Food Czar
In April 1917, shortly after the United States declared war on Germany, Hoover received the call that, over many months, he had been angling for: to return home for an important post in Washington. “The fact of the case is that … I have worn out my usefulness on the present job,” he had confided to Ray Lyman Wilbur the previous fall. “In the upbuilding of this enterprise, … I have had to quarrel with a goodly number of people.” Never a man of modest ambition, Hoover had sought nothing less than a position “of Cabinet rank,” and he had been nagging Edward M. House and others close to Wilson to put in a good word. When the summons finally came, his assignment—“to organize … food activities”—was ill-defined and more constricted than what he had been seeking, but Hoover recognized that it had large possibilities, provided that he was given carte blanche.
Colonel House cautioned the president that unless Hoover was accorded “full control” he would be “unwilling to take the job, for he is the kind of man that has to have complete control in order to do the thing well.” (Insistence on total dominance, House believed, was Hoover’s “besetting fault.”) Wilson had concluded that the democratic way to run the war mobilization was through committees, but Hoover demanded exclusive authority, “such as this democracy has never hitherto granted,” over “every phase of food
administration from the soil to the stomach.” The president yielded and, on May 19, 1917, announced that he was asking Congress to create the position of food administrator.
Hoover had no intention of waiting until Congress got around to passing a food bill. Within days, an old Stanford chum was writing that Hoover “is booked up with interviews like a barber’s chair on Saturday night.” Though he directed a phantom agency with no statutory powers, Hoover acted as though he were a plenipotentiary. He immediately set up an office, recruited a staff, and issued orders. By cadging a sum from the president’s discretionary fund, he put himself in the position to spend government money without congressional authority.
Aware as no administrator had been before of what a powerful force American women could be, he recruited half a million to go door-to-door enrolling housewives as “members” of a Food Administration that did not yet exist. During the first two weeks of July, nearly one hundred thousand volunteers, including Camp Fire Girls, fanned out across the country with pledge cards. In Maryland, a “Food Conservation Army,” dressed, said the Baltimore Sun, in the “Hoover Costume”—“white shirtwaist and skirt, with the badges of their rank and the Hoover brassard on their arm band”—gave Lou Hoover a snappy military salute.
Determined to avoid the European practice of food rationing, which, in its reliance on bureaucracies and prosecution of violators, he regarded as “Prussianizing,” Hoover counted on “the spirit of self-denial and self-sacrifice.” A man who wore scuffed suits (always of the same dreary design) and shoes with broken laces, he could not see why anyone should covet luxuries or want to dine out. “Afternoon tea,” the Kansas editor William Allen White wrote later, “was not in his social lexicon, and when he appeared at a tea he was like a Great Dane at a cat show—sniffy, but not so savage as evidently he wished to be.” Hoover preached “the gospel of the clean plate”: fewer meals, smaller portions. On Tuesdays, citizens were to do without meat; on Wednesdays, without bread. The Food Administration celebrated as a model of austerity a woman who had
secured pledge cards from each of her ten servants: Eleanor Roosevelt, spouse of the assistant secretary of the navy.
So pervasive were the food administrator’s messages that Webster’s gained a new entry: Hooverize, meaning to economize in the national interest. It became a household word. A 1918 Valentine’s Day card read:
I can Hooverize on dinner,
And on lights and fuel too,
But I’ll never learn to Hooverize,
When it comes to loving you.
Hoover cultivated the black arts of public relations. “The world lives by phrases,” he said, and “we are good advertisers.” He arranged for propaganda on movie screens and persuaded clergymen to deliver sermons on the gospel of food conservation. Schoolchildren were taught to sing “The Patriotic Potato.” Posters exhorted families: “Do Not Help the Hun at Meal Time” and reminded them “Wheatless days in America make sleepless nights in Germany.” Women were beseeched to “cook the Kaiser’s goose on their own stoves.” Above all, Hoover’s agency pounded home the message “Food Will Win the War.”
The same principle of voluntarism infused the staffing of the Food Administration. At his own insistence, Hoover served without salary, and the only personnel receiving wages were clerks. “If it falls to my lot to control the food supply of the United States,” Hoover had confided in mid-May 1917, “I shall begin at once to cut off every official and every theorist. There must be, above all, no professors on this job.” The “only people in the country” whose knowledge of the field he could rely upon, he said, were the “commercial interests.” Within the agency, he organized commodity divisions run by corporation minions on leave—“dollar-a-year-men” who knew who buttered their bread. More than three-quarters of a million volunteers ran the local branches. Hoover promulgated this structure as quintessentially democratic, but his reliance on
unremunerated officials vested decision making in men of independent means. Devolution guaranteed control by elites. Hoover’s notion of how to reach out to the countryside was to ask the biggest banker in a rural county to bring together other local power brokers to select the county food director. To farmers, that was placing foxes in chicken coops.
Hoover saw his main goal as inducing increased production, and he believed that the best way to achieve it was by offering hefty incentives. When a survey by the Federal Trade Commission found that Hoover had permitted exorbitant profits by the Big Five meat-packers, he tried to suppress the report. He also largely trusted manufacturers to discipline themselves. “The Food Administration,” Hoover explained, “is called into being to stabilize and not to disturb conditions.”
Yet, while singing the praises of voluntarism, he pressed for enactment of the Lever food control bill, which, one U.S. senator later protested, gave Hoover “a power such as no Caesar ever employed over a conquered province in the bloodiest days of Rome’s bloody despotism.” Winning a war “requires a dictatorship of some kind or another,” Hoover asserted. “A democracy must submerge itself temporarily in the hands of an able man or an able group of men. No other way has ever been found.” As Congress debated the measure, Hoover demanded authority to institute “forced food conservation”—including mandating meatless and wheatless days in every restaurant in America—and to penalize “the small minority of skunks” who schemed to exploit the emergency.
On August 10, 1917, Wilson, after signing the Lever Act into law, turned over the signature pen to Hoover—a welcome present on his forty-third birthday. The law, which forbade hoarding, waste, and “unjust and unreasonable” rates, authorized the president (and, by implication his surrogate, the food administrator) to require businesses to be licensed. Disobeying orders was punishable by a fine and two years in prison. With Hoover given unprecedented power to impose his will on the marketplace, his prerogatives, said the prominent rural journal Wallace’s Farmer,
were “the greatest ever held by any man in the history of the world.”
No longer in limbo after three months of incertitude, Hoover still had to cope with a predicament as intractable as it had been before the Lever Act. He confronted the formidable challenge of getting farmers to grow more and grocery shoppers to buy less so that surplus food could be sent to America’s overseas allies. At the same time, he dared not let this demand boost costs or create shortages in the United States. He took over at, in the phrase of the historian David M. Kennedy, “a time of giddily levitating food prices” that were riling consumers. Housewives had been looting groceries and battling police. Hoover, said one periodical, had “the biggest war job west of the trenches.”
Though Hoover loathed the headline rubric “food czar,” that appellation hit the mark. It was not a critic but a publicist for the Food Administration who coined the slogan “Herbert Hoover—the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.” While praising “patriotic cooperation,” Hoover brandished a cudgel to hammer millers, farmers, and middlemen into submission. On October 10, 1917, he issued an edict requiring the licensing of every American who worked in any phase of the production and distribution of commodities ranging from barley to pork to fruit to fish—a decree George Nash has characterized as “perhaps the most extraordinary regulatory act ever taken by the federal government.”
Hoover issued one ukase after another—to bakers on what percentage of nonwheat flour they must use, to consumers on what they had to buy if they wanted a loaf of bread—and he ordered restaurants to remove sugar bowls from their tables. “Voluntary conservation,” he said, was all well and good, but the requirements of the Allies for food were “greater than can be borne upon a purely voluntary basis.” In cooperation with the fuel administrator, he shut down factories for five days to reserve transportation for coal destined for Europe, and he persuaded Wilson to use his
powers under the Espionage Act to embargo shipments to destinations that did not have the food czar’s approval.
Routinely, Hoover circumvented the intent of Congress and exceeded his authority. The U.S. Senate had stipulated that the Food Administration could not buy or sell sugar, but that did not stop Hoover from organizing a gigantic cartel to hold prices down. Without any legal sanction, he established penalties for small retailers whose behavior he regarded as “unreasonable,” and, though he had no statutory power whatsoever over farmers, he cornered the market on wheat. As head of the Food Administration’s Grain Corporation with a capital of $50 million, Hoover informed millers that if they did not sell flour to the government at a price he determined, he would requisition it, and he told bakers they must make “Victory bread or close.”
With each passing day, his invocations of classical economic thought became rarer. In January 1918, in response to a question from Senator Lodge, Hoover said that “the law of supply and demand” had been “suspended.” Three months later, he added that “this law is not sacred … . Its unchecked operation might even jeopardize our success in war.” It was imperative, he maintained, that “economic thinkers denude themselves of their procrustean formulas of supply and demand,” for in crises “government must necessarily regulate the price, and all theories to the contrary go by the board.”
To ensure adherence to his conservation directives, Hoover relied on his “one police force—the American woman.” A network of 1,200 Price Interpreting Boards announced “fair prices,” which were published in newspapers so that housewives might boycott any grocer or butcher who did not fall into line. “We need some phrase that puts the stamp of shame on wasteful eating, dressing and display of jewelry,” Hoover said. In Indiana, regarded as the model state, self-appointed patrols invited any innkeeper or baker who did not comply with meatless and wheatless stipulations to discuss with the federal or county district attorney why he was hindering the conduct of the war.
At the same time that Hoover was imposing austerity on Americans, he was browbeating the British, French, and Italians by threatening to deny them loans from the U.S. government if they did not come to heel. America’s European allies could not buy a morsel of wheat or sugar without Hoover’s okay. At one point, he actually cut back food shipments to Europe in order to hold down prices at corner groceries in the United States. Hoover, who had won acclaim for feeding a neutral nation, did not hesitate a moment to clamp down on neutrals seeking to purchase food from America.
Neither abroad nor at home did Hoover endear himself to officialdom. George Creel, who headed the Committee on Public Information, recalled that Hoover spoke “only in chill monosyllables,” and Colonel House became so concerned about the food administrator’s attitude that he made the rounds of Washington hostesses, imploring them to “be nice to Hoover because he’s not happy. He doesn’t understand how to work with Congress or politicians.” Hoover circulated misinformation and, when he was caught in a lie, jiggled figures to place the blame on someone else. The food administrator, concluded the British ambassador to the United States, had “no parliamentary arts” and made “very bitter enemies.”
Yet well before the end of the war Hoover had emerged as an international hero. Two hundred thousand British pupils wrote him letters of thanks for food. In July 1918 King George summoned him to Buckingham Palace to express gratitude, and at a feast hosted by the lord mayor of London, the archbishop of Canterbury and other dignitaries lavished acclaim. In August Parisians cheered him as “the man who made it possible for France to eat.” That summer, at the royal cottage, King Albert bestowed upon him a unique honor: “Ami de la Nation belge,” and, as the American drove off, the monarch saluted him. In his own land, Hoover was called by Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis “the biggest figure injected into Washington by the war.”
As director of multifold operations, Hoover had been magisterial. The Allies were able to prevail in good part because they could
count on food from America. Though this was his first tenure in Washington, Hoover proved remarkably adroit at bureaucratic infighting. More than once, he had gotten his way by drafting a letter augmenting his powers and handing it to the president for signature. When congressmen badgered him at hearings, Hoover, said the New York Times, conducted himself with “perfect sangfroid.” In July 1918 a jubilant Hoover was able to report to the president that in the past year the United States had delivered over $1.4 billion worth of food to Europe. He also asserted that his policies had prevented food riots in American cities that would have resulted in “blood in our gutters.”
Hoover proffered clashing explanations for his success. On one occasion, he told a congressional committee that democracy had triumphed because of “its willingness to yield to dictatorship.” Customarily, however, he put forth an altogether different account, which is the one that accompanied him the rest of his days. The public-spirited American people, he claimed, had responded wholeheartedly to the request that they conserve food, demonstrating that “there was no power in autocracy equal to the voluntary effort of a free people.”
This insistence on the superiority of the private realm to intervention by the state once again flew in the face of facts. Though Hoover hailed the spirit of sacrifice among consumers, improvisations like breadless days had only a marginal impact. Over many months, consumption of wheat in America actually increased, as working-class citizens largely ignored the Food Administration’s propaganda. Women canvassers met more resistance than compliance. In some states, less than 10 percent of housewives signed pledge cards. Many who scribbled their names on cards did so because it was the easiest way to get rid of a caller. Moreover, Hoover, as a member of Wilson’s “war cabinet,” repeatedly scoffed at the notion that the free market could be counted on to allocate resources fairly. While denying that the Food Administration was “a price-fixing body,” he sought “an absolutely fixed price” for essential crops, and he put the federal government in the market on such
a massive scale that even he had to acknowledge it was “a sort of socialization of industry.”
Though in the spring of 1917 he had told a Senate committee that the Food Administration “should die with the war,” the armistice found him unwilling to surrender authority. He wanted to keep the agency alive even beyond July 1, 1919, which Congress would not permit. To feed Europe after the war, Hoover told Wilson, it was “absolutely necessary” for Congress to appropriate a sum twenty times the budget of the Food Administration. But Hoover’s recurrent reliance on the state found no place in his memory bank.
In autumn 1918—at the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh month—the Great War ended, and five days later Hoover sailed to Europe. Earlier in November, the State Department’s William Bullitt, concerned about the consequences of the disintegration of the Hapsburg empire, had urged Wilson to send the food czar to Austria because Hoover’s name “carries such prestige throughout the world that the people of Austria will trust in his ability to perform the impossible, and will be inclined to await his coming before turning in despair to Bolshevism.” The president had reached the same conclusion. He ordered Hoover to convert the Food Administration into an organization for relief and reconstruction on the Continent—the assignment for which Hoover had been lobbying.
In Paris, Wilson housed Hoover with members of the U.S. delegation, but instead of taking part in the wrangling at the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, Hoover struggled, as he said, “with the gaunt realities that prowled outside.” An agent of the U.S. government as head of the American Relief Administration, he served also as director-general of Relief for the Allied and Associated Powers, economic director of the Supreme Economic Council, and chair of both the Inter-Allied Food Council and the European Coal Council. He refused, though, to accept supervision from any international
authority. Acting on his own, he saw to it that within days the first vessels laden with food were bound for Trieste.
Establishing missions from Helsingfors to Salonika and east to Tiflis, Hoover cut a wide swath. He controlled traffic on the Danube, Rhine, Vistula, and Elbe; coordinated railways in eighteen countries; rebuilt bridges and highways; reordered currencies; combated typhus; and reopened mines. All of these activities were in addition to his main task of finding and distributing enough food to save nearly four hundred million people from starvation. Just as ingenious as he had been earlier in Belgium, Hoover in one deal swapped two Austrian locomotives for two million Galician eggs. Before its authority expired, the American Relief Administration transported millions of tons of food, clothing, and other necessities to war victims in twenty-one nations. Earlier, even while American doughboys were dying on the western front, Hoover had announced that he was planning to feed the Germans after the war. Much to the distress of Senator Lodge, he did.
In the summer of 1919, U.S. government money for the ARA ran out, and Hoover transformed it into a private organization. The next year, he raised almost $30 million by staging “banquets” at which diners, paying $1,000 each, were served the same meager meals on the same tin dishes on which underfed waifs overseas had to make do. At the head table, a lighted candle before an empty chair represented “the invisible guest” who would be nourished by contributions from the United States. “These children,” said Hoover, “are a charge on the heart of the entire world.” Under the ARA, the European Children’s Fund—a forerunner of CARE—fed millions in an arc from Armenia to Finland. The Finns added a new word to their lexicon: to hoover means to help.
The ARA did not act wholly from humanitarian motives. With the armistice, Hoover, who had been laboring mightily to expand production of food during the war, abruptly found himself confronting the reverse problem: mountainous surpluses, which, he told Colonel House, constituted “a situation of utmost danger.” The
relief program permitted him to dump overseas these huge stockpiles valued at as much as $3 billion. Historians dispute the extent to which Hoover used providing or withholding food as a weapon to suppress Bolshevism, but there is no doubt that he did so against an attempted monarchist coup in Hungary, where he demanded the removal of Archduke Joseph and “the formation of a ministry representing labor and socialist middle classes and peasants.” In Poland he moderated the military dictatorship of Józef Pilsudski by threatening to deny food unless the marshal appointed the pianist Ignacy Paderewski premier.
Hoover refused to be swept up in right-wing zealotry. Though he denounced Bolshevik “jackals” and thought Russia to be a “cesspool,” he warned Wilson that military intervention would create “infinite harm” because it would “make us a party to establishing the reactionary classes in their economic domination over the lower classes,” which “is against our fundamental national spirit.” Moreover, if U.S. forces interceded, they would, he foresaw, be bogged down in Russia for years, and American soldiers might become infected with the Bolshevik virus.
Hoover also viewed warily the transactions at Versailles. In February 1917, a day after Germany began unrestricted submarine warfare, he had confided: “If we have got to go into this war, I am extremely anxious that we should not go into it in alliance with anybody … . I dread the horrible entanglement of this country with all of the objectives of certain of the allies.” He opposed any postwar collaboration that failed to concede America’s economic preeminence, and he was dismayed by many of the treaty provisions. After Wilson returned to the United States, Colonel House wrote him that Hoover “is simply reveling in gloom. He gives Europe but thirty days longer of orderly life—after that, it is to be revolution, starvation and chaos.”
The differences between the Old World and the New, Hoover ultimately concluded, represented “the collision of civilizations that had grown three hundred years apart.” The United States, he
believed, “was the only nation since the time of the Crusades that had fought other peoples’ wars for ideals.” In contrast, Europe, “a furnace of hate” and “a boiling social and economic caldron,” spread “miasmic infections.” In April 1919 he wrote Wilson: “If the Allies cannot be brought to adopt peace on the basis of the 14 points, we should retire from Europe lock, stock, and barrel, and we should lend to the whole world our economic and moral strength, or the world will swim in a sea of misery and disaster worse than the dark ages.” When Hoover’s ship docked in New York five months later, he told the press that he was turning his back on Europe and hoped never to see it again.
Congenitally lugubrious though he was, Hoover gained the admiration of a perceptive British commentator for his insights. Herbert Hoover, wrote John Maynard Keynes, was “the only man who emerged from the ordeal of Paris with an enhanced reputation.” Keynes added:
This complex personality, with his habitual air of weary Titan (or as others might put it, of exhausted prize fighter), his eyes steadily fixed on the true and essential facts of the European situation, imported into the Councils of Paris … precisely that atmosphere of reality, knowledge, magnanimity and disinterestedness which, if they had been found in other quarters also, would have given us the Good Peace.
Despite his misgivings, Hoover quite unexpectedly announced that he strongly favored speedy ratification of the Versailles treaty—including the creation of the League of Nations, which, “for good or ill,” was embedded in the document. He did so not out of any utopian expectation that Tennyson’s vision in “Locksley Hall” of a “Parliament of Man” would be realized in Geneva, but because “until peace is made, Europe cannot get back to work.” In October 1919 he delivered speeches warning that delay would foster unrest and would deprive the United States of overseas markets. Dead set against engaging in any “mission of international justice,” he nonetheless
maintained that Americans could “no longer” keep up “the pretense of an insularity that we do not possess.”
The aftermath of war found Hoover at sixes and sevens. “I don’t want to be just a rich man,” he confided to the novelist Mary Austin. Maybe he could publish a newspaper, or perhaps promote a mining school. “Things came up in his mind,” she wrote, “and turned over, showing white bellies like fish in a net.” One thing was certain: whatever he did would be in the private sector. He had “drunk of the bitterness of public life to such a depth,” he said, “that no inducement short of national danger” could entice him again into government.
Yet when Hoover was mentioned as a prospect for the presidency in 1920, he sent conflicting signals. In 1919 he told a former colleague who wanted him to run that “the whole idea fills my soul with complete revulsion.” He did not think he could be nominated; he did not have “the mental attitude or the politician’s manner”; and he was “too sensitive to political mud.” In his diary, though, Colonel House recorded his pleasure that Hoover “did not pretend to me that he was not interested in the country-wide movement to make him President. It is patent that he has been working overtime in that direction.”
Hoover’s actions and statements made him especially appealing to progressives. During the war, he had urged Wilson to push for a tax on excess profits, and he had rebuked Social Darwinists by saying that “civilization spells the protection of the helpless … . The survival of the strong, the development of the individual, must be tempered, or else we return two thousand years in our civilization.” While carrying on a cordial dialogue with the head of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, he told the Boston Chamber of Commerce that “industry must be humanized” and the workforce “regarded not merely as a cost of production, but as a living agent, with human instincts and social wants.” As vice chairman of the Second Industrial Conference that convened in
December 1919, Hoover advocated a department of public works, a federal employment service, and home-loan banks; after the meetings ended in March 1920, he was chief author of a report to the president recommending a minimum wage, a forty-eight-hour workweek, the eradication of child labor, improved housing, and equal pay for men and women.
Though the possibility of the infiltration of America by Bolshevik agents alarmed him, Hoover expressed dismay at “transgressions against real civil liberty by the use of war powers in peace.” He deplored injunctions against strikes, “non-trial by jury of reds,” and the expulsion of legally elected Socialist legislators in New York State. He admonished Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and other patrioteers that communism fed on exploitation. “We shall never remedy justifiable discontent until we eradicate the misery which ruthless individualism has imposed upon a minority,” he said. More troubled by the right than by the left, he observed that “radicalism is blatant and displays itself in the open,” while “reaction too often fools the people through subtle channels of obstruction.”
Not surprisingly, given these views, a host of progressives promoted Hoover for the presidency. “I think he is precisely the man that the liberal movement in America, as you and I understand it, needs,” one progressive former mayor of an Ohio city wrote another Buckeye mayor. “His hardness is all on the surface.” To Hoover’s standard rallied the muckrakers Ida Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker and both of the country’s leading liberal journals. “Many a great reputation that was won in the war is crumbling, or has already crumbled,” wrote Oswald Garrison Villard. “We believe Mr. Hoover’s will grow as time passes. The Nation is proud, indeed, that so true an American has served humanity so conspicuously and beyond all gratitude well.” In like vein, the New Republic editors Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann called Hoover “a Providential gift to the American people for the office of pilot during the treacherous navigation of the next few years.”
Progressives, though, did not hold a monopoly on ardor for
Hoover. So inundated was the conservative Boston Herald with letters that in January 1920 it announced, “For the present, at least, we propose to print in the Mail Bag no more individual opinions favorable to the presidential nomination of Herbert Hoover.” Devotion to Hoover united the publishers of the Main Street magazines Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal with the laborite Heywood Broun and the Manhattan sophisticates Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley. A poll of the Harvard faculty favored him two to one. Unrecognized save in mining circles in 1914, his name—which appeared on every restaurant menu during the war—was more familiar to newspaper readers by 1920 than that of any American save Wilson. Especially beguiling was the legend of his rise from rags to riches. “Hoover,” the historian Paul Glad has written, “seemed to have come striding into public consciousness directly from the pages of a Horatio Alger novel.”
One enthusiastic letter to Hoover—from a well-known Harvard economist—unwittingly raised a bothersome issue, however. He would cast his ballot for the former food czar, Frank Taussig said, “on any ticket whatever, republican, democratic, new faith, socialistic, or Bolshevik.” That jocular promise pointed up an intriguing question: if Hoover did run for president in 1920, which party’s banner would he carry?
Colonel House was not the only Wilsonian to claim him for the Democrats. “He is certainly a wonder, and I wish we could make him President of the United States,” said the assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “There would not be a better one.” His wife agreed. Eleanor Roosevelt thought Hoover “the only man I know who … [has] first hand knowledge of European questions and great organizing ability and understands business … not only from the capitalistic point of view but also from the workers’ standpoint.”
Hoover, though, trod water. Raised in a Republican milieu, he had joined the Republican Club of New York City in 1909. Furthermore, not all Democrats thought he was a good fit. Since, after some qualms, he had concluded that the president had to accept
reservations in order to get the Versailles treaty approved, he could no longer be regarded as a true Wilsonian. The president himself had come to distrust him. “I have the feeling that he would rather see a good cause fail than succeed if he were not the head of it,” Wilson said. Most important, Hoover recognized that the Democrats were expected to lose badly in 1920, and he did not want to be their sacrificial lamb.
For a long while, Hoover maintained that he had no partisan affiliation. When a prominent Democrat wooed him, he responded by denouncing both parties, revealing “a disdain for political organizations,” the Democrat noted in his diary, “which is likely to lead him to trouble.” Hoover informed Colonel House that he could not take up with the Democrats because of the party’s southern reactionary element, and he could not tag himself a Republican because of the mossbacks in the East. (In 1917 he had resigned from Manhattan’s Republican Club.) In February 1920, he stated, “There are about forty live issues in this country in which I am interested, and before I can answer whether I am a Democrat or Republican, I shall have to know how each party stands on these issues.”
Not until March 30, 1920, did he announce that he was a Republican—in a snotty statement guaranteed to antagonize GOP stalwarts:
If the Republican party with the independent element of which I am naturally affiliated, adopts a forward-looking, liberal, constructive platform on the Treaty and on our economic issues, and if the party proposes measures for sound business administration of the country, and is neither reactionary nor radical in its approach to our great domestic questions, and is backed by men who undoubtedly assure the consummation of these policies and measures, I will give it my entire support. While I do not, and will not myself, seek the nomination, if it is felt that the issues necessitate it and it is demanded of me, I can not refuse service.
That declaration did not serve him well. After taking the high ground that he could not identify with a party until he knew its candidate and its platform, he had, in an irritatingly self-serving manner, abruptly committed himself without knowing either. “In effect,” commented the New York Times, “Mr. Hoover tells the Republican party he would like to belong to [it] if [it] will be the kind of party to which he would like to belong. And that, if he belongs to it, he would have no objection to leading it.”
The GOP extended a less than hearty welcome. Little more than a year before, he had been denounced by the Republican National Committee for asserting, “We must have united support for the President,” a statement regarded as a plea to voters to choose Democrats in the 1918 midterm elections. Hoover, announced the head of the Republican Congressional Committee, was guilty of “prostitution of official station.” Nor was hostility confined to the Old Guard. Hoover’s performance when food czar, the influential farm editor Henry C. Wallace said, “gave evidence of a mental bias which causes farmers to thoroughly distrust him. They look upon him as a typical autocrat of big business.” Of the many presidential aspirants in 1920, the Grange announced, Hoover was “the most objectionable to the farmers of this country.”
In these unpropitious circumstances, Hoover still found it hard to let go of the phantasm that he might be the Republican choice. A Stanford friend noted that Hoover had written Herbert Jr., “[My] nomination for the Presidency would be a great deal like [your] flivver. It would take a lot of people to start it, would make a lot of noise, and they would all have to walk back home in the end.” Rashly, though, he permitted his name to be entered in the California Republican primary against the favorite son, Senator Hiram Johnson.
Hoover never had a chance. Right-wing Republicans disowned him, and liberals remembered that Johnson had been Teddy Roosevelt’s running mate on the Progressive ticket in 1912. A longtime foe of the trusts, Johnson charged that Hoover was “backed by the great
powerful business interests to which he pandered while he was Food Administrator.” In addition, Hoover’s opponents capitalized on uneasiness about his many years in London. Mock posters read “Vote for ’Erbert ’Oover,” in tune with a Missouri senator’s reference to Hoover as a “recent acquisition to our population.” Without campaigning, Hoover polled 200,000 votes, but he fell far short of Johnson’s 370,000 in the May primary. All hopes that he might be a presidential contender that year were at an end. From his position at the command post in the Savoy ballroom in 1914, he had moved—despite an extraordinary record of achievement—to the role of bystander in 1920.
When Republicans that summer settled on an egregiously lackluster presidential nominee, they confronted Hoover with a difficult question—whether a pro-League progressive could support the nationalist conservative Warren Harding. Hoover might have fallen into line quietly by reasoning that the Democratic ticket of James M. Cox and Franklin D. Roosevelt did not offer a spectacularly better option and that no one could expect him to bolt so soon from a party in which he had just reenlisted. But Hoover would never permit himself to appear as anything but righteous. He insisted, against all evidence, that a vote for Harding was an endorsement of the League and that the Wilson administration in which he had been a prominent figure was “in the main reactionary” and “since the armistice … a failure by all the tests that we can apply.” (Hoover, Wilson retorted, was “no friend” of his, “and I do not care to do anything to assist him in any way in any undertaking whatever.”) His rationale could not have been lamer and in some quarters earned him contempt. Yet in one important respect Hoover had come off well. He had positioned himself to be a deserving recipient of Harding’s largesse, should he be disposed to reenter the public realm.