PROLOGUE

Herbert Hoover’s birthday, August 10, is not observed as a federal holiday, an occasion for patriotic parades or shopping mall clearance sales. Banks do not close, and the mail is delivered on time. Ordinary Americans attribute no unusual significance to the date. Yet in the minuscule village of West Branch, Iowa, descendants of Hoover, townspeople, and, occasionally, state dignitaries gather annually to pay homage to a man they consider the patron saint of their town, but whom much of America remembers as an economic Satan. When not demonized, he is relegated to a historical footnote, remembered bitterly as the incumbent president during the first four years of America’s Great Depression, a calamity laid at his door. Few presidents have been so routinely vilified. In polls ranking chief executives, he sinks to almost the bottom. High school textbooks often dismiss him in a few paragraphs; college texts allot only a little more.

Nonetheless, Herbert Hoover was one of the most extraordinary Americans of modern times. The kaleidoscopic range of his life’s work, constituting an almost unbroken record of success and offering writers and readers little fodder for criticism, would justify an inclusive biography even if he had never become president. The most versatile American since Benjamin Franklin, Hoover led a life that was a prototypical Horatio Alger story, except that Horatio Alger stories stop at the pinnacle of success. As one of Hoover’s early biographers wrote, “Truth does what fiction dares not try to do.”¹

Orphaned before the age of ten, by twenty-one Hoover had earned his way through Stanford University, where he won a reputation as a diligent student, a superb administrator, and an astute campus politician who demonstrated brilliance in his chosen field of geological engineering. He met his future wife, who soon joined his adventures as he roamed the world, finding fame and fortune. By twenty-four, Hoover was superintendent of an enormously rich gold mine in the arid wasteland of Western Australia. At twenty-seven, he managed a coal-mining operation in China and narrowly escaped death during the Boxer Rebellion. By forty, he was legendary in the mining community and a multimillionaire, having accumulated a fortune that supported his family for the remainder of his life.²

From the cornfields of Iowa to the apple orchards of Oregon, the goldfields of Australia, and the coalfields of northern China, Hoover’s early life was spent at or bordering frontiers. Herbert Hoover was an eminently practical idealist, lacking a scintilla of cynicism, with a profound moral compass firmly steeped in the American dream. Although Hoover’s own dream was tarnished by heartrending interludes and leavened by national tragedy, he refused to relinquish it. America, he believed, was the world’s most open society, imperfect yet pregnant with hope, flexible, resilient, and inspiring, a land that nourished and appreciated personalities as varied as Henry Ford, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Jonas Salk.

Hoover personified the American dream he extolled. The first president born west of the Mississippi, he was the first to use radio during a campaign, the first to have a telephone on his desk in the Oval Office, and the first commerce secretary to reach the White House. He was summoned to service by more presidents than any other American chief executive, including Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower. At his death, he had been awarded more honorary degrees than any other American. Most important, it is estimated that his relief efforts saved more human lives than those of any other individual in human history.³

Although he never carried a firearm or endured the shelling, gas, barbed wire, and machine guns of the First World War, Hoover emerged as the greatest humanitarian of the bloodbath that claimed well over 10 million lives. Amid the carnage, he saved the lives of millions of starving Belgians trapped in the vortex of war. After the fighting had consumed the lives of soldiers and destroyed the reputations of statesmen, Hoover rose above the embittered, self-serving peacemakers who gathered at Versailles and, as his friend John Maynard Keynes observed, became “the only man who emerged from that ordeal with his reputation enhanced.”⁴

Although the war ended in 1918, Hoover’s relief work was only beginning. His postwar American Relief Administration (ARA) fed nations from the North Sea to the Urals. The ARA’s European Children’s Fund, the forerunner to CARE, fed millions of children. During 1921–23, when drought, famine, and disease threatened 15 million people in the newborn Soviet Union, Secretary of Commerce Hoover set aside his antipathy toward Communism and persuaded President Warren G. Harding and Congress to allocate $20 million to distribute food and medicine to the Soviet peasants. Ironically, although most Americans remember Hoover for the anguish of the Great Depression, abroad he earned a reputation among common people as a selfless patron who staved off starvation, typhoid, and cholera during their periods of distress. In 1927, Hoover brought his reputation as a “Master of Emergencies” home when he rescued and rehabilitated the Mississippi Valley during the Great Flood that inundated hundreds of thousands of acres, sweeping away towns, cattle, and people.⁵

The catastrophic flood was a prelude to Hoover’s presidency, when he found himself deluged by human misery. His stained reputation as president is at least partly undeserved. A Progressive in the lineage of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Hoover was neither a do-nothing nor a laissez-faire president. On the contrary, he became the first chief executive to pit the government against the economic cycle. Erecting more public works in four years than were constructed during the previous twenty, he pushed through a divided Congress a greater array of constructive legislation than had any previous chief executive who served during hard times, and incubated ideas integral to the New Deal. American politics could hardly have leaped from Coolidge to Franklin Delano Roosevelt without Hoover in between. Still, Hoover was not simply FDR writ small. Hoover considered deficit spending during a recession a necessity, yet he did not believe that infinitely greater spending would yield infinitely greater prosperity. He advised that the government could only redistribute wealth, not create new wealth. He distributed public works according to counties of highest unemployment, irrespective of political influence, refusing to barter patronage for votes. Hoover did not end the Depression in his single term, yet no other democratic government worldwide ended it that quickly either.⁶

Although the Great Depression was Hoover’s major concern, it was not his only one. He pioneered summit diplomacy, initiated the Good Neighbor Policy with Latin America (fleshed out by FDR), and tried to cobble together international peace in a world bursting apart at the seams. Hoover reformed prisons, revised the legal code, ameliorated conditions for workers with the Norris–La Guardia Act, and improved the health and welfare of children. The president respected the separation of powers. No law he signed was declared unconstitutional. No federal appointee was dismissed for corruption. He created a lean bureaucracy and preserved labor peace. His administration cracked down on bootlegging—not surprisingly, unsuccessfully, although Al Capone was apprehended and sentenced to federal prison.⁷

As the Depression deepened, the president’s popularity plummeted. Despite his increasingly aggressive legislative assault on the Depression, the nation remained mired in steep unemployment and business stagnation. He found himself poised above an earthquake fault sufficient to swallow any president. Any incumbent elected in 1928 would likely have been defeated in 1932. After winning his first term in a landslide, Hoover lost out on a second in a landslide. Voters could not have been correct both times. Although historians often charge that Hoover’s exertions were too little, too late, his Democratic opponent in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt, during his campaign denounced the incumbent for doing too much, too soon, for piling up a mountain of debt, bloating the bureaucracy, and wasting taxpayer dollars. Roosevelt promised to slash spending by 25 percent and balance the budget if elected.

As an ex-president, Hoover sought historical vindication. Never again considered infallible or invincible, in time he recovered and served his country ably in his reincarnation as an elder statesman. Hoover’s public service—political, humanitarian, philanthropic, and literary—following his White House years embellished his stature, though it never fully restored his place in presidential history. Yet he was constitutionally incapable of remaining merely a spectator to public life. Because Hoover was an author and a highly sought speaker, his energy, productivity, and resolve were extraordinary. He did not turn from one task to another during this industrious period; he performed them simultaneously. He was constantly on the move, mentally and physically, striving to remain near the action.

Hoover gravitated incrementally to the right after his presidency in response to the swelling of the federal bureaucracy, the growth of executive power, and the increasing national debt. He became the conscience of the GOP philosophy during his exclusion from the inner circles of official Washington, a consistent champion of the conservative Republican principles—leading some to conclude retroactively that his presidency had been more conservative than it actually was. Following the Second World War he led another mission of mercy to alleviate the scourge of famine. The former president chaired commissions to reorganize the executive branch under Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, and he participated in two foreign policy debates that gripped the nation: entry into World War II prior to Pearl Harbor, and the use of nuclear power versus land armies from the 1950s onward. The frontier orphan, country bred but city polished, also aided slum boys through the Boys Clubs of America, a deterrent to juvenile delinquency.

From his suite in the Waldorf Towers, high above Manhattan, an endless stream of books flowed out, increasingly polished in style, provocative in discernment, and versatile in content. Having been denied political vindication, he sought historical acceptance and left a record of the history he had witnessed and helped shape. Throughout these years, he was the single most important bearer of the torch of American conservatism between his own administration and that of Ronald Reagan, who tapped a reservoir of political philosophy that might have vanished except for Herbert Hoover’s principles, conscience, tenacity, and ideals.⁸