Commerce
After his landslide victory, President-elect Harding announced that he was going to consult the “best minds” in the nation on how to compose his cabinet, but he needed no prompting about one obvious selection. He told a friend, “Reily, do you know, taking Herbert Hoover up one side and down the other, and taking into consideration the knowledge he has of things generally, I believe he’s the smartest gink I know.” Harding determined that Hoover could have his choice: either the Interior or the Commerce portfolio. Weeks before election day, William Allen White had anticipated the invitation. “If I were Hoover, I would do it,” he said, for Harding “is a man who is going to take the color of his environment and Hoover could help make an environment.”
Harding, though, found Hoover a hard sell. Republican Anglophobes and isolationists—some of them progressives—regarded Hoover as a Wilsonian infidel on foreign policy. Right-wingers thought him unsound on domestic issues. “Hoover,” confided a powerful GOP senator, “gives most of us gooseflesh.” Hoover was painfully conscious of this disapproval. He saw no point in getting embroiled in a donnybrook over as backwater a department as Commerce, and the Interior post did not appeal to him. Furthermore, he had lucrative prospects in the private sector, including an approach from the international financier Paul Warburg. Accordingly, he
drafted a letter to Harding on December 22, 1920, that began with the comment, “I cannot but be aware that there is opposition in certain politically-minded quarters,” and ended with a request “that you will dismiss from your mind all thought of my appointment.”
The president-elect, however, would not be denied. He informed two Pennsylvania senators who were pushing Andrew Mellon to be secretary of the Treasury that he would agree to name the Pittsburgh multimillionaire only if they abandoned their objections to Hoover. Grudgingly, they knuckled under. On February 12, 1921, Harding made a formal offer. Hoover hesitated, not least because the industrialist Daniel Guggenheim had asked him to take part in mining ventures at a guaranteed annual income of half a million dollars. When Hoover finally accepted the cabinet position, less than two weeks before Harding’s inauguration, he did so on his own terms, saying haughtily that the Department of Commerce “as it stands today … offers no field for constructive national service equal to that I already occupy in private life.” He wanted it strictly understood that bureaus would be taken away from other departments and given to him and, as he wrote later in his Memoirs, that his warrant would cover nothing less than “business, agriculture, labor, finance, and foreign affairs.”
Though the elevation of Hoover to the cabinet pleased progressives, some commentators wondered whether, as secretary of commerce, he would not quickly fade from view. Hoover, stated the New Republic, was “easily the most constructive man in public life.” But another journalist believed that he was “eclipsed by a preceding fame … . The War spoiled life … for Hoover. After its magnificent amplifications of personality, it is hard to descend to every day, and be not a tremendous figure, but a successful secretary of an unromantic department.” Hoover’s only duties as secretary of commerce, a predecessor told him, would be “putting the fish to bed at night and turning on the lights around the coast.”
Hoover had much grander notions. Unlike conservatives, who wanted to shrink the federal government, he was an empire builder. He greatly increased appropriations for his department; set up three new bureaus (aeronautics, radio, and housing); and extended his activities into realms that bore only the most tangential relationship to “commerce,” such as recreation. So expansively did he interpret his mandate that he has been titled “the grand marshal of economic policy at home as abroad.”
He made the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce under Julius Klein, a Harvard professor of Latin American history and economics, the linchpin of the department—sextupling its appropriations. The bureau conducted censuses of market behavior in American cities that no European country would institute for another thirty years and posted commercial representatives in cities from Riga, Latvia, to Soerabaja, East Java. In Caravans of Commerce (1926), a book dedicated to Hoover, the freelance journalist Isaac Marcosson painted a glamorous portrait of the bureau: “Its attachés have risked the glaciers of the Andes, and braved the fevers of Ecuador; they have been wrecked on the headwaters of the Amazon; they have encountered bandits beyond the Great Wall of China, all to the end that fresh fields be opened up for the products of American farm and factory.”
In aggrandizing his empire, the sky was not the limit. Hoover approved a large role for the U.S. government in aviation, not because he favored a nanny state but because federal inspection of planes and licensing of pilots would lower insurance rates and encourage travelers to risk boarding aircraft. Opposed to the European pattern of government-funded airlines, he wanted Washington to limit itself to an indirect subsidy by turning delivery of airmail over to private firms—especially after thirty-one of the first forty pilots employed by the government to ferry mail died in crashes. For the industry to flourish, Orville Wright testified, the government
had to provide facilities such as emergency landing fields. Hoover went beyond that advice by requiring all runways to be equipped with lights and radio beams. To expand the market for planes, the newly created aeronautics branch advertised their value to farmers for crop dusting. When the nation’s capital had to come up with an appropriate name for its first airport, it chose “Hoover Field.”
Hoover seized control of the air in a different sense by moving in on another infant industry: radio. When his tenure began, there were only two stations, both dabblers; a year later, there were 320, emitting a cacophony of sounds. Through edicts that he had no authority to issue or that were forbidden by an act of Congress, he imposed regularity. To lessen congestion, he ordered all amateurs off the airwaves; he empowered himself to issue licenses; and, in contravention of both domestic and international law, he assigned frequencies. In 1925 the department suspended the license of Aimee Semple McPherson’s radio outlet in California for straying from its assignment. The popular evangelist wired Hoover: “Please order your minions of Satan to leave my station alone. You cannot expect the Almighty to abide by your wavelength nonsense. When I offer my prayers to Him, I must fit in with His wave reception.” But Hoover prevailed, even though Congress denied him “the Napoleonic powers,” in the phrase of one critic, that he sought. Hoover left posterity two legacies: Marconi’s marvelous invention would not be operated by public institutions but by privately owned (and lightly regulated) networks—the bigger the better—and these corporations would profit by inflicting commercials on listeners. In the Hoover years, as the president of RCA said, the “heresy of government ownership, especially in radio matters,” was exorcised.
Disturbed by reports that as much as one-third of the American people lived in inferior homes, Hoover established a housing division that drafted model zoning statutes and a model housing code, and he exhorted builders to lower costs. Inadequate shelter, he maintained, was “thriving food for Bolshevism.” A conference he called led to the creation of an American Construction Council, which
sought to develop industry standards—but also to combat government regulation. Convinced that he needed someone of esteem to head the council, Hoover asked Franklin D. Roosevelt, who readily agreed. But when FDR pressed him to herd recalcitrant firms into line, Hoover flatly refused. As a result, the council foundered.
While burrowing into new fields, Hoover never forgot that his main responsibility as commerce secretary was to serve American business, though always with an eye on how to improve it. With his encouragement, the Bureau of the Census in July 1921 launched Survey of Current Business, an invaluable monthly periodical. Hoover believed, at a time when economic intelligence was primitive, that publishing statistics would stabilize the market by diminishing overstocking and allaying unreasonable anxiety about economic conditions. In addition, it would benefit small businesses, which could not afford to search out the information that their bigger rivals could pay to get. Data were not gathered by the government but provided by trade associations, which were self-interested. Nonetheless, the Survey was an important innovation.
The Bureau of Standards, which under Hoover earned a reputation as “the largest research laboratory in the world,” housed a division of simplified commercial practice to pursue his preoccupation with efficiency. He knew that to the apparently easy question, “What are the dimensions of a one-inch board?” a government committee found no fewer than thirty-two answers. To simplify, the division—which arranged more than 1,200 conferences—slashed varieties of everything from bedsprings to milk bottles. (Ironically, in his war against duplication, Hoover created so many committees that they duplicated one another’s work.) The government never decreed the elimination of superfluous models; it only recommended. Still, Hoover let businessmen know that if they were going to bid on government contracts they had better meet federal specifications. He also convened a National Conference on Street and Highway Safety, which favored imposing order on automobile traffic by requiring uniform signs: red for stop, green for go.
To critics who accused Hoover of homogenization, he retorted
that the “man who has a standard automobile, a standard telephone, a standard bathtub, a standard electric light, a standard radio, and one and one-half hours less average daily labor is more of a man and has a fuller life and more individuality than he has without them.” In the spirit of Henry Ford, who said that a customer could buy a flivver in any color so long as it was black, Hoover told the novelist Sherwood Anderson, a critic of Babbittry, “When I go to ride in an automobile, it does not matter to me that there are a million other automobiles on the road just like mine. I am going somewhere and I want to get there in what comfort I can and at the lowest cost.”
Not content with his spacious realm in Commerce, Hoover set his eyes on the domains of his cabinet colleagues. He gave Harding a reorganization syllabus transferring to Commerce segments of two independent regulatory commissions and all or part of seventeen agencies currently lodged in other departments. Information collection, he insisted, was solely his prerogative. Hence, the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Markets should yield to his Bureau of the Census, and Commerce should take over the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. When he did not get his way in either instance, he acted as though he had. Stiff resistance prevented him from absorbing Agriculture’s Bureau of Public Roads and Interior’s Geological Survey and U.S. Land Office, but he did grab the Bureau of Mines and the Patent Office from Interior and snatched the Bureau of Customs Statistics from Mellon’s Treasury.
Hoover did not even hesitate to challenge Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, who had come within a few votes of being elected president in 1916 and whose appearance was likened to that of Jove. Hughes regarded overseas affairs as wholly in his dominion, whereas Hoover insisted that anything economic in nature belonged to him. To a remarkable extent, Hoover made his presence felt in the conduct of foreign affairs. At the Washington naval
arms conference in 1921, he counseled Hughes on Asian policy, and as chair of the Inter-American High Commission—a post traditionally belonging to the secretary of the Treasury—he delved into financial relations in the Western Hemisphere. Hoover, who held on to his Commerce post when Calvin Coolidge rose to the presidency after Harding’s death in 1923, did not hesitate to denounce Coolidge’s intervention in Nicaragua with marines or to criticize U.S. dollar diplomacy in Mexico. He also spoke out on immigration: he advocated exclusion of Japanese, since there were “biological and cultural grounds why there should be no mixture of Oriental and Caucasian blood,” and he deplored admitting Puerto Ricans (“undersized Latins”) at a time when quotas restricted the entry of “Nordics.”
With the world as his arena, the secretary of commerce took it upon himself to wage war on foreign cartels. Although he had no qualms about the very high Fordney-McCumber tariff, which created a formidable barrier for European businesses seeking to sell their goods in America, he viewed manipulation of markets by other governments as unconscionable. He attacked a Franco-German potash syndicate, whose menace he exaggerated, and, to foil Brazil’s scheme to jack up the cost of coffee, he cut off loans to São Paulo and prompted the creation of a national coffee association in the United States. His biggest battle was with John Bull. When the British colonial secretary Winston Churchill fathered a scheme to boost the world price of rubber, Hoover, concerned about the impact on the vital U.S. automobile industry, struck back. By prodding Firestone and other tire makers to expand rubber plantations in Africa and Asia and by encouraging conservation measures, he drove down the price of rubber from $1.21 to 40¢ a pound. His actions took a bit of the edge off the long-standing charge that he was a craven Anglophile.
While attending to his manifold duties at Commerce, Hoover continued to head the American Relief Administration, which sped food to famine-sufferers in Soviet Russia. Throughout his life, he fiercely opposed recognition of the USSR, but when, at a public
gathering, a woman charged that American aid buttressed Bolshevism, he got up and, pounding his fist on a table, shouted, “Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!” From the September day in 1921 when the SS Phoenix, carrying seven hundred tons of food, sailed into Petrograd through all of 1922 and into 1923, Hoover’s ARA sustained fifteen million people daily. He carried out this vast enterprise with a small cadre of Americans, most of them unpaid—again assuring him that, in crisis, the country could rely on dedicated volunteers.
The consequences of this endeavor were double-edged. Maxim Gorky wrote Hoover: “In the past year you have saved from death three and one-half million children, five and one-half million adults … . In the history of practical humanitarianism I know of no accomplishment which in … magnitude and generosity can be compared to the relief that you have actually accomplished.” Decades later, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lauded the American effort in the Volga region in almost the same words. But the operation also had an outcome that Hoover neither intended nor welcomed. George Kennan concluded that Hoover’s benefaction had “importantly aided” the Kremlin, “not just in its economic undertakings, but in its political prestige and capacity for survival.”
These forays into international affairs led Hoover to clash with Hughes, Mellon, and even the president. They all believed that the government was duty-bound to safeguard overseas investments, while Hoover wanted to ensure that businessmen did not take risks that might require armed intervention by U.S. forces. He maintained that bankers, instead of being at liberty to invest abroad however they pleased, required government guidance. Loans, he argued, should go only for “reproductive” activities, never for armaments, but he could not get Coolidge or Mellon to agree to regulate lending.
Mellon, who thought Hoover “too officious” and “too much an engineer,” also resented his meddling in other affairs in the purview of the Treasury. Hoover favored taxing the securities holdings of
the “well-to-do” at a higher rate than what he deemed “earned” income. The less well-off, he believed, should pay no taxes at all, and he opposed excises on necessities. “I would like to see,” he declared, “a steeply graduated tax on legacies and gifts … for the deliberate purpose of disintegrating large fortunes.” Mellon decried these heretical views.
As secretary of commerce, Hoover also advanced the cause of conservation—traditionally the bailiwick of the secretary of the interior. He intervened to preserve the natural assets of Niagara Falls; organized a conference to save Chesapeake Bay; attempted to halt the diminution of Alaska’s salmon fisheries; and prided himself on being “the arch anti-pollutionist in the country.” Concerned about oil slicks fouling oceans, bays, and estuaries, he demanded “very drastic regulation” and expressed disappointment when Congress yielded to oil tycoons in eviscerating “my pollution bill.” But because federal regulation was much too light-handed, Hoover failed to curb contamination of rivers and lakes, and, in Alaska, salmon runs faltered. He did better as chair of a Colorado River Commission. Under his leadership, the agency worked out water sharing among seven quarrelsome states that made possible an ambitious project in Boulder Canyon that later bore the name Hoover Dam.
No controversy over Hoover’s attempts to set policy in other fields aroused nearly so much animosity as his bitter feud with the secretary of agriculture, Henry C. Wallace, who despised him. Wallace thought Hoover “bloodless,” “stuffy,” and “opinionated.” He also believed—with good reason—that Hoover had nothing worthwhile to say to the beleaguered farmer. Hoover was willing to support measures such as the Agricultural Credits Act, which he had a hand in drafting, but he held so romanticized a view of commercial agriculture that he feared for the souls of farmers if the government intervened further. Hoover made such a mark on farm issues, however, that when Wallace died in 1924, Coolidge offered him the post of secretary of agriculture. Hoover turned the president down, but he continued, as secretary of commerce, to exert
greater influence than anyone else on Coolidge’s vetoes of farm subsidy legislation.
For a secretary of commerce, Hoover exercised extraordinary authority over the country’s working conditions. When coal miners went out on strike in 1922, Harding designated him—not the secretary of labor—as chief negotiator with the operators. The president did so because Hoover, who could speak with the prestige of a man with a generation of experience in finance, also had won the confidence of union leaders. Hoover commonly concluded that labor was more reasonable than management. He favored agreements stipulating that the fruits of greater efficiency go to “the provision of unemployment and sickness insurance … on an adequate scale,” with the residue “administered through the major voice of organized labor,” and, at a time when many industrialists were promoting the open shop, he expressed contempt for union busters.
It took a while for workers to realize that Hoover was a less than dependable ally. Although he endorsed the right to “employee representation,” he did not distinguish between independent labor organizations and shop councils. When employers converted these councils into subservient company unions, Hoover raised no objection. At one point he even advocated using scabs to mine coal. He believed that employers should pay high wages, less because he empathized with workers than because he understood that there was no point in producing goods unless there were consumers who could afford to buy them. Furthermore, if employees were underpaid, they might walk off their jobs, and strikes were messy. Every major industry ought to be unionized, he told Gompers, but he had in mind the housebroken AFL craft unions that kept their members corralled, and he frowned on militant tactics to organize workers in factories. “Our nation is very fortunate in having the American Federation of Labor,” he declared, because radical elements “have been met in the front line trenches by the Federation … and routed at every turn.” Still, he believed that there was “no economic failure so
terrible in its import as that of a country possessing a surplus of every necessity of life in which numbers willing and anxious to work are deprived of dire necessities. It simply cannot be if our moral and economic system is to survive.”
When unemployment passed four million in August 1921 during a postwar recession, it was not the secretary of labor but Hoover who pushed Harding to convene a national forum to enlist support for maintaining wage levels and speeding construction. Throughout his public career, Hoover touted conferences as the democratic way—to avoid top-down decision making and to allow all voices to be heard. In truth, more often, conferences were vehicles for Hoover to impose his will. In 1921 he picked out the participants, set the agenda, chaired sessions, and wrote the findings—before the delegates had even met one another. “At the conference on unemployment, which was Mr. Hoover’s,” said one commentator, “the best and only example of the unemployed present was the Secretary of Labor.”
A number of historians have seen Hoover’s performance at these meetings as the origin of federal assumption of responsibility for countercyclical planning, but it was considerably less than that. Warning against “governmental doles and other fallacious remedies based upon the practices of European governments,” Hoover told the delegates it was “not consonant with the spirit of institutions of the American people that a demand should be made upon the public treasury for the solution of every difficulty.” The conferees did favor accelerating public works, but only if they were “on a ‘commercial’ basis, not a ‘relief’ basis,” and they dumped the burden for getting them under way on mayors and communities. In the months after the gathering broke up, the Commerce Department served as little more than a cheerleader to local officials.
Hoover, who ended the conference by telling the delegates that their actions marked a “milestone in the progress of social thought,” boasted ever after that his agitation had brought the country out of the 1921–23 recession, inaugurating an era of vibrant prosperity. The post-parley committee under the former New
York police commissioner Colonel Arthur Woods, Hoover initially claimed, had put 1 to 1.5 million to work. “Distress prevailed in every city, soup lines had been formed,” he reported in 1924. Then, following the conference, “Credit and Confidence were restored in the business world … . And the whole country mobilized to provide emergency employment.”
In fact, there is no evidence that Hoover’s venture had any impact. New York City behaved as though it had never heard of his organization, and, as the historian Irving Bernstein pointed out, in one-industry towns such as Gary, Indiana, “no committee could find jobs that did not exist.” Yet by 1928 Hoover had carried his self-delusion and self-promotion to the point of declaring that “within a year we restored … five million workers to employment.” Unhappily, the lesson he again drew was that in the event of a future depression one could confidently count upon community effort for salvation.
Throughout his tenure in the Commerce Department, Hoover made labor issues part of his mandate. In 1922 he angered railway executives by asking them for a minor concession to salvage something for a shopmen’s union that had called an ill-fated strike. When the owners made clear that they intended to smash the union, he said that “their social instinct belonged to an early Egyptian period.” After Harry Daugherty obtained a flagrantly overreaching injunction against the union—a decree, Hoover said, that “outraged” him “by its obvious transgression of the most rudimentary rights of man”—he tongue-lashed the attorney general at a cabinet meeting.
For more than two years, Hoover brought relentless pressure on steel magnates to end barbaric twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, in the mills. He massed figures to show that a change could be made without economic loss, but the steel barons dismissed his views as purblind and “unsocial.” The twelve-hour day, they insisted, “was not of itself an injury to the employees, physically, mentally, or morally.” At one point, Hoover composed a letter for Harding to send, which the president thought much too truculent.
Hoover then persuaded Harding to summon the manufacturers to the White House, and, when they proved recalcitrant, he inflamed public opinion by leaking an account of their attitude to the press. When their leader, Elbert “Judge” Gary, still balked, Harding sent him a letter, drafted by Hoover, which compelled him to capitulate.
Hoover’s most conspicuous intervention in labor policy came in 1924 when, in collaboration with the United Mine Workers’ chief John L. Lewis, he forged an agreement in the coal industry. After this compact was negotiated, an exultant Hoover claimed credit, but when operators repeatedly violated it, he would do nothing to see that it was carried out and, instead, began to attack the union. The rift revealed a fundamental difference of purpose. For Lewis, the key consideration was wage level; for Hoover, labor peace—so that output, which is what he cared most about, would be maintained. Nonetheless, Hoover continued to have Lewis’s approbation.
His singular incursions into other jurisdictions—State, Interior, Treasury, Agriculture, Justice, Labor—elicited the well-circulated quip that Hoover was “Secretary of Commerce and UnderSecretary of all other departments.” In 1925 a New Republic columnist expressed a similar view:
It is certainly not generally recognized … how extraordinarily extensive is his impress upon the government outside of his own Department. There is reason to doubt whether in the whole history of the American government a Cabinet officer has engaged in such wide diversity of activities or covered quite so much ground.
The plain fact is that no vital problem, whether in the foreign or the domestic field, arises in this administration in the handling of which Mr. Hoover does not have a real—and very often a leading—part. There is more Hoover in the administration than anyone else … more Hoover … than there is Coolidge.
Hoover’s feisty behavior also helps account for why he had not a friend in the cabinet. Unable to understand how anyone could disagree with him, he flew into tantrums when men he did not think were his equals raised objections. He had a high regard for the secretary of state, whom he thought the ablest man in the cabinet—always excepting, of course, himself—but their relationship was “Mister Hughes” and “Mister Hoover.” Coolidge could not stand Hoover’s meddling or his presumptuousness. “What’s our wonder boy done now?” the president inquired. As his time in the White House was running out, Coolidge said of Hoover, “That man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad!”
Despite his hyperactivity in Washington, Hoover strongly disapproved of the leviathan state. In 1921 he asked whether European currency difficulties might not be resolved by a consortium of bankers, thereby eliminating any occasion for a political response. In 1925 he told Iowa farmers that experience had taught him that “every time we find solution outside of government we have not only strengthened character but we have preserved our sense of real self government.” In his hostility to bureaucracy, Hoover showed no awareness that he was not only the premier bureaucrat of the decade but the man most responsible for swollen government agencies. What began as a strong predilection ended as catechism. By 1928 he was saying, “Even if governmental conduct of business could give us more efficiency instead of less efficiency, the fundamental objection to it would remain unaltered and unabated.”
Hoover, though, placed his faith not in the freewheeling entrepreneur, but in federal encouragement of trade associations, which he thought of as self-regulating entities like medieval guilds. “While I am not a believer in extending the bureaucratic functions of the Government,” he explained, “I am a strong believer in the Government intervening to induce active co-operation in the community itself.” He put Commerce at the disposal of existing trade associations and nudged unorganized industries to coalesce. “We are passing from a period of extreme individualistic action into a period of associational activities,” he announced in 1924.
For a time, his promotion of trade associations embroiled him in a squabble with Attorney General Daugherty. Stringent enforcement of antitrust laws against trade associations was a “perversion of justice,” Hoover contended. “Men have murdered with brickbats,” he remarked, “but that is no reason for prohibiting brick houses.” He stopped short of advocating cartels, however, stating, “I would not propose price-fixing in any form short of again reentering the trenches in another World War.”
Hoover diverged from free marketers, too, in challenging classical economic theory. In 1923 he wrote: “We are constantly reminded by some … economists and businessmen that the fluctuation of the business cycle is inevitable; that there is an ebb and flow in the demand for commodities and services that cannot from the nature of things be regulated. I have great doubts whether there is a real foundation for this view.” He denied that periodic mass unemployment was tolerable, and he believed that government had an important assignment in preventing downturns, since the market was untrustworthy. In 1928 he urged a gathering of governors to create a $3 billion reserve fund for public works “to ward off unemployment in lean years.” In this instance, his conception of the need for long-range planning exceeded that of some progressives. “We had better let God run it as in the past,” said Senator George Norris of Nebraska, “and not take power away from him and give it to Hoover.”
Commentators found Hoover’s mild iconoclasm much less germane than his rationalizations of the status quo. In an address to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1924, Hoover declared: “Our homemade Bolshevist-minded critics to the contrary, the whole economic structure of our nation and the survival of our … levels of comfort are dependent upon the maintenance and development of leadership in the world of industry and commerce.” Businessmen, he added, “deserve high public esteem.” Two years earlier, he had told the National Association of Manufacturers: “There is no regulatory function in the Department of Commerce, … and it is my feeling that in order that this Department shall be of the greatest
service to commerce and industry, it should be maintained on a non-regulatory basis.”
Hoover elaborated on his ideas in a slim 1922 volume, American Individualism. There he acknowledged the possibility that trade associations and labor unions might produce “a new setting of tyranny.” If U.S. government officials were “timorous mediocrities dominated by groups,” then “we shall become a syndicalist nation on a gigantic scale.” But he took comfort in “the vast multiplication of voluntary organizations for altruistic purposes,” which offered “proof of the ferment of spirituality, service, and mutual responsibility.”
American Individualism attracted considerable attention because certain passages departed markedly from the reactionary temper of the postwar era. Hoover struck an emphatically progressive chord in writing:
We have long since abandoned the laissez-faire of the 18th Century—the notion that it is “every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost,” … in part because we have learned that it is the hindmost who throw bricks at our social edifice, in part because we have learned that the foremost are not always the best nor the hindmost the worst … . We have also learned that fair division can only be obtained by certain restrictions on the strong and the dominant.
The government regulation that “began strongly three decades ago,” he pointed out, was “proof that we have gone a long way toward the abandonment of the ‘capitalism’ of Adam Smith.” In the one pellucid sentence in the book, Hoover said, “There are continents of human welfare of which we have penetrated only the coastal plain.”
As in his orations, however, most of American Individualism offered nothing that could not be heard at a weekly Kiwanis luncheon. “Acts and ideas that lead to progress are born out of the womb of the individual mind, not out of the mind of the crowd,” he
argued. “The crowd only feels: it has no mind of its own which can plan. The crowd is credulous, it destroys, it consumes, it hates, and it dreams—but it never builds.” In a sentence he italicized, he stated that, though every individual should be safeguarded equality of opportunity, “he … must stand up to the emery wheel of competition.” Government oversight, he conceded, had been “highly beneficial,” but it had also been guilty of “throttling … initiative,” and he deplored the tendency to “go too far and stifle the reproductive use of capital.” While, in his neither-this-nor-that fashion, Hoover warned against “the equal dangers … of reaction and radicalism,” he aimed his sharpest arrows at the left. “The will-o’-the-wisp of all breeds of socialism,” he maintained, “is that they contemplate a motivation of human animals by altruism alone.” In rejoinder, he stressed that “for the next several generations we dare not abandon self-interest as a motive force to leadership and to production, lest we die.”
It is hard to fathom why this jejune screed, little more than a pamphlet, has been taken seriously as a meaningful contribution to social theory. A man who had already convinced himself that “we now have equality of opportunity,” Hoover never gave more than a glance at the actual life choices faced by a Mississippi sharecropper or an Ohio seamstress. He churned out synthetic sentiments (“non-essentials are the real fertilizers of the soil from which spring the finer flowers of life”) and cloddish locutions such as “production of the total product.”
Current Opinion likened his chunky style to the wooden verbiage of Grover Cleveland, and the New York Times not long before had written that Hoover’s statements “read like introductions to something he is about to say. Yet there is around all of them an atmosphere of saying something definitely. He is not a man to be suspected of evading any question, and therefore the only possible conclusion is that when he says nothing he really sincerely believes that he has said something; that he is simply unable to be definite, positive, concrete, in discussing public questions, though he certainly
thinks he is as definite as anybody.” No matter. The publication of American Individualism magnified the impression that Herbert Hoover was more than an officeholder. He was a statesman.
Hoover’s ascent to the peak of national prominence came not from a book, however, but from a fortuitous crisis: the worst natural disaster in the nation’s history, the 1927 Mississippi River flood. After days of relentless rain, the collapse of mighty levees let loose immense torrents of brown water, creating an inland sea a thousand miles long and fifty miles wide. People and livestock were drowned in an instant. The debacle left countless families homeless, their occupations gone, and with no way to feed themselves. Finding shelter and sustenance for these regiments of displaced Americans was an awesome challenge, and President Coolidge, who would have preferred to shirk all responsibility, knew there was only one person who could assume that chore. Reluctantly, he appointed Secretary Hoover to coordinate rescue and relief in the Mississippi Valley.
With a confidence born of having made it through far worse devastation in the Great War, Hoover swiftly took command. He set up headquarters in Memphis on the Chickasaw Bluffs, high above the raging river, but he spent most of the next three months traversing the valley in a private Pullman car—moving ceaselessly from Cairo to New Orleans and back again, often sleeping on the train or a boat. In each of the ninety-one communities he stopped at, he preached the same sermon: “A couple of thousand refugees are coming. They’ve got to have accommodations. Huts. Water-mains. Sewers. Streets. Dining-halls. Meals. Doctors. Everything. And you haven’t got months to do it. You haven’t got weeks. You’ve got hours. That’s my train.” In Rising Tide, his most rigorous critic, John M. Barry, acknowledged that Hoover “performed magnificently during the initial stages of the flood.” He sparked a fund-raising drive that brought in $17 million; gathered an armada of six hundred vessels; and put together 150 tent cities as havens for multitudes of evacuees.
Hoover, who as secretary of commerce had quietly integrated
the Census Bureau and established the post of adviser on black economic development, gave particular attention to the plight of African Americans. He asked the Red Cross to place more blacks on its payroll, and he demanded that it determine whether “colored people are being restrained in the camps against their will, … are being tagged for return to specific plantations, … [and] are being charged by Red Cross for food.” When the NAACP exposed abuses, he authorized Robert Russa Moton, Booker T. Washington’s successor as head of Tuskegee Institute, to investigate. Hoover’s concern went far beyond these steps. He saw the crisis as nothing less than an opportunity to reconfigure southern society. With singular foresight, he proposed the subdivision of plantations into small homesteads that tenants, notably African Americans, could buy, with the program to be financed by a private resettlement corporation.
Unhappily, the Mississippi flood, which showed Hoover at his best, also revealed him at his worst. Hoover exploded when Moton reported that blacks were conscripted at gunpoint to labor on the levees; “were beaten by soldiers”; “that more than one wanton murder was committed by these soldiers”; and “that women were outraged by these soldiers.” In Hoover’s words, he “laid Dr. Moton out.” He refused to believe the findings and insisted that Moton rewrite the document. Any revelation of brutal mistreatment of African Americans and of the shortcomings of the Red Cross would undermine his assumptions about the virtues of voluntarism, private charity, and local control. His vision of a multitude of homesteads in the Deep South came to nothing because it depended upon private capital he could not raise, and when African American leaders asked how dislocated black croppers were expected to get through the coming winter, he snubbed them.
Moreover, Hoover, in a manner that by now had become characteristic, distorted the nation’s response to the Mississippi calamity and what it signified. The country had come through the ordeal, he asserted, almost entirely because of community improvisation. “I suppose I could have called in the whole of the Army,” he remarked later. “But … all I had to do was to call in Main Street.”
Never would he acknowledge that two out of every three dollars spent to cope with the flood came from government or that he had depended on federal agencies—from the Public Health Service to the Department of Agriculture to the National Guard—for essentials of his operation: sixty planes, hundreds of ships, field equipment, and tents to quarter the victims.
Hoover, though, emerged from the venture more than ever a celebrity. Once again, he had become a “czar,” but this time empowered even to issue orders to the army and navy. During the disaster, governors seeking aid ignored the president of the United States and communicated with Hoover instead, and his name appeared in the press more often than Coolidge’s. Most important, he had become the protagonist in a melodrama watched by millions. In a “reminiscent biography” published in 1928, Will Irwin wrote: “I, who have followed Hoover on his great European jobs, would like to leave him as I saw him one May morning of 1927—standing on the tottering Melville levee, his aeroplanes scouting overhead, his mosquito-fleet scurrying below, a group of prominent citizens about him listening to the wise, quick, terse directions which were bringing order out of chaos. It symbolizes the man, that scene—‘The one tranquil among the raging floods,’ the transmuter of altruistic emotion into benevolent action.”