Opinion at the time ranged from the liberal position that Lenin deserved a chance to Churchill’s call for military action against the Bolsheviks. Hoover denounced the Soviet regime for its wholesale slaughter of its own people yet opposed armed intervention on grounds that it would result in a long and bloody conflict with uncertain political outcomes. He believed the Soviet economy, having throttled individual initiative, would soon collapse under the weight of idleness and hunger, an optimistic prediction, as it turned out.