Despite winning election in November 1928, Hoover would not take office until his inauguration in March 1929, a torturous delay for an impatient man accustomed to a heavy schedule. There was no question of lounging around Washington through the interregnum. Coolidge did not want him there, and Hoover, irritated by political ritual, wanted no part of the legions of congressmen, party officers, job seekers, and advice givers clamoring for his attention. He resorted instead to his old device of living on the jump, commandeering a battleship for a ten-week, ten-country tour of Central and South America. It was a longer voyage than any president or president-elect had taken to that time, featuring twenty-five speeches from Honduras to Argentina. There were promises of renewed trade, promises to remove Coolidge’s marines from Nicaragua, and the enunciation of what he dubbed a “good neighbor” policy in the Americas. A hundred thousand people threw confetti as he rode through the streets of Rio de Janeiro with President Washington Luís. It was an unambiguous success.1
Back in Washington, Hoover gave two weeks to desk work, preparing cabinet appointments and cementing priorities with the Republican legislative leadership, before bolting south again, this time to Florida for fishing and bridge. He socialized with a deaf Thomas Edison, with Edison’s neighbor, Henry Ford, and, warmly and unexpectedly, with a vacationing Al Smith. The Hoover party was impressed at the heavy drinking and scant bathing costumes in a rebounding and garish Miami.2
Cabinet making was a wearisome task for Hoover, involving as it did myriad human and political considerations. He felt for the many friends and followers who would not make the cut. He understood, as one colleague said, that for every ten names on his list of prospects, nine would become enemies, and the tenth an ingrate. His instincts impelled a nonpolitical approach to appointments, with preference to men of merit and administrative ability, yet there were important constituencies that needed to be served.3
He kept Mellon in Treasury to appease Wall Street and old-guard Republicans. James J. “Puddler Jim” Davis, a man of the people and a former Pennsylvania steelworker, first appointed by Harding, remained in Labor. To smooth his relations on the Hill, Hoover appointed James Good of Iowa, a pragmatic politician and former chair of the House Appropriations Committee, as secretary of war. Another intermediary with Congress would be Walter F. Brown of Ohio, who filled the postmaster’s office with its generous patronage opportunities.4
More in his own image, Hoover selected as his secretary of agriculture Arthur M. Hyde, a successful lawyer who as the one-term governor of Missouri had reconfigured and rationalized his government while setting it on a progressive course. Robert P. Lamont of Illinois, succeeding the president in Commerce, was an engineer and steel executive. He had been chief of the ordnance division of the army during the Great War as well as a partner to Hoover in flood relief. Ray Lyman Wilbur, medical doctor, third president of Stanford University, and a former classmate of the president, was named secretary of the interior. Charles Francis Adams III of Massachusetts was an unexpected choice for secretary of the navy: a glittering figure, graduate of Harvard Law, America’s Cup champion yachtsman, successful businessman, descendant of two U.S. presidents, he had no experience of public office beyond two years as mayor of Quincy, Massachusetts. All four of these appointees were professional men, seldom exposed to politics. William Mitchell, the new attorney general, was picked from the same litter. A prosperous midwestern lawyer and railroad administrator who had also studied engineering for two years at Yale, he had served as Coolidge’s solicitor general. To the extent that he had a political profile, he was a Democrat.
Secretary of state was the most difficult office to fill. Charles Evans Hughes, Hoover’s first choice, maintained that four years in the position under Harding and Coolidge had been sufficient. Hugh Gibson, Hoover’s friend from the Belgium years and a career diplomat, also refused, probably because of financial considerations (a lofty social profile was expected of the secretary). Harlan Fiske Stone, another possibility, would have added spice to the cabinet—as Coolidge’s attorney general, he had prosecuted Mellon’s Aluminum Company of America for antitrust violations—but he did not want to leave the Supreme Court for State. Out of a sense of political obligation, Hoover offered the office to Senator Borah, who recognized it for the halfhearted gesture it was and declined. The president-elect turned finally to Henry Stimson, who was serving as governor of the Philippines after a career as a Wall Street lawyer and Taft’s secretary of war. He accepted.
It is a measure of Hoover’s suspicion of career politicians that only Good had served more than one term in elected office. The cabinet looked more like a business council than a political body, and an elite one, at that. The eight members, not including the president and vice president, had sixteen degrees among them. All had professional degrees. Four were Ivy Leaguers. Most had been born to privilege, sons of lawyers, politicians, or millionaires. Everyone in the cabinet beyond Davis was affluent, rich, or very rich. Industrial and Protestant America were overrepresented. There was not a Catholic, a Jew, a southerner, or a woman in the fold. Nor was there a journalist, a soldier, a small businessman, or an academic. Hyde and Hoover owned agricultural operations, and Stimson liked to ride, but none could be called a farmer. The average age was sixty, older than any of the previous three cabinets. Hoover was content to sacrifice regional and demographic balance on the altar of administrative competence. He wanted strong and compatible departmental managers to whom he could delegate authority, leaving him free to concentrate on major policy initiatives. He also wanted safe hands. It no doubt crossed his mind that the political animals had been the weakest links in Harding’s cabinet.
Prior to the election, in one of his speeches on equality of opportunity, Hoover had spoken of the value of self-made men, the type who began life close to the soil and who through talent and application assumed positions of leadership in business or government:
Our leadership rises, as if in capillary tubes, from the great underground river of unceasing human capacity and integrity, latent and recessive in some one generation of a family, let us say, but then out-breaking and triumphant in the next.5
He still believed in this archetype, described at length in American Individualism. To relinquish it would be to undermine his personal story and abandon his view of himself as an American ideal, but as a practical matter he was drifting from it. Privileged individuals filled his cabinet, and many of his senior non-cabinet appointments, as well. Probably more than any other president, Hoover favored scions of great American families. Charles Hughes Jr., son of the former presidential candidate, would be Hoover’s solicitor general. Robert Taft, son of the former president, had been his lawyer at the American Relief Administration and a member of the Firm. William R. Castle, whose father dominated the Territory of Hawaii, would become Hoover’s undersecretary of state. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. would be his choice as governor of Puerto Rico. Ogden J. Mills, heir to the fabulous, multigenerational Mills fortune, divorced from a Vanderbilt, would be his undersecretary of the Treasury, eventually replacing Mellon.
It was difficult to fault any individual appointment, and public reaction to Hoover’s cabinet was reasonably positive. The strategy, however, contained risk: he failed to appreciate how education, affluence, and several decades of viewing life from the boardroom had separated his ilk from the everyday concerns of the farm, the ward, and the average voter. He failed to appreciate how meritocracy, in practice, can slide into elitism.
While Hoover’s supposed lack of humanity is exaggerated, it is true that the American people could become an abstraction for him, as evidenced by his comment that American leaders routinely emerge from a great underground river. This Styxian metaphor relegated the citizenry, the people among whom he had been raised, to the benighted borders of Hades. He would have found this interpretation of his remark appalling and insisted on his sensitivity to the common man and his positive view of human nature, but by surrounding himself with like-minded administrators, he was setting himself up to be insulated from the voice of the people.6
Hoover returned from his fishing trip to Washington for two final weeks of preparations. Politics had not rested in his absence. Republican speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth had been trying to convince the lame-duck session of Congress to address agricultural relief so as to relieve Hoover of his commitment to an extra session in the spring. Combating Longworth at every step was Senator Borah, seemingly convinced that he and not Hoover had earned the great Republican electoral mandate of 1928, and with it the right to schedule an extra session. A spring session was inevitable, said Borah, “unless we propose to disregard the promises we made to the voters in the last campaign.”7
Hoover might have backed out of his commitment to Borah. A new president was allowed a window of time to get his feet under him in the White House before having to deal with legislative matters. It was also well understood that extra sessions of Congress were for extraordinary purposes, and none but farmers believed agriculture was in crisis. Coolidge had refused to call Congress back to deal with the Mississippi flood, and his popularity had survived. Hoover could nudge his commitment back to autumn, by which time other issues might supplant agriculture as a priority, providing an escape. But he made no attempt to delay, scheduling the extra session for mid-April. His reasons were a muddle of good intentions and political delusion: he thought the business of the extra session worthwhile, and he wanted to maintain the support of Borah and the farm states; he was invested in his identity as a man of integrity and reluctant to betray a campaign pledge in the plain light of day; he also convinced himself that Congress would act reasonably and affirm his request to limit the extra session to farm aid and the revision of agricultural tariff items, leaving manufacturing rates alone. The latter he believed despite the hordes of lobbyists and congressmen already beating down the doors of the House Ways and Means Committee in anticipation of an opportunity to raise protective duties on items of interest to their clients or constituents.
Presidential inaugurations had been held outdoors on March 4 on the Capitol’s East Portico since Andrew Jackson’s time. The weather usually cooperated. In fact, any expert, any scientist, or any committee or conference of experts or scientists, asked on the date of Hoover’s election to forecast the weather on the date of his inauguration, would have called for a fair and comfortable day, with sunshine or light clouds and a noontime high of about fifty degrees Fahrenheit. It was the rational expectation for early spring in Washington, but Hoover’s inauguration would be an exception.8
At dawn on March 4, 1929, the Pennsylvania Avenue parade route waited cold, wet, and empty under heavy banks of dark clouds. Rain dripped from fresh lumber on the vacant grandstands, and from every statue and monument in sight. Over on S Street, Secret Service officers stood sentry under the sheltered entrance to Number 2300 and kept a watchful eye on a huddle of newspapermen across the street. The reporters smoked cigarettes and spoke in low voices under their umbrellas, their damp feet slowly turning numb. They glanced regularly through the feeble light to the rain-streaked upstairs windows of 2300, looking for signs of life. They saw none, despite a record number of Hoovers under the steep-pitched roof. Lou, Allan, and Herbert Jr. were at home, along with daughter-in-law Margaret and both grandchildren. Two rare visitors, May Hoover Leavitt and her son, had arrived from Long Beach.
The only member of the household on his feet at that early hour, unbeknownst to the contingent outside, was the president-elect. Hoover had risen discreetly before his usual time and now found himself uncharacteristically alone with his ham and eggs at the big kitchen table. He sipped his coffee and flipped through newspapers filled with details of the ceremonies that would in several hours make him a working politician for the first time in his life.
Although Hoover left no record of what he was thinking as he sat alone at his breakfast table on that rainy morning, he had to be conscious of the monumental expectations he was carrying into the White House. No one would let him forget them, least of all the reporters outside on the sidewalk. By one tally of 900 newspaper endorsements, he had received 720. WORLD’S BIGGEST MAN CHOSEN TO FILL WORLD’S BIGGEST JOB, read one headline. The San Francisco Chronicle had already granted him a second term, predicting “he will drive so forcefully at the tasks now before the Nation that the end of his eight years as President will find us looking back on an era of prodigious achievement.” The great Anne O’Hare McCormick, the first woman to earn a Pulitzer Prize, wrote in the New York Times:
We were in a mood for magic…and the whole country was a vast, expectant gallery, its eyes focused on Washington. We had summoned a great engineer to solve our problems for us; now we sat back comfortably and confidently to watch the problems being solved. The modern technical mind was for the first time at the head of a government. Relieved and gratified, we turned over to that mind all the complications and difficulties no other had been able to settle. Almost with the air of giving genius its chance, we waited for the performance to begin.9
While Hoover had confidence and high expectations of himself, the prognostications were nonetheless daunting. “My friends,” he said in a private letter, “have made the American people think me a sort of superman, able to cope successfully with the most difficult and complicated problems. They expect the impossible from me and should there arise in the land conditions with which the political machinery is unable to cope, I will be the one to suffer.”10
He seemed in no hurry that morning, his usual impatience to get on with his day checked by his apprehension for what it held. The ceremonial aspects of his new position were largely repugnant to him; that much had been apparent throughout inaugural weekend. He had avoided the press and the locals and some 200,000 visitors who had filled Washington to bursting for the affair, and he had skipped all but the most essential receptions and events, including a reunion for veterans of his various relief operations. The previous morning, a Sunday, he and Lou had attended the Friends Meeting House at Thirteenth and Irving Street, where they would be regulars during his term. The plain little building, lucky to hold forty attendees on a typical Sunday, was packed with two hundred in anticipation of his appearance. Another five hundred waited outside to watch him come and go. They raised a ripple of applause when he stepped from his car. Rather than ignoring it, or subtly, or politely, or cheerfully acknowledging it, Hoover had squelched the ovation with a definite frown.11
By 8 a.m. the phone was ringing, the morning mail had arrived in two bursting bags, and the bevy of Hoovers had made its way downstairs, chattering excitedly about preparations for the day. Hoover disappeared to his study for a few more minutes of quiet. It would have suited him to spend the rest of his day there, executing his oath of office through the mails.12
At 10:30 a.m., Mr. and Mrs. Hoover, in formal morning attire, left 2300 for the White House. Twenty minutes later they were ushered into the Blue Room to await Calvin Coolidge, who had spent his last hours in the executive mansion wandering through his vacant offices and saying curt farewells to his staff and associates of six years. In no hurry to greet his successor, the president came downstairs at the last moment and after the briefest of receptions escorted Hoover through the North Portico into the gray midmorning. They stood elbow to elbow awaiting their car, each in a black overcoat, Hoover’s plain, the president’s with a regal fur collar. As they waited, Coolidge gave a friendly tip of his silk hat to the photographers and spectators across the street. Hoover watched and imitated him like a tourist adopting a foreign custom.13
A bugle corps sounded the president’s call as their open black limousine, the lead car in what would be a twenty-four-vehicle procession, swung out of the driveway behind a guard of United States cavalrymen. Hoover and Coolidge shared a blanket over their knees and continued to tip their hats to onlookers. At the Capitol they were swept into the Senate wing and on up to the president’s room, where Coolidge signed last-minute legislation. Hoover pretended to be calm and patient as the new vice president and the junior senators took their oaths inside the Senate chamber.
Shortly before 1 p.m., Coolidge and Hoover made their way to the East Portico’s open-air pavilion and found their seats in the front row, where they shook hands and nodded to the congressmen, justices, diplomats, and dignitaries seated behind them. On the plaza below, a mass of umbrellas, tight as paving stones, obscured a crowd of fifty thousand. To the right and left of the pavilion, reporters scribbled and cameras whirred. The inauguration was being captured for the first time on talking newsreels. Among the last people into position were Lou Hoover and Grace Coolidge, who had somehow gotten lost in the crowd. The rites were delayed a moment as they rushed down the steps to their seats, out of breath and giggling. Hoover, feeling each second’s delay as an eternity, stood snapping his fingers.
Finally, at 1:07 p.m., the president-elect turned in front of a battery of microphones to face the walrus-like figure of Chief Justice William Howard Taft. By some failure of design, they were the only two individuals on the platform not protected from the elements as Taft raised his right hand and in emphatic voice, with the rain blowing directly into his eyes, asked Herbert Hoover if he did solemnly swear to faithfully execute the office of the presidency. Hoover, motionless, hand on a new Bible, answered a forthright “I do.”14
With that, the thirty-first president of the United States, the first Quaker president, the first president born west of the Mississippi, and the first surveyor or engineer to sit as president since Washington, bent to kiss the Book. It was open to his favorite verse of Proverbs: “Where there is no vision the people perish, but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.” As Hoover straightened, Coolidge, with joy and the relief of newfound freedom on his face, leapt to offer congratulations.15
As the cheering subsided, Hoover drew from an inside breast pocket his speech and with bare head and grave face turned to the microphones. Without preliminaries, he fastened his eyes on the yellow pages in his hands and began reading into the rain. His only acknowledgment of his enormous audience was a curt “My Countrymen.”16
He had written his speech with great care over several weeks. It was solemn and businesslike. It held to the inaugural tradition of describing the problems facing the nation and proposing their solution, yet there were personal touches. At the outset he expressed his sense of the grandeur of the moment and the hallowed nature of his public service:
This occasion is not alone the administration of the most sacred oath which can be assumed by an American citizen. It is dedication and consecration under God to the highest office in service of our people. I assume this trust in the humility of knowledge that only through the guidance of Almighty Providence can I hope to discharge its ever-increasing burdens.17
Hoover’s read of the situation of the United States at home and abroad was brief and optimistic. He spoke of how the nation had emerged from the Great War, the conflict that had changed everything, with higher degrees of comfort, security, and individual freedom than any country had ever known. Surprisingly, in view of the profile he had built in Commerce, he touched lightly on economic issues. The bulk of his domestic comments were devoted to issues he had assiduously avoided throughout the campaign and, indeed, throughout his entire time in Washington: Prohibition and its enforcement.
Rather than take a clear side on the Eighteenth Amendment, Hoover reminded Americans that it was the law of the land. Those who dissented were welcome to attempt its repeal, but in the meantime, they were obliged to obey the law, just as his government was obliged to enforce it. With rain dripping from his forehead and chin, he acknowledged that dry enforcement was failing and that America had suffered a “dangerous expansion in the criminal elements who have found enlarged opportunities in dealing with illegal liquor.” He scattered blame among the citizenry, who created a market for bootleggers, and the states, for not doing their part in enforcement of the Volstead Act. He announced the transfer of federal oversight from Treasury to the Department of Justice, and, more significantly, he promised a review of the entire federal machinery of justice, from investigation to appeals. A bold and unexpected move, the judicial review served several purposes. It removed the liquor issue from the quasi-religious war of wet versus dry and subjected it to the sort of expert analysis Hoover preferred. It broadened the debate, implicating the entire justice system, while sparing Prohibitionists liability for a nationwide boom in organized crime. It also answered the real need for a judicial review, something bar associations and politicians had been advocating for years. Finally, and not least importantly, the review bought Hoover time to find a way out of the Prohibition debacle before the next election.18
Reaching the halfway mark of his address, eyes still glued to his wet yellow pages, Hoover read on with what one reporter described as “the methodical efficiency of a well-oiled machine, hardly stopping for bursts of cheering,” of which there were many during the Prohibition section. He next resurrected and dwelt upon another issue that had been largely absent from his campaign: the cause of world peace.19
From the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 to the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, peace had become almost as core to Republicanism as the protective tariff. It was a clever, sanctimonious, and somewhat disingenuous way for an isolationist party to express an interest in international affairs—lobbying for a blissful global quietude that would preserve the status quo, preclude foreign entanglements, and leave the world safe for Americans to trade from a position of unprecedented dominance.
While Hoover shared his party’s conviction that the American way was an indubitable blessing to the world, he was more sincere than most in his attachment to peace and internationalism. He bid to make the issues his own with an atypical resort to emotive language. “I covet,” he said, “for this administration a record of having further contributed to advance the cause of peace.” He raised the specter of millions of “vacant chairs” in homes of soldiers across America and Europe, and attributed his “passion for peace” to the fact that he had experienced “as much of the horror and suffering of war as any other American.” Categorically renouncing imperialism and calling for greater limits on armaments, he sang, in his plodding monotone, verses from Wilson’s hymnal:
Surely civilization is old enough, surely mankind is mature enough so that we ought in our own lifetime to find a way to permanent peace…
We wish to advance the reign of justice and reason toward the extinction of force.20
In deference to the isolationist mood of his party and the country, Hoover freighted his exhortations with qualifiers. He ruled out membership in the League of Nations. He called the Permanent Court of International Justice a uniquely American inspiration and the most potent instrument for peaceful settlement of disputes among nations, yet begged the world not to take offense at the U.S. Senate’s many reservations about participating in it.
At 1:40 p.m., his hands red with cold and his overcoat soaked through, Hoover ended his address as he had begun, praying for the public servant and insisting that forces beyond his control had brought him to this juncture: “I ask the help of Almighty God in this service to my country to which you have called me.”21
The crowd roared from under its umbrellas, the Marine Band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the Coolidges headed for Union Station and a 2:30 train to Northampton, and the Hoovers piled into yet another open car for the procession down Pennsylvania Avenue, now so black and slick with rain that a quarter million onlookers could see the parade both above the pavement and mirrored in it. Entering the portals of the White House for the first time as president, Hoover was greeted by friends and family shouting “Chief! Chief!” He answered with a boyish, bashful grin.22
For the rest of the afternoon, he watched his splashy parade from the shelter of the White House reviewing stand with his grandchildren at his feet. He evinced no enthusiasm for the pageant. He ignored the five hundred people, including diplomats, government officials, and visiting delegations, who had been invited to lunch, choosing to eat alone with Lou.
The Washington Post wrote the next morning that “Herbert Hoover’s long, world-wide search for the most in life culminated yesterday in the White House.” He appeared at his new offices, comfortable and bullish, at 8:55 a.m., before his staff had arrived. Determined to be the hardest-working chief executive ever to serve the American people, he plunged directly into a full day of meetings, beginning with his first press conference.23
Much as Hoover liked his good press, he did not like reporters, who made him feel “like a microbe on a needle under a microscope.” Determined, nevertheless, to extend the good rapport he had known with them while serving as secretary of commerce and get off on the right foot, he met with correspondents on the White House beat prior even to sitting down with his cabinet, a gesture designed to flatter them. He solicited from the leaders of the press gallery suggestions as to how his office might serve them better:
I generally wish to see us develop a relationship between the press and the President that will be helpful and feasible in the proper conduct of affairs and at the same time of maximum assistance to you. I have no revolutions to propose, but I think, out of experience, we can accomplish something from time to time and probably in the course of 50 years develop it to perfection.24
Two days later Hoover declared the special session of Congress for April 15, and in the weeks that followed made a series of announcements that clearly distanced his administration from those of his predecessors.
He swept the stage clear of Coolidge’s props, most notably the Mayflower. There was a touch of spite in his public release of a report that the presidential yacht and its complement of 157 officers and enlisted men had cost $300,000 a year to maintain. He also closed the White House stables, a predictable move considering his contempt for horseflesh, and he began filling the executive mansion with modern accoutrements. Whereas Harding and Coolidge had taken calls in a booth down the hall, Hoover installed a telephone on his desk. He expanded the presidential garage to accommodate a fleet of more than twenty vehicles, including Cadillacs, Lincolns, Fords, and Pierce Arrows, most of them provided to the White House free of charge by manufacturers.25
He threw more dirt on the graves of Harding and Teapot Dome by calling an immediate halt to the issuance of oil drilling permits on federal properties: “There will be no leases or disposal of Government oil lands….There will be complete conservation of government oil in this administration.” This act did more than bury the past: it established conservation as a priority for the administration and signaled Hoover’s intention to be a responsible steward of America’s natural bounty. It was an agreeable role for a trained geologist who understood commodity markets and loved the outdoors. He had been appalled to see some thirty-four thousand permits for drilling on public lands issued during the twenties. With the economy increasingly dependent on fossil fuels, he worried for the security of U.S. supplies. He lectured oil companies on how higher levels of extraction were resulting in weaker margins, and he negotiated a deal with them to cap production in 1929 at the previous year’s level.*, 26
As the financial community had feared, Hoover was also quick to turn his attention to Wall Street, where wild optimism and rampant speculation showed no signs of abating. Untethered from actual commercial performance, shares had yielded a preposterous 44 percent in 1928 and were promising to top that in 1929. Despite a Fed rate holding at 5 percent, money continued to pour into the market, much of it financed by increasing volumes of brokers’ loans. Hoover launched an unprecedented presidential campaign against stock speculation. Agreeing with the Federal Reserve Board that further increases in its discount rate would put undue burden on farmers and legitimate business borrowers, he worked with the board to put direct pressure on New York City banks. They were told to choose between lending to brokers and retaining access to the Fed’s discount window. Hoover also sent his friend Henry Robinson, head of Security First National Bank in Los Angeles, to lecture Wall Street on the dangers of speculation, and he called Richard Whitney, president of the New York Stock Exchange, on the White House carpet and sent him away with presidential warnings about brokers’ loans ringing in his ears. Editors and publishers of major newspapers were lobbied to lecture their readers on market risks. Hoover wrote a statement that was released under Treasury Secretary Mellon’s name recommending that investors turn from overpriced stocks to undervalued bonds.
There was no question of the sincerity of Hoover’s market worries. Edgar Rickard was staying at the White House one busy Sunday in April that saw the Hoovers attend a Quaker meeting in the morning, a lunch with Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, and a large dinner with various bankers and senators. At a break in the action, the president instructed his friend to sell their shares in Pitney Bowes and to settle their bank loans in anticipation of “possible hard times coming.” This was several weeks after Rickard had followed Hoover’s order to pull his money from the loan market, and several weeks before he said that he wanted his funds in cash and low-risk bonds. The pair would repeatedly discuss the liquidation of their investment fund in the months ahead, a move that had been under almost constant consideration throughout five years of disappointing returns.27
The president’s interest in markets was one of several signals to Wall Street that its relationship with Washington was changing. Another was a March 14 executive order directing the commissioner of internal revenue to expose any refund or abatement of income taxes or estate taxes in excess of $20,000. This was a measure Andrew Mellon and the financial community had mightily resisted throughout the Coolidge years, pleading the right of wealth to privacy. Hoover compounded his Treasury secretary’s embarrassment by again using him as a puppet, demanding that he formally request the executive order of the president by public letter, stating as his reason for recommending the new policy the public’s need to know that “there is nothing which the Treasury desires to hide.” It was obvious to the press that the measure had been imposed on Mellon, notwithstanding Hoover’s insistence that the secretary had made the proposal himself.28
If there was any lingering doubts that the permissive Coolidge-Mellon approach to the moneyed classes was finished, Hoover declared: “Excessive fortunes are a menace to true liberty by the accumulation and inheritance of economic power.”29
Wall Street was not Hoover’s only target in these early days. The American people, too, came in for a scolding. They seemed to have adopted the “extraordinary notion,” Hoover told the Associated Press, that obedience to the law is a matter of choice rather than a necessary precondition for self-government. In addition to illegal liquor traffic, and in part to underline his point that the problem of lawlessness in the United States was broader than Prohibition, he cited an array of rising felony rates, including nine thousand killings in America each year. This was twenty times the rate in Great Britain, with only a small percentage of the perpetrators brought to justice. “In many of our great cities,” he lamented, “murder can apparently be committed with impunity.” In May, Hoover appointed George Wickersham, Taft’s attorney general, to chair an eleven-member National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement charged with conducting the first comprehensive national study of crime and policing in U.S. history.30
Another set of early Hoover initiatives aimed to address problems held over from his Commerce years. He undertook to reorganize and rationalize federal government departments, a muddle never addressed under Harding or Coolidge. He laid plans for the rebuilding of the Republican Party in the South to eliminate the noxious practice of trading postal and judicial appointments for political support. He proclaimed May 1 as National Child Health Day, inviting the people of the United States “to make every reasonable effort to bring about a nation-wide understanding of the fundamental significance of healthy childhood, and of the importance of the conservation of the health and physical vigor of our boys and girls throughout every day of the year.” This was followed by the announcement of a massive conference of experts on child welfare.31
Most ambitiously, Hoover applied the scientific, data-driven approach that had guided his work on the American economy to the whole of American society by drafting the country’s preeminent social scientists, including William Ogburn of Chicago, Howard Odum of North Carolina, and Alice Hamilton of Harvard Medical School, to investigate the actual living conditions of people in every corner of the land. His hope was that the review would provide the basis for “the formulation of large national policies looking to the next phase in the nation’s development.”32
Hoover was using neither Coolidge nor Harding as a model in establishing his administration, notwithstanding his dependence on their legacy of Republican prosperity. He took more guidance from another party icon, a man he seldom mentioned, had hardly known, and whose day had come and gone while Hoover was overseas. It had been Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 campaign that had first quickened Hoover’s political pulse, and now almost every domestic note the new president hit was an echo of the late Rough Rider’s progressivism: the bias for vigorous action, the courting of the media, the insistence on honesty and merit in public service, conservationism, protection of the less fortunate, insistence on law enforcement, reliance on experts, campaigns against waste and inefficiency, and, finally, fist shaking at what Roosevelt had called “the malefactors of great wealth.”33
Hoover’s debt to Roosevelt was noticed occasionally and approvingly in the press. That it did not receive more attention was due in part to dissimilar personal styles. It was difficult to see reflections of the beloved Teddy in a successor so averse to playing the hero and shooting the bear. Hoover was determined to professionalize the presidency, by which he meant adopting a businesslike style of leadership, low key and collaborative as opposed to charismatic and combative.34
Professionalization was what Hoover meant when he advised the press corps not to expect any headline-making bombast of him. He stuck primarily to facts and figures in his public statements and press conferences, and less than a month into his administration was arriving empty handed at his regular press briefings: no news, no confidences, no affability, just another “famine morning,” he would grunt to the disappointed gallery.35
His notion of professionalism permitted Hoover to evade those chores of leadership requiring him to expend energy on human interaction. He cut the daily ritual of shaking hands with visitors to the White House to two days a week. While Roosevelt had found these sessions invigorating, Hoover, unable to drop his guard and act freely and naturally around strangers, afraid of contracting colds or fevers, considered them a drain on his time and vitality. Professionalism applied as well to relations with Congress. “It is much less heroic,” Hoover acknowledged, “for the President to cooperate than to carry the banner of the people against the bastions of Congress,” but more could be accomplished by showing legislators respect and meeting them on common ground.36
Undergirding his commitment to a professional style of leadership were, of course, Hoover’s familiar anxieties and apprehensions. Professionalism was an alibi for his diffidence and insecurities, his fears of error and ridicule, and his discomfort with human emotion. He seems to have been so firmly convinced of the rightness of his approach, or perhaps so repulsed by the alternatives, as to never have second-guessed his motives.
None of this was as idiosyncratic as it might seem. Leaders almost always define their job in terms of their own capacities and inclinations. Confronted with any new problem, Roosevelt’s first impulse was to cry “bear” and fire away. Hoover preferred to gather facts and manage a problem into submission, free from the demands of public performance, with time and space to concentrate on what he perceived as the substantive aspects of his role.
Once visiting hours were reduced and all traces of Coolidge removed, Hoover settled easily into life at the White House. The physical setting suited him. He was accustomed to large residences crowded with family, staff, and guests. “We are beginning to feel perfectly at home,” Lou wrote Allan in May. “Daddy has moved all the upstairs furniture once, and most of it twice.” She had shipped in a small pile of heirlooms and photographs from Palo Alto, where their home, in typical Hoover fashion, had been abandoned in haste, with check stubs and personal papers strewn around studies and bedrooms, and no plans made for its occupancy.37
Hoover took as his study a room on the second floor of the executive mansion that had been used by Coolidge to the same purpose. He positioned his desk to allow a side view of the White House grounds and the Washington Monument. He kept his office hours in the Oval Office in the West Wing. That his office hours routinely numbered twelve, fourteen, even sixteen a day fascinated a Washington accustomed to Wilson’s banker’s hours, Harding’s tee times, and Coolidge’s somnolence. Hoover would emerge from the rounded course of Georgian pillars at the rear of the White House at about half past eight each morning and stride to his office. His first hour was devoted to correspondence and newspapers, after which he cleared his desk and launched into a series of eight-minute appointments that ended on schedule with him pressing a button to summon a secretary. His staff, under these time constraints, learned to bring him solutions to approve rather than problems to solve.
Tuesdays and Fridays the morning routine was broken for ninety-minute cabinet sessions. He would walk back to the residence for lunch and be “back to the mines,” as he said, in as little as fifteen minutes. The afternoon passed in longer conferences on issues at the top of his agenda. Around 6:30, his face gray, his shoulders sagging, his tie askew, his jacket sprinkled with cigar ash, he would clear his desk for a second time and walk back from his office, often with Lou at his side, her arm linked in his, past the saluting guards and through the rear doors of the old mansion. He would often retire to his bedroom, disrobe, and lie down for fifteen minutes, all the refreshment he required, before working on a speech or reading documents and dressing hurriedly for dinner, which began promptly at eight.38
It was his dedication to his desk that led a journalist to call Hoover America’s first “presidential industrialist.” He and his friends thought this a helpful positioning. Wrote Vernon Kellogg, in words Hoover would himself echo:
The difference between Mr. Hoover and most other Presidents is that he expends practically all of his time in his overalls down in the roundhouse, working desperately to repair the engines of civilization; a less conscientious man in his position would put on a high hat and take his post in front of the railroad station where he could be pleasant to the customers and assure them that he would like to give them all a free pass on the train.39
Dinners at the White House were crowded and stimulating, the table packed with friends, colleagues, and visitors, sitting without precedence. “[Hoover] not only sees but converses with more people than any one in Washington,” said Anne O’Hare McCormick. “With the possible exception of Roosevelt, he is the most gregarious President we have ever had.” Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Washington’s leading social arbiter, also approved of the Hoovers’ entertaining, although like McCormick she overestimated the degree to which Hoover was interested in his guests: he was more a presence than a participant in many of his functions. Lou kept things moving at the table, communicating with servants by such simple tricks as turning her eyeglasses in her hand. After the last course, the men would retire to the Lincoln Study on the second floor for cigars and conversation. It was generally for others to talk, impart information, and tell stories, and the president to listen. After an hour, Hoover would suggest they rejoin the ladies in the Blue Room on the main floor. After another fifteen minutes, good-nights were said and Hoover would return upstairs to read mysteries or history for an hour or so before falling asleep around midnight. It was common for him to wake in the night and read or work for another hour before dozing off again. He would arise in the morning at six, without exception.40
The interval between waking at six and walking to the office at half past eight each morning was as jam-packed as every other part of the presidential day, albeit with activity of another sort. A new influence had come into Hoover’s life when he moved into the executive mansion.
Joel Boone, the White House physician, was a natty naval surgeon who had been assigned to the Mayflower during the Harding and Coolidge years. He met Hoover for their first official appointment in the president’s dressing room several days after the inauguration. The doctor examined a plump man slightly less than six feet tall and slightly more than 190 pounds. He had a forty-three-inch chest, short legs, small feet, powerful hands, a weak pulse, poor teeth, and enough wax impacted in his ears to affect his hearing. He also had difficulty breathing after two minutes of moderate exertion. He admitted to doing little exercise beyond calisthenics on ships or trains and occasional visits to a masseur. He excused his personal neglect on the grounds of busyness, and he was palpably reluctant to change his habits.41
Dr. Boone was not the sort of man to be daunted by a show of presidential recalcitrance. He had been awarded the Medal of Honor, America’s highest military decoration, for repeatedly exposing himself to heavy barrages of shellfire and poison gas while tending to wounded Marines on the battlefields of France. He had been at bedside for the final breaths of President Harding in San Francisco and Calvin Coolidge Jr. in the White House. He wanted no more losses on his watch.
Boone also believed there was a danger that Hoover would push himself too hard in office, and while he found the president’s “powers of concentration…amazing,” and his capacity for work “astounding” and “beyond his associates’ comprehensions,” he thought the workload would crush him without changes to his lifestyle. He fixed his large brown eyes on Hoover and told him that he was going on a diet to bring his weight under 180 pounds and that he would be taking regular exercise, preferably outdoors. Hoover listened carefully, asked a few questions, and, satisfied with the answers, nodded assent.42
The question remained, what type of exercise? Hoover, no athlete, had a single suggestion: he mentioned to the doctor that occasionally on shipboard he had tossed a medicine ball with friends and sailors—a good and strenuous exercise, he thought. Within the week, Boone had arranged for a collection of the president’s friends and associates to gather every day at 7 a.m. on the White House’s south lawn for a game of their own invention. It called for two to four players a side. It used the rules of tennis with a six-pound medicine ball heaved back and forth over an eight-foot volleyball net. Victory went to the team with the most points when a factory whistle down by the Potomac blew at seven thirty. Eventually they would call the game Hooverball.43
They played six days a week, in the heat, rain, and snow, missing a day only if the president was out of town. Hoover arrived for action in casual clothes: old trousers, a flannel shirt, crepe-soled high-top shoes, and a leather bomber jacket if it was cool. The most regular attendees were Boone, the journalist Mark Sullivan, White House aide Lawrence Richey, Interior Secretary Wilbur, Attorney General Mitchell, and Supreme Court justice Harlan Fiske Stone. The Hoover kennel, which at different points included an Irish wolfhound, an Irish setter, an English setter, a Norwegian husky, a German shepherd, an elkhound pup, and a Scotch terrier, roamed the sidelines.
The game was by all accounts a vigorous workout. Stone, a former stand-out guard for the Amherst University football squad, threw the ball with enough heat to knock opponents backward. Hoover also threw with force, although he tended to get spun around on his catches, which Boone attributed to his small feet. He was roughed up from time to time, as they all were, by balls to the face or other points of vulnerability. Still, he would get upset if he suspected his opponents were taking it easy on him.
With this exercise and a diet heavy on nuts and fruits, Hoover did not take long to make Boone’s prescribed weight. His strength and fitness improved noticeably. The doctor, having demonstrated his worth, was presented with additional presidential infirmities. There was an extensive dermatological situation, wrote Boone, in a part of the anatomy not usually exposed to other observers, that Hoover out of modesty had been hesitant to mention. The condition was treated with the help of a specialist. Another problem was found under the president’s jaw. He thought it was a gland, but Boone, suspecting a dental issue, ordered X-rays that turned up an infected molar. While examining the president’s mouth, Boone made further inventory of bleeding gums, cavities, and leukoplakia (thick white and gray blotches) of the palate, tongue, and cheek, which he attributed to Hoover’s heavy cigar smoking. He arranged extensive dental work that would stretch over his patient’s first year in office. The leukoplakia seemed to recede once the molar was removed.44
Soon adopted as one of the family, Boone routinely joined the Hoover family for breakfast after medicine ball, as did Justice Stone, Secretary Wilbur, and Mark Sullivan, with whom the president was especially close. Florid, funny, and exceedingly well informed, Sullivan was great company, and Hoover, said Boone, particularly enjoyed having him around. The mode of conversation at table was light and unstructured. Topics ranged from sports to politics to whatever the president happened to be reading at the time. Hoover’s dogs climbed over him. His attention would flag only if granddaughter Peggy Ann happened to be present. He could “hardly take his eyes off her whenever she was about him,” said Boone.45
The doctor approved of the First Lady’s habit of filling her table with guests morning and night, and of the informality of the gatherings. Among friends and associates, the president was talkative, even voluble by his standards. With strangers he tended to lapse into grunts and silences. Boone became a great admirer of Lou, a person of “unusual alertness,” he said, with beautiful eyes and a striking appearance.46
Boone’s intimacy with Hoover allowed him to continue a study of presidential moods and idiosyncrasies begun during the previous administration. He had watched with empathy and concern Coolidge’s deterioration, his black rages, his stomach ailments exacerbated by eating binges that afterward required enemas or purgatives. He was mesmerized by Coolidge’s evening practice of dressing for dinner, mounting a mechanical horse that had been presented him as a gift, and arriving at dinner covered in sweat. Hoover’s quirks were milder. He ate like a starving man, bolting his food with hardly a chew. He always finished before anyone else (sometimes before others had been served), and as soon as he had finished he popped a cigar into his mouth.47
Hoover was not fussy, as his scant attention to food, grooming, attire, and his surroundings would attest, but he was extremely fastidious about his tools, from his first-rate fishing tackle and top-of-the-line automobiles to his cigars. He loved his cigars, and only his cigars. If another were offered him, no matter the brand, he would accept it, prepare it for lighting, and surreptitiously reach into his pocket and exchange it for one of his own.
He would chew through as many as ten cigars a day. He appealed to the Department of Commerce’s commercial attaché in Cuba for help in finding brands to his taste. “I am having difficulty finding a good Cuban cigar that is mild enough not to corrupt my soul,” he wrote, requesting three or four hundred different samples. The White House also corresponded with the Ritz-Carlton in Havana, which eventually provided from its humidor a quantity of La Corona Del Ritz “especially manufactured and selected to his liking.” Hoover ordered five hundred at a cost of $290 (the price of a Ford Runabout). They did not meet expectations. A dealer in New York introduced Hoover to Ramon Allones Havana Cigars, Grovnicos de Luxe, No. 2-25, English Market Selection, which were delightful until the annual variation in the taste of cigars due to harvest quality frustrated the president and the hunt was resumed. Fortunately for the productivity of the administration, Hoover’s taste in pipe tobacco was easily satisfied by a single variety available at the University Club in New York.48
That his long-standing pursuit of a better smoke blossomed into an obsession in the White House is undoubtedly a measure of the stress the president was under. He was fortunate to have Boone at hand to whip him into shape and attend to matters of health that he would otherwise have ignored. The long ordeal of his presidency was about to begin in earnest.
* On the heels of the drilling permit freeze, Hoover introduced restrictions on hunting of migratory game birds. He would also move to control reckless timber harvesting and expand the National Park System, among other measures. He saw a clear link between conservation and his obsessions about efficiency and waste reduction.