Herbert Hoover as a baby, 1875: “He looked about very cordial at every body.”Credit 1

Main and Downey, 1878: The local newspaper was one page, once a month.Credit 2

Jesse and Hulda Hoover, 1879: They courted at oyster suppers and buggy rides.Credit 3

A people habituated to hardship: the extended Hoover-Minthorn family, 1878. Those pictured include: 1: Herbert Hoover as a baby, in the arms of 2: his father, Jesse Hoover; 3: his mother, Hulda Hoover; 4: his brother, Theodore Hoover; 5: his sister, Mary Hoover.Credit 4

The three orphaned siblings: Theodore, Herbert, and Mary Hoover at Salem, circa 1888.Credit 5

Young Lou Henry with a rifle, as per usual, August 22, 1891.Credit 6

An unbroken record of academic mediocrity: Hoover (bottom left) and a surveying squad at Stanford University, 1893.Credit 7

Herbert Hoover at age twenty-two, passing himself off as thirty-five, 1897.Credit 8

Lou Henry, a nominal Episcopalian, and Herbert Hoover, a nominal Quaker, were wed by a Catholic priest in Monterey, 1899. Mrs. Henry (bottom step, right) and Jean and Mr. Henry (higher step), 1899.Credit 9

“I am the devil.” Herbert Hoover in the Australian goldfields, 1900.Credit 10

Mr. and Mrs. Hoover with Mr. and Mrs. Rickard, enjoying Piazza San Marco and their unusually cosmopolitan lifestyle, February 15, 1912.Credit 11

The Hoovers were so thoroughly anglicized that they were sometimes mistaken for British. Traveling with Allan (left) and Herbert Jr. (right), 1917.Credit 12

“The nearest approach to a dictator Europe has had since Napoleon.” Herbert Hoover, on the eve of the Paris Peace Conference.Credit 13

“The biggest figure injected into Washington life by the war.” Hoover (top left) with Woodrow Wilson and the U.S. World War Council, 1918.Credit 14

“Many,” said Walter Lippmann, “felt that they had never met a more interesting man.” Hoover works a crowd, date unknown.Credit 15

An independent woman and an unusual political wife: Lou Henry Hoover with two Girl Scouts, 1925.Credit 16

“When the United States of America is sick they call for Herbert Hoover.” With children rescued from the great Mississippi flood, Natchez, Mississippi, 1927.Credit 17

Hoover with friends at “the greatest men’s party in the world,” Bohemian Grove, 1927.Credit 18

Hoover was careful not to break Calvin Coolidge’s spell of supremacy. Aboard the presidential yacht Mayflower, 1928.Credit 19

“We are nearer today to the ideal of the abolition of poverty…than ever before.” Hoover campaigning on Republican prosperity, 1928.Credit 20

“He could hardly take his eyes off [granddaughter Peggy Ann] whenever she was about him.” The Hoovers in Palo Alto at the end of the election trail, 1928. Left to right: Herbert Hoover Jr.; Mrs. Herbert Hoover Jr.; Mrs. Herbert Hoover, holding Herbert III; Herbert Hoover, holding Peggy Ann; and Allan Hoover.Credit 21

“I ask the help of Almighty God in this service to my country to which you have called me.” President Herbert Hoover is given the oath of office by Chief Justice William Howard Taft in Washington, D.C., March 4, 1929.Credit 22

“In violent defiance of the law and the public authorities.” Veterans stage bonus demonstration as Congress struggles with the deficit, April 8, 1932.Credit 23

Hoover and his circle were convinced his odds of reelection would be best if Franklin Roosevelt were the Democratic nominee. At FDR’s inauguration, March 4, 1933.Credit 24

A Hooverville in Bakersfield, California, April 1936. Even through the Roosevelt era, every shantytown was known as a Hooverville.Credit 25

Hitler, said Hoover, was “an extraordinarily emotional character” whose mind “gets to mysticism at a jump.” The former president meets the Reich Chancellor in Berlin on March 8, 1938.Credit 26

“Yours has been a friendship which has reached deeper into my life than you know.” President Harry S. Truman and former president Hoover at the White House, February 7, 1951.

John F. Kennedy would have been Hoover’s sixth president, but Hoover declined the offer to serve. With then-senator JFK, January 1956.Credit 27