II. THE RISE OF HERBERT HOOVER

Herbert Hoover was a force of nature. Raised in dour Quaker poverty, he was orphaned as a child and serially farmed out among a grim collection of distant relatives, from a sodhouse-dwelling plains farmer to a skinflint, sharpster uncle in Oregon. Very early, he learned to work prodigiously, to improve himself constantly, to trust his own apparently limitless abilities, and to push through any obstacle that got in his way. By sheer grit, plus the luck that often accompanies talent, he was accepted into the first class at the new Stanford University, and discovered geology. In 1896, at twenty-two, having grown a mustache and added thirteen years to his age, he won a commission to scout mines in the Australian outback—one-hundred-plus-degree weather, scorpions and other venomous varmints, and some of the world’s toughest and most desperate men. He found a promising mine, engineered its purchase by his home office, and brought it to production, returning sixty-five times the investment.¹¹

Hoover repeated that performance again and again. He had some flops, of course, but they were far outweighed by his triumphs, and he gained wide recognition as a genius mining engineer. From then until the outbreak of World War I, his life was spent in the world’s most inhospitable places, on almost every continent, most of them as the head of his own international mining consultancy, nosing out new mines, or bringing failed mines into production. Since he usually took shares in the properties he rescued, he quickly became very wealthy. His wife, Lou Henry, whom he had met at Stanford and married after his first success in Australia, sometimes traveled with him, and their first son, Herbert Jr., had circumnavigated the world twice by the time he was two. As a practical matter, however, Hoover’s two sons rarely saw their father when they were young, and were often without the presence of either of their parents. Both sons became successful engineers and investors. Herbert Jr. was undersecretary of state in the second Eisenhower administration, and often served as acting secretary during the illnesses of John Foster Dulles.

Hoover began to think of retiring while he was still a young man. He had distilled his professional lore into a college textbook, Principles of Mining, something of a minor classic, and had enough money to live in luxury for the rest of his life. He was not a religious Quaker, but had internalized the Quaker imperative of service, and felt that he could contribute to improving the lot of humanity. As it happened, Hoover was in London on the fateful day that Germany invaded Belgium in 1914. More than a hundred thousand American nationals found themselves caught in war zones, and began streaming across the channel into London. These were not poor people, but their assets were blocked on the continent, so they could not buy passage back to the United States. Hoover bulldozed his way into control of a fledgling committee to raise loans from local expatriates to finance their countrymen’s passages home—along the way falsely claiming authorization of the American ambassador. In his mining career, Hoover had proved himself an extraordinary manager, and he displayed all of his talents in his humanitarian work—recruiting willing volunteers, furnishing them with precise instructions, then hard-driving both himself and his crews. Within about two months, the London strandees had almost all been repatriated, at the cost of $400,000, almost two-thirds of which came from private donors, and almost all of which was repaid.

Hoover was wrapping up his London affairs and about to embark for home himself when he got a call from the American ambassador: would he take on a mission to save up to a million Belgians from starvation? The Germans had displaced a large share of the Belgian population, and the British were enforcing an embargo on imports into the continent. The Americans hoped to mount a private effort to save the Belgians, with strong but unofficial American backing. Hoover was ready. Within days, he was raising a million dollars a week and ordering huge volumes of food, far beyond his current resources, much of it secured by his personal pledge, far in excess of his own fortune. Within just a couple of weeks, a shipload of food was on its way to Rotterdam.

Purely as a private citizen, Hoover negotiated with the heads of state and senior officials of Great Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. The German government gave him carte blanche to travel anywhere within their lines, and when a ranking German general tried to stop him, Hoover entrained to Berlin and had him overruled. Churchill detested him because he was compromising the British embargo; Senator Henry Cabot Lodge wanted to prosecute him for unauthorized negotiations with foreign powers—a serious offense—until Teddy Roosevelt warned Lodge that he was attacking a hero.

William Leuchtenburg, a Hoover biographer, writes:

If a man without Hoover’s daring had held his post, many thousands would have starved to death. An organization with no legal standing and no stable source of funds, the Commission for Relief in Belgium crossed national frontiers in the midst of the world’s first global war, plunged into markets on two continents, and spent unheard-of sums. Nothing daunted Hoover. He seized control of railways, took over factories and warehouses, and commandeered five hundred Belgian canal boats. When the kaiser’s armies occupied northern France, Hoover extended his realm there too. The CRB, said a British Foreign Office functionary, was “a piratical state organized for benevolence.”¹²

Few people liked Hoover. He came across as an icy bully, utterly sure of himself, a fact machine, and almost always maddeningly right. British ministers are masters of deflection and demurral. Hoover would force himself into their presence, batter down their objections, and invariably get his way, which they greatly resented. His staff idolized him, for his energy, his equanimity in the face of hardships and danger, his utter fearlessness, and above all his clarity—the razor-like focus on the essential mission stripped to its bare particulars.

Hoover repeated essentially that same performance two more times, but on a larger scale. He was called back to the United States upon Wilson’s war declaration and appointed “food czar,” charged with feeding the troops, holding down prices, rationing domestic food, and managing the American food relief programs for Europe. Then, at the close of the war, he returned to Europe and ran a version of his Belgian relief program for the entire continent. Both those jobs came with wide authority, which he always exceeded. It is highly unlikely, for instance, that he had the right to trade Austrian locomotives for Galician eggs. But he did it, because it made sense, and no one dared tell him otherwise.

Hoover’s casual assumption of godlike powers may have been a heritage of his mining experience. Managing a big mine in the prewar era entailed supervising large collections of hard men in remote areas without modern communications. The ideal manager necessarily had a deep knowledge of mining; immersed himself in the operation; made rapid, practical, and correct decisions; insisted on strict and unquestioning obedience; and was the final authority on everything. In other words, he was a lot like Herbert Hoover.

When Hoover returned to the United States in 1919, he may have been the most famous man in the world. Scores of high-level officials throughout the world carried grudges from his rough handling. There were murmurings that Hoover had overstated his accomplishments or given too little credit to his subordinates. But the achievements were real, and could be measured in millions of tons of food shipped around the globe, millions of people saved from starvation, and the near miraculous absence of scandal or fraud in all of his operations. It can also be measured in the grateful acknowledgments that flowed in from European potentates, and spontaneously from the people who had been beneficiaries. Hoover had his flaws, to be sure, but his performance had been magnificent. Experienced people, embittered by other well-meaning humanitarian interventions, were amazed. John Maynard Keynes, a man who had earned his cynicism, pronounced Hoover “the only man who has emerged from the ordeal of [the Versailles negotiations] with an enhanced reputation.” Wilson’s youthful, but politically sagacious assistant naval secretary, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, said Hoover “is certainly a wonder, and I wish we could make him President of the United States.” His wife, Eleanor heartily agreed.¹³

There was no possibility of Hoover winning a major party nomination for the presidency in 1920, although it certainly crossed his mind. He had once joined a Republican club, but preferred to be called a “progressive.” He foolishly allowed his name to be entered as a contender for the Republican presidential primary in California, against a native son, Hiram Johnson, and was roundly trounced for his effrontery. Given the unravelling of the late-stage Wilson administration, a Republican victory in the general election was an almost foregone conclusion, and Hoover eventually settled for secretary of commerce in the star-crossed and corrupt Harding administration.

As a commerce secretary, Hoover was almost comically hyperactive—anything to do with “commerce,” he was sure, came under his authority. So he claimed the power to regulate airports, radio, and housing. Some of it he made stick: for example, by enforcing minimum lighting and runway standards for airports angling for US mail service contracts. His Bureau of Standards, “the largest research laboratory in the world” established a vast range of standards for weights and measures, highway safety, and model building codes. After a persistent campaign, he forced the steel industry to end its twelve-hour-workday schedules, and he mediated coal strikes. With his left hand, as it were, he ran a Russian food relief program, evolved a water management plan for western rivers, and pushed Colorado dam legislation through the Congress. His first year in office, he created the Survey of Current Business—a monthly compilation of business and financial statistics, which drew the envy of Keynes, the godfather of national economic reporting.¹⁴ Most famously, when catastrophic floods devastated the Mississippi River valley in 1927, he replicated his virtuoso performances on the European continent, creating temporary housing for hundreds of thousands of people, raising funds (the federal government had none), and marshalling food supplies, as well as recommending comprehensive flood control measures.

Hoover’s boss, through most of his tenure at the Department of Commerce, was “Silent Cal” Coolidge, the tireless preacher of smaller government and lower taxes, who had succeeded to the presidency on Harding’s death in 1922, and won a full term in 1924. Their relationship was uneasy, to say the least. The larger-than-life Hoover draped himself all over Coolidge, once insisting on giving him fly-fishing lessons when Coolidge, who was no outdoorsman, had been cajoled by the press into an awkward attempt to fish with worms. Near the very end of his administration, Coolidge let slip his real opinion of Hoover, who was already a shoo-in to be his successor: “That man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad!”¹⁵

In the general election Hoover crushed the Tammany stalwart, Al Smith, an anti-Prohibition “wet” and a Roman Catholic to boot, picking up almost 59 percent of the popular vote and carrying the Electoral College by 444 to 87. He took up his duties in March 1929, with brimming hopes for a truly scientific, progressive administration, one that would seek to harness the best efforts of government, big business, and the voluntary sector to improve the nation’s economic and social functioning.

The high point for Hoover’s hopes came very soon after he took office, when he convened a group of leading demographers, economists, and social scientists to organize a committee on recent social trends. Their goal was to prepare a complete survey of Americans, “their economic well-being, their health and habits, their problems and hopes,” which he planned to use to set a reform agenda for his second term. Two thick volumes were published in 1933 and 1934 containing thirteen monographs, ranging from population studies through specific topics like “Labor in American Life,” “The Family,” and “Arts in American Life.”¹⁶ But by that time Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House, and the aspirations of the Hoover administration and the pretensions of social scientists had been swept away by the global tsunami of the Great Depression.