The Long Good-bye
Herbert Hoover did not go gently into the purgatory of the ex-presidency. He survived for another third of a century, and never in those decades did he make peace with what his countrymen had done to him. “The president was not merely rejected in November 1932,” Richard Norton Smith has written. “He was virtually excommunicated.” In an open touring car carrying President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt in an inaugural cavalcade down Pennsylvania Avenue on March 4, 1933, Hoover stared ahead stonily—refusing to respond to FDR’s overtures or to the boisterous onlookers, jubilant over his ouster. Later, when his train pulled out of Union Station, he turned away from the window to conceal his tears. To a former secretary, he muttered in 1936, “Democracy is a harsh employer.”
A month after his term ended, a caller found Hoover “lonely beyond measure.” He could not stand being cut off from the action in Washington, where Roosevelt had launched his earthshaking First Hundred Days. At his ten-room aerie in Manhattan’s Waldorf Astoria, he played solitaire or groused to anyone who would listen about that demonic FDR and those unfair journalists. He could not pick up a paper without reading how Roosevelt’s dynamic leadership contrasted with his own timidity or how FDR’s ready grin and cheery rhetoric inspirited the nation as Hoover’s despondency had
not. Instead of doing his best to ignore aspersions, Hoover subscribed to a clipping service that permitted him to dwell on how much he was detested. Not one Republican congressman, he complained, would come to his defense when the New Dealers told outrageous lies about him. He nursed unbecoming grievances: why had the marine band played “Hail to the Chief” on Inauguration Day before FDR had formally taken the oath of office? Hoover even fumed about a book by one of his former aides, though it was patently obsequious.
Hoover did have reason to grumble, though, for he was unfairly held responsible for both the 1929 stock market calamity and the onset of the Great Depression. In the 1932 campaign, Roosevelt had charged that as secretary of commerce Hoover had promoted foreign loans, financing the speculation that brought on the crash. It was a cheap shot. No officeholder of the era was as blameless as Hoover for what ensued. As commerce secretary, he had issued repeated warnings against “the fever of speculation”; asked Coolidge to prevent practices such as inside trading; and urged the Federal Reserve to raise the discount rate in order to deter plungers in the Great Bull Market. Worried about the “crazy and dangerous” frenzy, he had been in the White House only two days when he exhorted Federal Reserve officials to curb speculation. “Please do not use me as a whipping boy for the ‘New Era,’” Hoover implored a columnist later. “I was neither the inventor nor the promoter nor the supporter of the destructive currents of that period. I was the ‘receiver’ of it when it went into collapse.”
Critics also misrepresented Hoover as a Wall Street lackey. “The only trouble with capitalism is capitalists,” he had told the columnist Mark Sullivan. “They’re too damned greedy.” Bankers were worse than gangsters, he said. Al Capone “apparently was kind to the poor.” In 1932 Hoover had asked the Senate to investigate “sinister bear raids” on the stock exchange, and advocated legislation requiring full disclosure of stock offerings and subjecting fraudulent promoters to punishment. “Men are not justified in deliberately making a profit from the losses of other people,” he declared. In
vain, however, did Hoover protest, “No man can foresee the coming of … panic … . I did not notice any Democratic Jeremiahs,” for he had already entered national folklore as the author of the Great Depression. As a boy, the essayist Russell Baker got the straight dope from his aunt: “People were starving because of Herbert Hoover. My mother was out of work because of Herbert Hoover. Men were killing themselves because of Herbert Hoover, and their fatherless children were being packed away to orphanages … because of Herbert Hoover.”
In the spring of 1933, the nation appeared to be breathing a collective sigh of relief. When “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf” became a hit, psychologists explained that the song’s popularity reflected national rejoicing that Hoover was no longer in the White House. “March 1933,” Richard Norton Smith has noted, “cast him as black bishop to Roosevelt’s white knight.” For generations to come, Democrats summoned up Hoover as a specter to warn voters of the disaster that could befall the country if they elected a Republican president. Commentators have often said that FDR always ignored his actual opponents and campaigned each time against Hoover until he ran against Hitler—but even in 1944 Hoover remained a target. “We ought to be eternally grateful to Herbert Hoover, who has been our meal ticket for twelve years,” a sassy New Dealer remarked.
In 1934 Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes effaced the identity of the most conspicuous artifact of the Great Engineer by changing the name of Hoover Dam to Boulder Dam. “Hoover had very little to do with the dam and in fact was supposed to be opposed to it,” Ickes contended. The government instructed the artist sculpting bas-reliefs on the dam to omit any mention of the former president. In response to his mean-spirited actions, Ickes, as he noted in his diary, received “a number of insulting letters,” and neither the U.S. Board on Geographic Names nor Rand McNally would accept the appellation “Boulder Dam.” But Ickes was pigheaded—and, with the Democrats in control, he had his way. Not until 1947 did Congress restore the structure’s original name.
Hoover responded to the assaults on him, especially on his performance as president, by writing more than two dozen books—few of which served him well. When he put together The Challenge to Liberty (1934), expressing his rancor at Roosevelt’s policies, longtime comrades in arms informed him that his writing was verbose and his views antediluvian, and counseled against publishing it. As conservative an acolyte as Robert Taft thought his treatment “extreme.” But Hoover would not listen. When the New York Times ran a highly unfavorable review of these “brooding, bitter essays,” Hoover dismissed the country’s foremost newspaper as a journal that had “betrayed American institutions.”
Like the deposed chief of state of a government in exile, he churned out reams of print to demonstrate that the principles he had followed were the right ones. He denied that times had been as bad as his critics were saying. Someone, he said, ought to write “a good thumping article” showing that the devastating bank crisis “really was not any great crisis after all.” What others deplored as rigidity, he saw as steadfastness. At the end of 1933 he told an archconservative Republican senator, “When the American people realize some ten years hence that it was on November 8, 1932, that they surrendered the freedom of mind and spirit for which their ancestors had fought and agonized for over 300 years, they will, I hope, recollect that I at least tried to save them.”
Maddened by the pretensions of the youthful New Dealers who had made their way to Washington “from the colleges mostly around Boston,” Hoover lashed out in frenzied harangues. Instead of pointing out that his own officials were largely responsible for the Emergency Banking Act of March 1933 enacted under Roosevelt, he denounced this conservative (and effective) statute as a “move to gigantic socialism” bound to “raise the most appalling difficulties.” FDR’s farm program, he maintained, consisted of “goosestepping the people under this pinkish banner of Planned Economy.” Both the National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration were “fascistic,” and the Civilian Conservation Corps reminded him of an earlier effort to create a “camp of
potential mercenaries … under sinister military leadership.” The Roosevelt administration, he asserted, had “a pronounced odor of totalitarian government.”
Eschewing the opportunity to dissect FDR’s shortcomings deftly, Hoover spouted rhetoric even some of Roosevelt’s opponents found preposterous. Critics of American individualism, he charged, had the mind-set of “those who defame the Sermon on the Mount.” He went on: “They would destroy our religious faiths. Instead of a nation of self-reliant people, they would produce a nation of sycophants eating at the public trough.” The New Deal, he insisted, was “a veritable fountain of fear,” and the American people were in peril of becoming “pawns … of a self-perpetuating government.” In an address to a Republican convention, he railed, “If man is merely one of the herd, Stalin is right, Hitler is right, and, God help us for our foibles and our greeds, the New Deal is right.” He made no secret of his abhorrence of Roosevelt. When, at a gathering of campaign correspondents holding a down-home chicken supper, FDR’s voice came on the radio, Hoover so far forgot himself that he booed the president of the United States.
Occasionally, Hoover claimed to be the fountainhead of New Deal innovations for which Roosevelt was unjustly taking credit, but much more often he presented himself as a libertarian no less resolutely opposed to government intervention than Herbert Spencer had been. On June 10, 1936, Hoover declared: “Either we shall have a society based upon ordered liberty and the initiative of the individual, or we shall have a planned society that means dictation … . There is no half-way ground.” He continued to come across as hardhearted and divorced from the terrible suffering of the Depression. In his Memoirs, he ludicrously contended that during his presidency “many persons left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples.” If a generation of historians mistakenly thought of him as an apostle of laissez-faire throughout his career, Hoover cued them to that conclusion.
His bombast had enough visceral appeal to stand-pat Republicans that, again and again, Hoover—only fifty-eight when he left
office—indulged the foolish expectation that his party would seek him out as its presidential nominee. At the 1936 convention, an appeal to “recapture … the citadel of liberty” drew thunderous applause, interspersed with cries of “We Want Hoover!”; not even with repeated pounding of the gavel could the chairman impose order. But the delegates had no intention of going to the country with Herbert Hoover at the head of their ticket. An Ohio poll of prospective GOP voters found that he was the choice of only 4 percent.
A year later, on the day after Roosevelt announced his audacious scheme to pack the U.S. Supreme Court, the conservative Michigan Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg recorded in his diary: “This morning ex-president Hoover phoned me from the Waldorf-Astoria in New York eager to jump into the fray … . Now here is one of the tragedies of life. Hoover is still ‘poison’—(the right or wrong of it does not matter). Borah, [Charles] McNary and I had a conference at 11 o’clock. Borah is prepared to lead this fight, but he insisted that there is no hope if it is trade-marked in advance as a ‘Hoover fight.’ … McNary emphatically agreed. As a matter of fact, this already was my own attitude.” Affronted and seething, Hoover asked, “Who is trying to muzzle me?”
By FDR’s second term, however, American eyes turned increasingly toward Europe, where the Great Humanitarian had far larger stature. In 1938, at a time when Hoover remained in low repute in his homeland, the Continent gave him a tumultuous welcome. King Leopold of Belgium decorated him, and, from Ostend to Brussels, crowds cried “Vive l’Amérique!” In France, the University of Lille bestowed on Hoover the first of a dozen honorary degrees; a street was named for him; and student admirers presented him with a beret d’Honneur.
While in Berlin on that trip, Hoover received an invitation from an astounding source: Adolf Hitler. He resolved to decline, but the U.S. ambassador urged him to meet the führer. Hoover’s attitude
toward the Third Reich is hard to determine. According to one account, the word Jew sent Hitler off on a standing tirade of several minutes. Sit down, Hoover allegedly told him. “That’s enough. I’m not interested in your views.” Yet Hoover permitted himself to be entertained sumptuously by Hermann Göring at his hunting lodge, and he showed no distress about the devouring of Austria. He even thought that the Nazis could improve upon the government of Czechoslovakia. On returning to America, he expressed dismay at “the heartbreaking persecution of helpless Jews,” but he fretted that Jews had too much influence on U.S. foreign policy.
As Europe moved inexorably toward war in the summer of 1939, Hoover published an article to remind Americans what the Great War had been like—not a time of glory but of unspeakable terror. He wrote about soldiers in the Battle of the Somme:
Here and there, like ants, they advanced under the thunder and belching volcanoes of 10,000 guns. Their lives were thrown away until half a million had died. Passing close by were unending lines of men plodding along the right side of the road to the front, not with drums and bands, but with saddened resignation. Down the left side came the unending lines of wounded men, staggering among unending stretchers and ambulances … . And it was but one battle of a hundred.
As late as mid-July, Hoover comforted himself with the conviction that Germany had no plans for aggression, certainly not against Britain or France. The main danger, he was convinced, came not from Hitler but from Roosevelt, who was discouraging the democracies from reaching an “accommodation” with Berlin. The Nazi rape of Poland in September and the outbreak of World War II neither chastened nor instructed him. In January 1940 Hoover still dismissed the thought that France might be overrun as “too impossible an event to warrant comment.” In his address that year to the Republican convention in Philadelphia, he scoffed at the notion that
the Fascist powers imperiled America. “Every whale that spouts is not a submarine,” he said. Anyway, it would not be disastrous for the United States “if the Old World falls.” But if America were to enter the war, “the last sanctuary of liberty” would disappear.
In 1940 Hoover once again believed his party’s convention might deadlock and delegates would choose him as their presidential candidate. When devoted loyalists advised him to face reality, he blew up at them. Private polls, he insisted, showed “a very extraordinary turn in the tide” in his direction. He ignored a Gallup Poll that found he had the support of only 2 percent of Republicans. For a few hours, it appeared his antennae might be finer tuned than the skeptics. As his car pulled up to his Philadelphia hotel, a crowd of well-wishers chanting “Hoover! Hoover! Hoover!” was so large that it stopped traffic. When he strode down the center aisle toward the podium to speak, the band struck up “California, Here I Come,” and, after he finished his warning against involvement in overseas quarrels, California delegates marched their state’s standard around the hall in the hope of starting a stampede for Hoover. Almost no one joined them. The Nazi blitzkrieg through the Low Countries and France meant that neither Hoover (never seriously considered) nor the isolationist Robert Taft were viable opponents for FDR, and the party, to Hoover’s dismay, settled instead for the internationalist upstart Wendell Willkie.
During the period between the convention and Pearl Harbor, Hoover saw events spin out of control. GOP leaders in Connecticut told him bluntly not to set foot in their state to campaign for the ticket because his presence would hurt the party. On the eve of the election, certain that this contest would be FDR’s last hurrah, Hoover denounced the president for spewing “billingsgate” at foreign leaders, presumably Hitler in particular. He was taken aback when the American people returned Roosevelt to the White House for an unprecedented third term. Hoover opposed lend-lease and dismissed the Four Freedoms as useless without a “Fifth Freedom”: free enterprise and the right “to accumulate property.” But no one seemed to be listening. In December 1941 the Japanese bombs
raining on Hawaii brought the United States into the global conflict he had so long striven to avert.
Hoover, who had been such a formidable figure in the Great War, sat out World War II unwanted and uncalled on. When Bernard Baruch, head of the War Industries Board in 1917, urged Roosevelt to appoint Hoover to direct economic mobilization, the president replied, “Well, I’m not Jesus Christ. I’m not going to raise him from the dead.” That retort was inexcusable, and FDR has been roundly scolded for not making use of the World War I food czar’s immense knowledge. But, considering Hoover’s unbridled hostility toward him, it was a bit much to expect the president to take his predecessor into his official family. Moreover, the American people’s bitter memories of the early years of the Great Depression made Hoover a poor choice for an administrator who would need to ask consumers to sacrifice. Furthermore, Roosevelt had, in fact, asked Hoover—through an intermediary—to come to the White House in September 1939 to advise him on how to get relief to the Poles and had been snubbed. “Hoover turned us down,” Eleanor Roosevelt told a friend. “He refused to call on the President.” Still, it was hard for Hoover. In January 1942 he likened himself to a “leper.”
Republicans did not make his tribulation easier. At the 1944 GOP convention, Hoover’s sons were shunted aside so that they would not appear in photographs with the Republican nominee, Thomas Dewey. At Wendell Willkie’s funeral in October, Eleanor Roosevelt graciously went out of her way to pay her respects to Hoover, but Dewey, sitting in the same pew, pretended not to know that his party’s most recent president was there. That behavior did not sit well. “Dewey has no inner reservoir of knowledge on which to draw for his thinking,” Hoover confided to a friend. “A man couldn’t wear a mustache like that without having it affect his mind.”
A bleak year, 1944 was a time of rupture. Lou Henry Hoover, his companion since campus days, died—and with Lou, who adored their home in Palo Alto, went his most enduring bond to California. He settled in for good at what he referred to as his
“comfortable monastery” on the thirty-first floor of the Waldorf Towers. The November election brought another change. After FDR’s fourth victory, Hoover put his twenty-two-room Georgian mansion on S Street on the market and turned his back on Washington as a domicile forever.
No longer did anyone ask whether Hoover was a Wilsonian Democrat or a Bull Moose progressive. Rooted perdurably in the camp of GOP archconservatives after the war, he took solace in the reelection of Joe McCarthy and was gratified by the emergence of Barry Goldwater. Not even small steps by the government were tolerable. “Only a drop of typhoid in a barrel of drinking water sickens a whole village,” he warned. Health insurance, he said, violated the “American way.” A mission statement he prepared in 1959 for the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace—a library and conservative think tank he had founded at Stanford in 1919—lauded private enterprise and warned against federal initiatives. Liberals were disheartened by John F. Kennedy’s cautious centrism, but Hoover maintained that “Kennedy’s goals were evil” because they promoted “socialism disguised as a welfare state.” In 1964 he told Goldwater that he would like to sell TVA, even “if I could only get a dollar for it.”
By targeting progressives, Hoover reinforced the impression that he had always been a reactionary. He contended that “liberalism” was a locution “applied to those who would deny the same freedom to others which they demand for themselves—a good word turned pink inside.” When he gave a televised speech at Stanford averring that “fuzzy-minded people” who were closet collectivists constituted a greater danger than Communists, the columnist I. F. Stone dismissed the talk as “the kind of chrome-plated guff which made Hoover seem a tiresome old bore before.”
Given these sentiments, no one anticipated that when Hoover was recruited into public service for the first time since he was expelled from the White House, the summons would come from a
Democratic president. Less than a year after he moved into Franklin Roosevelt’s chair in the Oval Office, Harry Truman began a courtship of Hoover. “He’s a nice enough old man,” Truman later remarked to a New Dealer, though “to the right of Louis the Fourteenth. But he deserves to be treated with respect as an ex-President. Roosevelt couldn’t stand him and he hated Roosevelt. But he … can do some things. No reason to treat him other than with respect.” Mail ran two to one against Truman’s overtures to what one irate constituent called “that contemptible character, Herbert Hoover.” The ex-president’s name, a Philadelphia judge wrote the White House, had “a connotation that can never be erased from the memories of democratic-minded Americans—Hoovervilles, apples on the street corners, soup lines—no we want none of Mr. Hoover in any capacity.” But Truman persisted, even though he thought his predecessor “doesn’t understand what’s happened in the world since McKinley.”
“I have a job for you that nobody else in the country can do,” Truman told Hoover on March 1, 1946. “You know more about feeding nations and people than anybody in the world.” He wanted Hoover to take the president’s private plane and fly to Europe and Asia to determine what should be done about the worldwide food crisis. Though distrustful, Hoover found the invitation irresistible. His long exile was ended. It also meant that he could enlist in a cause he cared deeply about. Even during his period of eclipse during World War II, he had raised large sums to feed the Poles and the Finns—all the while insisting that “the whole thing should be on donations from governments.” Shortly after the war, he had advanced a proposal that led to the creation of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF). Moreover, he had said recently, “It is now 11:59 on the clock of starvation.”
Over the next eighty-two days, the septuagenarian Hoover flew fifty thousand miles to assess the peril of famine in thirty-eight countries. “After the last war I directed food supplies for a large part of Europe,” he reminded reporters in Paris. “Now I’ve been called back like an old family doctor.” His onerous itinerary included
meetings with seven kings (among them, the young monarch of Siam), the British cabinet, thirty-six prime ministers, an Indian maharaja, Pope Pius XII, and Mahatma Gandhi. When the “food ambassador” returned to the United States for a brief stopover before going on to South America, he gave a radio talk that was the most eloquent address of his life. “Hunger hangs over the homes of more than eight hundred million people—over one-third of the people of the earth,” he said. “Hunger is a silent visitor who comes like a shadow. He sits beside every anxious mother three times a day. But we can save these people from the worst, if we will.”
Hoover got another important assignment during the Truman presidency when in 1947 the Republican Eightieth Congress established a Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch. An autocratic chair of what became known as the “Hoover Commission,” he surprised conservatives by pushing for strengthening the president’s managerial capability. Though he had ranted against FDR’s usurpation, he had become convinced that it was misguided for executive power to become so diffused that no one could be held accountable, especially in a nuclear age with dangerous enemies abroad. In its final report, according to the political scientist Peri Arnold, “the last Republican president joined in a celebration of the expansive, modern presidency” and the “central authority required by the majoritarian positive state.”
His idiosyncratic collaboration with Truman (they have been titled “the odd couple”) did not extend to foreign policy, however. Despite unparalleled prosperity, Hoover foresaw economic disaster in the willingness of the government to shoulder so large a proportion of the cost of defending the Western world. The Bretton Woods international system of monetary management, he thought, harbored “poison oak,” for it reflected the giddy penchant of Americans to lend “all their money to foreigners.” He had little hope for the United Nations unless it was revamped to exclude the Communist countries, and he urged the United States to “withdraw at once” from NATO, which he regarded as an exorbitant failure. When Truman fired Douglas MacArthur for insubordination,
Hoover, working through intermediaries, instructed the general to fly home immediately and then helped arrange a tumultuous welcome for him in San Francisco as well as an invitation to address Congress. He also suggested to MacArthur a theme for his oration: “The object of war is victory.” Even after the frenzied exaltation of MacArthur abated, Hoover regarded him as “a reincarnation of St. Paul into a great General of the Army who came out of the East.”
Hoover did not get on nearly so well with the Republican Dwight Eisenhower as he had with the Democrat Truman, however. Eisenhower honored him with an appointment to chair a second (and much more conservative) Hoover Commission on the executive branch and did all he could to cosset the former president—from inviting him on a fishing jaunt in Colorado to lionizing him on his eightieth birthday. But Hoover thought the general fell short because he would not do enough to free the government from the incubus of the New Deal. He charged that “Ike gave me a couple of left wingers” on the second Hoover Commission and had caved in to a radical cabal. “He is a very expensive president,” Hoover grumbled. Still worse, Eisenhower was inept with a fly rod.
In his final years, memories of the Great Depression dimmed, and the country increasingly came to regard Hoover as a sage, even as a national treasure. In 1957, at a banquet saluting Hoover, Senator John F. Kennedy declared: “We may say of him whom we honor tonight, as Edmund Burke said of Charles James Fox: ‘He has put to hazard his ease, his security, his interest, his power, and his … popularity … . He is traduced and abused … . He may live long, he may do much. But … he can never exceed what he does this day.’” Readers swiftly made Hoover’s 1958 book, The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson, a surprise best seller. When he turned ninety on August 10, 1964, sixteen states proclaimed “Herbert Hoover Day.”
It would be too much to say that Hoover mellowed, but he did reveal a self-deprecating, ironic wit that had not been conspicuous
before. “I’m the only person of distinction,” he said, “who’s ever had a depression named after him.” He enjoyed repeating the jest that the University Club in Manhattan was so stodgy a fellow could not take his mistress there—unless she was married to a member. When his niece revealed that she did not know how to cope with speakers who ran on and on, Hoover told her: “You just pass them up a little note and you just write on it ‘your fly is open’ and he’ll sit down right away.” Asked how he managed to endure the many years when leaders of both parties treated him as a pariah, he replied, “I outlived the bastards.”
Life for a former president, Hoover remarked, came down to little save “taking pills and dedicating libraries,” but he knew when he spoke that it was not true for him. Even in his last days he kept a battery of secretaries busy. On the eve of his ninetieth birthday, he was well along on yet another book. He “stayed young by working,” Richard Norton Smith has written, “as well as by nurturing the animosities of a lifetime.” He labored on a history of FDR and the New Deal so unbalanced that—to protect Hoover’s reputation—it has been hidden away. On one occasion, asked what he was doing in the middle of the night, he retorted, “I’m making my Roosevelt book more pungent.”
Hoover found little cause for joy, though, in the contemporary political scene. He recognized that Goldwater’s campaign was imploding and that the country was about to return by acclamation Lyndon Baines Johnson, sponsor of the War on Poverty and the Great Society—statist programs Hoover abhorred. Prospects abroad were no better. Asked by an acquaintance bound for Europe whether there was anything he would like done, Hoover replied, “Well, you can tell the British to take their hands out of our pockets.” Nearly blind, toothless, and confined to a wheelchair, he stayed feisty to the last. He was so hard of hearing that his secretaries had to shout. That was all right, Hoover told a visitor. “I’m used to being hollered at.”
A little before noon on October 20, 1964, he died of an upper intestinal tract hemorrhage. Only one former president, John Adams,
had lived so long. It fell to his last adversary, Lyndon Johnson, to order flags lowered to half-staff and to declare a period of thirty days of national mourning. Hoover, obituaries dutifully recorded, was almost universally judged to have been a failed president—an ineluctable reminder that the Oval Office requires more than dedication and managerial skills, both of which he had in abundance. But there was more to his career than the four years in the White House. Hoover, an associate told the press, “fed more people and saved more lives than any other man in history.” On a lovely Indian summer afternoon, Herbert Hoover was interred at a site he had chosen—a grassy rise overlooking the Iowa cottage in which he had been born nine decades before.