10
A Tribute to Herbert Hoover
SEPTEMBER 16, 1988
Remarks at the annual celebration of Herbert Hoover’s birthday, at the Hoover Library in Iowa
I have always been intimidated by meticulous scholarship of the kind one associates with modern historians—their five thousand footnotes, and twenty-eight appendices. No wonder Arthur Schlesinger needs plenty of Rose’s Lime Juice to get through the day! We pundits tend to speak in large and billowing terms, and my reaction, no doubt defensive, toward those who always get the arcane historical story exactly right brings to mind Goering’s statement that anytime anyone mentions culture in his presence, he reaches for his Luger.
I was told by my hosts that it especially interests this audience for the speaker to recount his own experiences with the Chief. On this matter my memory was nicely jogged when George Nash was kind enough to send me, in addition to much other fascinating material, copies of my correspondence with Mr. Hoover during the last half dozen years of his life.
I went to him in 1954, as a relatively young man of twenty-nine. We had a friend in common. (I interrupt myself to remark that it is probably true that everyone in America had a friend in common with Herbert Hoover. Certainly anyone who was ever a member of the Boys’ Club was, indirectly, a friend of Herbert Hoover, or for that matter any European who did not die of starvation during the early twenties.)
I told Mr. Hoover that, in my judgment, political discourse in the United States was suffering gravely from the absence of a conservative journal of opinion. In those days, I said to him—having only recently graduated from college—it was generally assumed, by what goes by the name of the thinking classes, that the conservative movement was a loose conspiracy of illiterate tycoons whose only interests were to maximize profits and burn books. I rattled on a little bit on the subject. He sat there at his desk, silent; looking just a little bit to one side as, I later came to know, was habitual. I was still going on when he cleared his throat for a minute and I stopped talking. “You need capital,” he said simply. A clean knife, through all that butter. It flashed through my mind, though this was not the moment to recall it, that shortly before Herbert Hoover’s inauguration as president, Calvin Coolidge is said to have remarked, while riding down in an elevator with a friend, “You know, there’s going to be a hell of a depression.” Mr. Hoover, as usual, had got to the point.
The file reveals that he gave me the names of four or five affluent friends in California, with all of whom I visited. It is historically interesting to recall that these gentlemen, most of them former associates of the Chief, and protégés, were so profoundly gloomy about the prospects for the American Republic that, for the most part, they acted as though to launch a magazine in an effort to do something about it was the equivalent of lying athwart History, yelling Stop!
Always he treated me with great courtesy. I note from the file I have just examined that he would write out in pencil his replies to letters, and the faithful Bunny Miller would take his phrases and complete them, supplying, so to speak, the surrounding boilerplate.
The file to which I refer reminds me that I sent to Mr. Hoover a copy of the speech I gave that night at the Plaza Hotel, which included a tribute to him. Now, it was always widely rumored that Mr. Hoover had an insecure sense of humor. And I note that Mr. Glenn Campbell, when he was here giving this commemorative talk a few years ago, addressed that subject directly, making a distinction between what Mr. Hoover thought it appropriate to say and to enjoy when he was president, and when he was not president. But since at dinner one night with him (yes, twice he invited me and my wife to dine with him, on one occasion quite alone), he had said to me that—and I quote him exactly—“There was nothing wrong with Franklin Roosevelt that a major miracle couldn’t cure,” I felt he would not misunderstand the one paragraph in my speech which engaged in polemical levities.
My final extended experience with Mr. Hoover came after the Supreme Court outlawed common prayer in the schools. The Chief expressed his indignation and surprise at this ruling, and word of this reached me. A few friends and I organized the Committee for Religious Liberty, and for a while it appeared that Mr. Hoover would be willing to serve as its Protestant co-chairman, with Lewis Strauss representing Jewish dissidents, and Robert Murphy, Catholic dissidents.
But fatigue was setting in. And I had from him, dated August 21, 1962, the longest letter he ever wrote to me. He gave ten reasons why he had finally decided not to serve. I quote a few of them:
“1. I am now eighty-eight, with the physical limitations that come from such years. Moreover, I have gone through severe physical ordeals in California and Iowa. You are a humane man, but even so, you may have forgotten an old college barber-shop chorus—‘The old gray mare ain’t what she used to be!’
“2. Every time I lend my name to some righteous movement, the public holds me responsible—even if my associates have guaranteed that I do not need to think about the organization again. And they load my days with letters about it....
“5. I have two little books on the stove, jointly with Mr. Nichols [Bill Nichols of This Week magazine was an intimate of Mr. Hoover, and of my family], which I hope may add some cheer to the American home folks, and they require constant attention while cooking.
“6. For over thirty years I have been collecting the materials and preparing the publication of three volumes on certain phases of American foreign relations. I think they are of importance to the American people. At eighty-eight years, ‘the night cometh.’
“7. There are probably twenty million males in the United States who have been to college. Is there not some one of them who can meet your needs?
“8. I greatly regret to refuse any request from such a valiant and self-sacrificing worker in the garden of common sense (which means the test of past experience before jumping off deep ends).”
And, finally, “10. I greatly value your piece about me. It spells friendship. Yours faithfully, Herbert Hoover.”
The scale at which he worked defies common measurements. Oh yes, did I tell you that George Nash, in answering my original questions, told me that if I was missing any other piece of information, please not to hesitate to specify my needs, because he has access to sixteen million documents here at the Library. Sixteen million documents! Either written by Herbert Hoover or read by him. And he wrote thirty books. One of them was a translation from the Latin. Moreover, as Mr. Nash has documented, Herbert Hoover was the most important domestic political figure in the United States not just from 1928 to 1933, but from 1921 to 1933.
There is much learned research on his presidency, and on the measures he chose to combat the Depression. To the extent I am qualified to pass judgment on them, I am persuaded that the relevant knowledge, at that time, of fiscal and above all of monetary management was insufficient, resulting in Mr. Hoover’s having made mistakes. Mistakes, however, which were not rectified by his successor, never mind the glamour with which FDR’s terms of office are associated.
What did come, after Mr. Hoover left office, was a gradual reconstitution of the American idea of the reasonable division of responsibilities between the private and the public sector. On this point, be it noted, Mr. Hoover himself was always something of a pragmatist. It is widely conjectured that he might have got the Democratic nomination for president in 1920. And in 1928, he was nominated over the opposition of the Old Guard within the GOP.
Mencken is famous among other reasons for writing of the state that it is “the natural enemy of all well-disposed, decent, and industrious men.” And it is certainly difficult to deny the near-cosmic damage done by the state during this century. The thirty million dead Russians and fifteen million dead Germans and forty-odd million dead Chinese were not slaughtered by the private sector. And, in America, $200 billion of welfare having been spent to document our concern for those who need help, we see a growing class of the perpetually demoralized: young men and women—boys and girls in many cases—whose professions, under state training, are childbearing, unemployment, and, in many cases, drugs and crime.
Herbert Hoover openly and explicitly acknowledged what he deemed to be the responsibility of the state to step forward and help those who needed help, and to worry about the formalities later. It was by feeding the people of Europe after the First World War that he solved the problem of starvation in Europe. By contrast, we attempt to attack the problem of starvation in Ethiopia these days by windy conferences having to do with questions of jurisdiction, and grain rots in Ethiopia sometimes within sight of those who simultaneously starve.
Mr. Hoover’s pragmatism was informed by a series of general assumptions. One of them was that the social energy of American freemen was vital to the production of resourceful thought. For this reason he believed that success should be applauded, not discouraged by taxation and derogation. At the Democratic Convention in Atlanta, two weeks ago, the listener was invited to feel that any American whose entrepreneurial zeal translated into commercial success was carrying on the work of General Sherman marching through Georgia.
I do not know whether—after George Nash and the other scholars are quite through fixing Mr. Hoover’s large place in history—they will have uncovered a political theorist.
I think I would be surprised if they did so. The most important rulers in the civilized world have not been primarily theorists. They have been men and women of character, intelligence, insight. In the case of Herbert Hoover, not only character, intelligence, and insight, but an ardent desire to help individual human beings—together with an ardent desire to preserve a society which, in his judgment, is unique. I am sure that many of you are familiar with his great paean to America, given here in 1948. Even so I quote these sentences from it:
America means far more than a continent bounded by two oceans. It is more than pride of military power, glory in war, or in victory. It means more than a vast expanse of farms, of great factories or mines, magnificent cities, or millions of automobiles and radios. It is more even than the traditions of the great tide westward from Europe which pioneered the conquest of this continent. It is more than our literature, our music, our poetry. Other nations have these things also ... [Here there is] that imbedded individualism, that self-reliance, that sense of service, and above all those moral and spiritual foundations ... They [the Quakers I grew up with] were but one atom of the mighty tide of many larger religious bodies where these qualities made up the intangibles in the word, American.
I do not venture to predict, as I have said, whether the scholars resident here are discovering a great political theorist. But there can hardly be any doubt that, every day, here in West Branch, these men and women are discovering a man who, every day, every year, looms larger and larger. A man fit to come from the loins of the America Herbert Hoover revered, the America he served so nobly.
