The Road to the White House
The Mississippi flood saga catapulted Hoover into the perch of front-runner for the 1928 Republican nomination. Though he had not once been a candidate for any office, he had no difficulty imagining himself in the White House. As early as 1922, the antagonistic Hiram Johnson had written, “Hoover has an ambition that o’erleaps itself. He is perfectly mad to be President.” In 1926, a year before Coolidge surprised the country by announcing, somewhat cryptically, that he did not “choose to run” for another term, Hoover had hired a publicity agent. His service in the cabinet under two presidents fitted him with impressive qualifications, for, as one observer commented, Hoover had “traveled around a wider arc of the circle of federal governmental functions and opportunities than anyone else.” Furthermore, he exuded self-confidence. “I felt, looking at him,” remarked Sherwood Anderson in 1927, “that he had never known failure.”
Hoover, though, encountered a number of impediments on the road toward nomination. His eligibility was questioned because he had not, in the period immediately prior to 1928, “been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States,” as the Constitution stipulated, and the allegation that he was a British subject took on life when an English clerk revealed that Hoover was on the voting rolls in a London district. Though Anglophobes bridled at the
thought of Hoover in the Oval Office, the most rabid opposition to him came from the Republican right. “Financial men,” a publisher wrote Chief Justice William Howard Taft, “say that they have a grievance against Hoover, dating back to the food administration days.” Taft himself later expressed fears that Hoover was a “dreamer” with “some rather grandiose views” who labored “much under the Progressive influence.” When it became likely that Hoover was going to be the GOP’s choice, stock prices fell. By then, however, the naysayers had run out of time. At the Republican convention in Kansas City, Hoover won the presidential nomination by an overwhelming margin on the first roll call.
Stanford’s president, Ray Lyman Wilbur, came up with a unique way for his boon companion to be formally notified on August 11, 1928, of the nomination—not, as was traditionally done, in a staged encounter on the candidate’s front porch, but in the university’s huge football stadium. There, in an acceptance address delivered one day after his fifty-fourth birthday, Hoover said: “In no other land could a boy from a country village, without inheritance or influential friends, look forward with unbounded hope. My whole life has taught me what America means. I am indebted to my country beyond any human power to repay.” Identifying himself with Harding and Coolidge, he made a rash promise. “Given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years,” he told the rally of seventy thousand supporters, “we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.”
Though Hoover was seeking office as nominee of a major political party, he did not want to be mistaken for a politician. He dreaded hitting the campaign trail. When he finally heeded the plea of advisers to make at least a few public appearances, he sputtered, “I’ll not kiss any babies.” Yet, while assuming this nonpolitical stance, he busied himself assiduously, supervising campaign minutiae and laboriously preparing his own speeches, a process that consumed a disproportionate number of days. When an assistant prodded him to speak more frequently, he replied, “I can make
only so many speeches … . I write a speech as I build a bridge, step by step, and that takes time.”
Hoover’s champions portrayed his disdain for politics as a virtue, demonstrating that he was concerned only with the public weal. Earlier in the decade, during his third year as secretary of commerce, the Chicago Daily News had chimed:
Who kept the Belgians’ black bread buttered?
Who fed the world when millions muttered?
Who knows the needs of every nation?
Who keeps the keys of conservation?
Who fills the bins when mines aren’t earning?
Who keeps the home fires banked and burning?
Who’ll never win a presidential position?
For he isn’t a practical politician?
Hoover—that’s all!
Campaign biographers saw his ostensible indifference to politics as appropriate to a new age when the state would be managed by technicians—a prospect that might have been a bit scary save that Hoover also embodied nineteenth-century pioneer values. He was likened to Charles Lindbergh, the Lone Eagle who, in his 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic and in his autobiography We, blended evocation of cherished traits of individualism with reverence for modern technology. While holding tradition in high regard, Hoover’s presidency, his adherents said, would usher in a “New Day.”
Most Americans had become acquainted with Hoover in the Great War, and his supporters did all they could to keep those memories bright. “When hate and cruelty and stupidity stalked the world unchallenged” and “when choking yellow fumes of gas were blowing straight into the young, eager faces of thousands of boys,” wrote the novelist Kathleen Norris, “there was a big, silent, efficient American man planted in Belgium fighting disease and starvation with American food, and fighting hate of the enemy with America’s characteristic love for the suffering.”
Recollections of his years of service and the vision of a New Era appealed especially to progressives, including the revered Jane Addams of Hull House. They were gratified when Hoover warned against excessive use of injunctions against labor unions; advocated public works to employ the jobless; and announced that he favored a shortened workday, more spending for education, and “hundreds of millions” of dollars to help the farmer. One progressive demurred, but only because he thought Hoover altogether too militant. “Mr. Hoover has always shown a most disquieting desire to investigate everything and to appoint commissions and send out statistical inquiries on every conceivable subject under Heaven,” Franklin D. Roosevelt complained to an industrialist. “He has also shown in his own Department a most alarming desire to issue regulations and to tell businessmen generally how to conduct their affairs.”
Progressives seeking clues as to what kind of president Hoover might be would have done well to have scrutinized him more carefully. When Harding contemplated freeing the Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs from prison, Hoover had told him he was making a mistake. Throughout this period, he expressed intense hostility to proposals for federal operation of the power dam and nitrate plants at Muscle Shoals in the Tennessee Valley. In 1924 he wrote Ray Lyman Wilbur how displeased he was that some members of the Stanford faculty were backing the presidential candidacy of Senator Robert La Follette on a Progressive ticket, adding that engineers and economists who looked favorably on public power development and other heresies were either “deliberately untruthful or … incompetent.” He realized that Wilbur was hampered by “that well established form of blackmail on Universities called Academic Freedom.” Nonetheless, he instructed him, “You don’t have to promote and advance this type of people.”
His liberal supporters might also have taken note of several of his remarks on the campaign trail. At a Madison Square Garden rally, Hoover, praising “the American system of rugged individualism,” denounced “every step of bureaucratizing the business of our
country.” He accused his Democratic opponent, Governor Al Smith, a moderate who would later be a ferocious critic of the New Deal, of being a covert Socialist and expressed alarm that “the points of contact between the government and the people are constantly multiplying.” To cater to southern whites, he denied that he opposed Jim Crow; allowed his subordinates to make racist remarks; and ignored an appeal to denounce the Ku Klux Klan. (The Democrats were far worse.) Hoover’s behavior in these instances was not only discreditable, it was unnecessary. Heading the ticket of the majority party at a time of unparalleled prosperity, he enjoyed the further advantage of facing a rival who roiled certain sensibilities by being a Roman Catholic from New York’s Lower East Side, a product of the Tammany Hall machine, and a foe of Prohibition.
Hoover had only one liability: he seemed to be a cold fish. Henry Pringle, the saucy biographer of Teddy Roosevelt, reported after a 1928 interview with Hoover:
He rises awkwardly as a visitor is shown to his desk, and extends his hand only halfway, in a hesitant fashion. His clasp is less than crushing. Then he sits down and waits for questions. His answers are given in a rapid, terse manner and when he is finished he simply stops. Other men would look up, smile, or round off a phrase. Hoover is like a machine that has run down. Another question starts him off again. He stares at his shoes, and because he looks down so much of the time, the casual guest obtains only a hazy impression of his appearance.
He exuded a grouchy impatience. “You can’t expect to see calves running in the field the day after you put the bull to the cows,” Coolidge once admonished him. “No,” Hoover replied, “but I would expect to see contented cows.” It was a bright sally, but not even Coolidge, a legendary sourpuss, could abide Hoover’s ill nature.
The country greatly admired Hoover but did not warm to him as it had to Teddy, or did later to FDR, Ike, and Reagan. The standard
monograph on the 1928 campaign was to underscore the unlikelihood of Hoover’s ever becoming a charismatic figure: “His hair parts in the middle and his Christian name is Herbert.” Furthermore, his face was “immobile,” his movements “ponderous,” and he favored a stiff high collar years out of fashion. Even when he went fly-fishing, he wore a double-breasted blue serge suit. H. L. Mencken labeled the chubby candidate—whose face, it was later said, had a “curiously lunar terrain”—a “fat Coolidge.” In titling a 1928 magazine article, one writer found it necessary to pose the question “Is Hoover Human?” Hoover’s stolid demeanor constituted a challenge for his publicists, but one of his campaign biographers was up to it. Hoover’s feeling for the downtrodden, Irwin wrote, “translates itself not into tears but into action. ‘What can I do?’ he asks himself; and the mind once more takes control. Henceforth, while others weep, he works!” For many he was, despite his lack of magnetism, heroic.
When his train pulled into the depot on election day, Hoover, who had arrived in Palo Alto a generation before a friendless stranger, found a crowd of ten thousand awaiting him and the Stanford band ready to escort him to the polling station. Overhead, from a circling plane, a pilot tossed out firecrackers that, on exploding, revealed the flags of every country on the globe. That night, Hoover chalked returns on a blackboard in his spacious living room. At 7:30 p.m. West Coast time, a United Press wire conveyed Governor Smith’s concession. “He should have conceded three hours ago, or, better still, three months ago,” Hoover responded.
The first person born west of the Mississippi to be elected president, Hoover had won a resounding victory. In a contest with a heightened turnout, he received 21.4 million votes to Smith’s 15 million and ran up a 444–87 advantage in the electoral college, including four states from the “Solid South.” Led by John Philip Sousa, two thousand jubilant students paraded up a hill to the home of the president-elect—the March King’s seventy-piece band
blaring forth “El Capitan” and “Stars and Stripes Forever” accompanied by booming cheers for Stanford’s most famous alumnus.
To an unusual extent, commentators polarized in speculating about what the landslide portended. “Competent observers,” reported the Nation, “say that Mr. Hoover’s Administration will either be, on the purely executive side, one of the most memorable in our history, or that he will be one of the greatest failures in the Presidency.” His admirers had no doubt about what his accession to the White House would bring. To the pugnacious labor leader John L. Lewis, Hoover was “the foremost industrial statesman of modern times.” Even more striking was the expectation of a former muckraker who had become a gullible enthusiast for what was dubbed fondly the Soviet experiment. “Big business in America is producing what the Socialists held up as their goal: food, shelter, and clothing for all,” stated Lincoln Steffens. “You will see it during the Hoover administration.”
Others, though, including some who were close to Hoover, wondered whether he had the proper temperament. An engineer, he once said, could fashion a waterfall much more beautiful than nature ever had. His listeners were aghast. On another occasion, he ruminated about whether an earthquake or powerful winds might topple a skyscraper. The correspondent with whom he was discussing the subject later reflected: “What particularly struck me at the time was the cold engineering question which he puzzled over; the other results of such a catastrophe apparently did not concern him at all.” Hoover boasted of establishing ideas on “a practical economic basis, more and more stripped of the purely emotional side.” In 1928 he had remarked, “It has been no part of mine to build castles of the future but rather to measure the experiments, the actions, and the progress of men through the cold and uninspiring microscope of fact, statistics, and performance.”
Even at the outset, some observers felt premonitory chills. “I don’t think he can sublet the job of emotional appeal,” the editor William Allen White remarked early in December. “There seems to be a broad feeling that he is too much a machine,” a close associate
commented. Similarly, the New York Times questioned whether being “a glutton for statistics” obsessed with “the elimination of waste” equipped a man to be national sovereign. “A technologist, he does not discuss ultimate purposes,” wrote Time during the 1928 campaign. “In a society of temperate, industrious, unspectacular beavers, such a beaver-man would make an ideal King-beaver. But humans are different. People want Herbert Hoover to tell where, with his extraordinary abilities, he would lead them.”
Some found Hoover’s cast of mind troubling. His economic conceptions, wrote the economist George Soule, were “conceived in advance of the evidence, and … held stubbornly after the evidence goes against him.” That remark anticipated the historian Alfred Rollins’s subsequent judgment: “Hoover almost always went deep with a problem, but the depth was like a mineshaft, straightly walled by Hoover’s presumptions. Though his views were always well documented, they frequently lacked all understanding of the complex human and social ramifications of the problem. At the moment of their impact on history, Hoover’s narrowness betrayed him.”
The New Republic thought it “a poor omen” that Republican power brokers had so little liking for their own candidate. Their “suppressed uneasiness and irritation justify the prediction of … either a stormy or compromising career as President.” Until now, Hoover had survived by confining his engineering techniques to increasing the profits of industrialists, the periodical observed, but as president he was going to have to tackle problems such as unemployment that would inevitably entail “a heavy cost.” It concluded with a prediction: “He will put up a valiant but probably in the end an unsuccessful fight. The inertia of the Republican politicians and the unintelligence of American businessmen in relation to public affairs will wear him out. He will be unable to recruit the following with which successfully to oppose them, and he will in the end either conform or quit.”
Nothing put Hoover at greater risk than the extravagant expectations his champions had aroused. “A vote for Herbert Hoover,”
Republican ads proclaimed, “is a vote for … the party that has wiped out soup-kitchens … and bread lines from the land”; campaign workers distributed copper Hoover Lucky Pocket Pieces inscribed “Good for four years of prosperity.” In placing his name before the Republican convention, a Californian had characterized him as “engineer, practical scientist, minister of mercy to the hungry and the poor, administrator, executive, statesman, beneficent American, kindly neighbor, wholesome human being.” Hoover “sweeps the horizon on every subject,” he declared. The press often went even further, hailing him as “a genius” and as the “most useful American citizen now alive.” George Washington had been a pretty good president, acknowledged the Los Angeles Times, but “he had never had the training or experience of Herbert Hoover.”
These encomiums troubled no one more than the president-elect as he contemplated what the future had in store. In late January 1929, at the Florida vacation home of J. C. Penney on Biscayne Bay, he told the editor of the Christian Science Monitor: “I have no dread of the ordinary work of the presidency. What I do fear is the … exaggerated idea the people have conceived of me. They have a conviction that I am a sort of superman, that no problem is beyond my capacity … . If some unprecedented calamity should come upon the nation … I would be sacrificed to the unreasoning disappointment of a people who expected too much.”