ONE

A Quaker Orphan on the Frontier

Herbert Hoover nearly died young. At two, he became infected with croup and lay on his tiny bed, coughing himself to exhaustion, unable to breathe, while his parents and relatives struggled to revive him. His father, Jesse, in futility, finally pronounced the stony, cold, purple little body dead. At that moment, the boy’s uncle, Henry John Minthorn, a physician, arrived and began to work desperately on the still child. Nothing worked. At last, he applied his mouth to the child’s and breathed air into his lungs. The infant choked, heaved, and slowly began to revive. It was the first, but not the last, close brush with death for Herbert Hoover.¹

He had been born about midnight on August 10–11, 1874, in West Branch, Iowa. A midnight birth meant he could have selected either August 10 or 11 as his birthday. He chose the eleventh, yet his biographers selected the tenth. Nicknamed Bertie, he had an older brother, Tad, about four years his senior, and a sister, May, approximately two years younger. By the time he turned three, he and Tad were inseparable, a bond severed only by death, though he and May never became close.

The Hoover children were descended from six generations of Quakers, about one-third Swiss and three-quarters British. Their ancestors had migrated in the mid-1700s for a variety of religious and political motives, but chiefly seeking free or cheap land. Bertie’s paternal ancestors had lived initially in Pennsylvania, then moved south to Maryland and North Carolina, thence to Ohio, and finally to the village of West Branch in 1854, always relocating in groups connected by kinship and religion. His maternal heritage also originated in Pennsylvania; from there his mother’s family migrated to Canada, lived briefly in Ohio, and finally landed near West Branch in 1859. Two paternal ancestors were colonial governors; none on either side fought in the American Revolution. Both sides of the family converted to Quakerism, the paternal from Lutheranism, the maternal from Congregationalism. The Quaker lineage was intense as well as lengthy. It included evangelists, physicians, missionaries, and agents who ministered to the needs of Native Americans. The early generations were predominantly farmers.²

Hoover’s father, Jesse, was gaunt and muscular, with brown hair and eyes and a Quaker beard, and was infused with kinetic energy, a trait Bertie also inherited from his mother, Huldah. As the village blacksmith, Jesse was mechanically gifted, like both his sons, and his quick wit and storehouse of tall, spellbinding tales made him popular in the community. He won election to the town council and became village assessor.³

Jesse’s devout Quaker wife likely did not appreciate his humor. The two were such opposites in personality that some initially considered their marriage a mismatch. At twelve, the serious, slender, green-eyed, brown-haired girl stopped fights among boys on the playground. At her father’s funeral the following year, she consecrated her life to God. Huldah Minthorn was well educated for a woman of her time, graduating from a Quaker academy and attending two semesters at the embryonic state university at Iowa City. Then she taught at nearby Muscatine, where she was known as a biblical scholar and hard-nosed disciplinarian who converted all eighteen of her students to the Quaker creed during a single year. Intense and solemn, Huldah taught her children to be direct, to set priorities, to avoid gossip, “to live in peace, and to work for the common good among all men of all races.” Though firm, she was tolerant and embraced the couple when one of her relatives married outside the faith. When Tad asked his mother if her doctrines represented the only way, she invariably answered, “Yes.” Yet she explained that her version of heaven included multitudes who had entered in some other way.⁴

Once a stop on the Underground Railroad, the secret network that smuggled fugitive slaves to freedom in Canada, West Branch was a bustling farm village of about four hundred, located at a crossroads on the Iowa prairie. Notably lacking a tavern, West Branch had twelve stores and a few paved sidewalks, but no paved streets, public lighting, or municipal water except for a town pump. Frugality and thrift were ingrained by religion and necessity. Farmers raised corn, wheat, hogs, dairy cows, and chickens, mostly for domestic consumption. Winters were frigid, with winds that whipped across the virtually treeless prairie. Summers were torrid, offering little shade, punctuated by thunderstorms and occasional tornadoes. Typhoid, malaria, diphtheria, tonsillitis, and tooth loss were endemic. Malnutrition resulted from an abundant but unbalanced diet. In a setting where only the hardy survived, Bertie overcame mumps, measles, diphtheria, and chicken pox. “It was a Montessori school in stark reality,” he later wrote.⁵

The Hoover family lived in a tiny cottage measuring only twelve by twenty feet, wedged together in a combined sitting room and kitchen, an adjoining bedroom where the children slept, and another bedroom for the parents. Outside there was a back porch, and an outhouse near the well. The building rested upon the banks of the west branch of the Wapsinonoc, usually a mild creek. After thunderstorms it sometimes swelled, surged up to the front door, and swept away fences, bridges, horses, cattle, and people. A footbridge connected the modest home with Jesse’s blacksmith shop on the adjoining bank. The setting was humble yet not bleak. A white picket fence surrounded the front yard, where Huldah planted marigolds, snapdragons, and tiger lilies. “My life started amid golden love and glorious sunshine,” Tad remembered.⁶

Bertie’s life began auspiciously. His parents were kind, upright, popular in the community, upwardly mobile, and caring. He was surrounded by a nurturing environment of fellow Quakers, including aunts, uncles, and cousins. Their stable community included no rich and no poor. The family was attuned to the changing of seasons, the sowing and reaping of crops, and the rhythms of nature.⁷

No twentieth-century president, with the exception of Theodore Roosevelt, derived such spiritual replenishment from nature. Hoover would later look back on his time in West Branch with nostalgia for small-town life and scenic beauty. It marked his lifelong addiction to the outdoors, a taste for pastoral settings, and empathy for rural America. “I prefer to think of Iowa as I saw it through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy,” he later wrote, “and the eyes of all ten-year-old Iowa boys are or should be filled with the wonders of Iowa’s streams and woods, of the mystery of growing crops.”⁸ He recalled Cook’s Hill, “that great long hill where, on winter nights, we slid down at terrific speeds with our tummies tight in home-made sleds.” Local creeks and rivers were swarming with sunfish and catfish, which he and his brother caught, cooked, and ate. Their primitive tackle was a willow pole with a butcher line for a string and cheap hooks. For good luck they spit on their bait—a worm.⁹ As a world-known figure, Hoover was asked which subject he liked best in school as a young man. “None,” he answered. “They were something to race through so I could get out of doors.”¹⁰

Hoover remembered his childhood in Iowa as a time of daily adventures and exploration, “the wonder of growing crops, the excitements of the harvest, the journeys to the woods for nuts and hunting, the joys of snowy winters, the comfort of the family fireside, of good food and tender care.”¹¹ Not only did he learn character-molding lessons that tested his mettle and stretched his imagination; life on the frontier also gave him a tough, resilient body, and neither farm nor village chores daunted him. He dutifully planted corn, hoed gardens, milked cows, and sawed and carried wood. As he worked, Hoover tapped his fertile young mind and planted seeds that blossomed as he matured and made him an unusually creative person with enormous drive. He learned to be resourceful, to rely on his intuition and instincts and, because he was sometimes alone, to trust his own judgment. He learned to soften loneliness.

Bertie demonstrated unusual industry in a hobby that foreshadowed his profession. Frequently trekking to the Burlington railroad tracks, where the construction engineers had hauled glacial gravel and dumped it as ballast along the road, he foraged for specimens, finding agate, coral, crystals, and fossils of ancient creatures embedded in stone, which provoked his curiosity. He searched along the edges of ponds, creeks, and rivers, carried the rocks home, and labeled them. The collection became his most prized possession. Bertie was fortunate to find a local dentist, Dr. William Walker, who shared his hobby of collecting stones and was an amateur geologist who owned agate from Colorado and marble from Vermont.¹²

Much of the boy’s time, when he was not at home, at school, or outdoors, was spent in Quaker worship. The creed dominated the small communities of his youth. Officially known as the Society of Friends, the Quaker denomination was created in England by George Fox in 1652 to restore Christianity to its humble origins, to strip away the ceremony and worldly ostentation that had crept into Anglicanism, Catholicism, and Presbyterianism. Quakers rejected adornments such as steeples, stained glass windows, and organs. Dress was plain, emphasizing subdued colors of gray and black, and language was candid. The Friends, as they were known, did not recognize any person as their superior and employed no form of salutation that might be interpreted as a sign of servility. They considered all men brothers, none exalted over another. All agreements between Quakers were oral; their word was sufficient. They evinced resolute individualism, tolerance, thrift, directness, and transparent honesty. Any type of honest labor, mental or manual, received due respect, and education was venerated. Modesty, humility, an aversion to idle gossip, and protection of privacy, all Quaker traits, would later prove handicaps to Hoover as president.¹³

Although Quakers were stubbornly individualistic, they also believed in bonds of unity and in cooperation, especially within their immediate communities. They cared for one another, and Quakers were rarely in dire need. Yet they did not want to encourage sloth and helped only those in want through no fault of their own. Despite their equability, there was a hard edge to Quaker charity. The able-bodied were expected to support themselves. An ill person, for example, would be helped only for the duration of his or her hardship. Hoover’s sect was highly disciplined, rarely wasted time, and believed in social order. Thus, freedom was never absolute. The ideas of liberty and responsibility were merged, and Hoover described his own ideal as “ordered liberty.” From his religion Hoover also derived his philosophy combining idealism and practicality. His sect did not oppose wholesome recreation, yet life was a serious business, and individuals should be purpose driven. They received fulfillment through assisting, serving others, and close friendships, with an unusual affinity for lifelong bonds. Men were entitled to the rewards of honest labor, and the Friends strove for social justice yet discouraged the flaunting of wealth.¹⁴

Quakerism took root in West Branch from its founding, and it remains influential to this day. After outgrowing services in private homes, the early settlers erected a one-room meetinghouse that seated about a hundred. With no predetermined programs, congregants relied on spirit to inspire them to pray, to speak, or, rarely, to sing. Singing or excessive speaking by an individual was attributed to vanity or to inspiration from a dark source. Sunday entertainment of any kind was discouraged. Services lasted about two hours, much of the time devoted to silent meditation.

While he occasionally chafed at discipline, Hoover never rebelled against the essential doctrines of his childhood faith, although he developed minor vices such as smoking cigars and drinking in moderation, and his Sabbath attendance was irregular. Hoover was whimsical about some Quaker customs, which he remembered nostalgically. “Quaker children were submitted to a certain mild discipline,” he wrote. They were, for example, required to read a chapter of the New Testament every morning. “Out of which I became for life a walking Concordance,” he explained. “But in a large way there were no inhibitions on the non-destructive energies of children.” Though Huldah rejected novels as untruth and limited the family library to the Bible, an encyclopedia, and tracts denouncing alcohol, her mischievous sons sneaked peeks at adventure novels such as Robinson Crusoe and The Deerslayer when they visited the homes of more lenient relatives. Hoover remembered that his parents and extended family stimulated the imaginations of their children by encouraging fantasies, including beliefs in Mother Goose and Santa Claus. “But any taint of militarism, including wooden swords and toy soldiers, were rigidly excluded.” Christmas was a time for homespun enjoyment. He remembered, “Cutting down a Christmas tree was a ceremony. It was decorated with strings of popcorn for snow. Roasting the popcorn, collecting nuts from the woods and making the candy from maple and sorghum molasses were children’s privileges.” On Christmas morning, the children awakened to stockings stuffed by Santa Claus, and that day’s service at the meetinghouse featured the reading aloud of the second chapter of Luke and the Sermon on the Mount. At noon, “there was a superlative Christmas dinner,” he recalled, “with all the fixings known even to New York City, except caviar and alcohol.”¹⁵

Hoover was proud of the self-sufficiency of his pioneer Quaker ancestors. “They operated their own creameries, meat packing, and fruit preserving,” he wrote. “They ground their own cornmeal, made their own maple and sorghum syrup, made their own soap and repaired their own machinery.” The children worked after school and enjoyed it, and everyone practiced thrift.¹⁶

Hoover carried most Quaker traits all his life. His reticence, for example, and self-effacing style, his preference for privacy, and his devotion to his immediate and extended family, as well as his commitment to those legitimately in need, were common among Quakers. Still, the adult Herbert Hoover did not emerge from a mold. In some respects he was atypical, or possessed certain traits to an unusual degree. It would be an oversimplification to consider Hoover’s environment deterministic. After all, West Branch produced many Quakers yet only one Herbert Hoover.

Bertie entered the first grade at five, the youngest student, somewhat ill prepared. He missed the first week and was often absent. Temporarily held back from promotion to the next grade, he compensated for the lost time and rejoined his classmates. He soon proved an average student who excelled at math. Popular with teachers and schoolmates, he was at times a target for school-ground bullies because he had been taught not to fight back. His first-grade teacher, Mrs. Stephen Sunier, reflected, “He was studious. A real cherub. Just a sweet little boy. Bertie was a smiling boy and good-natured but he had a reserve about him that was puzzling. Yes, he had wonderful dignity for a little fellow. You didn’t have to tell him to study.” Mollie Brown, who taught Bertie in the third and fourth grades, was especially fond of him. Brown instructed him in arithmetic, geography, language, and physiology, for which no textbooks were used. She spent her own spare time helping him keep abreast when he missed class. By fourth grade he had become more serious and somewhat withdrawn, though still likable. “His mother was rather strict with him,” Brown said, “but when she gave him permission to go to the swimming hole he would fairly fly to see who got there first, and he would be half undressed before he got there. He was a playful boy, yet he remembered his lessons and was quiet.”¹⁷

When he was a small boy, Bertie’s attention was not always directed on his studies. The Hoover brothers played pickup games of baseball and football at recess, after school, and between chores. Bertie was a better-than-average baseball player. A bit chubby, he possessed average speed yet was agile and determined. Huldah enrolled Bertie in the Band of Hope, a youth organization that promoted Prohibition. Though uninterested in politics as a boy, he later remembered when his mother remained at the polls all day to help persuade men to vote Iowa a dry state, which they did. Bertie claimed that even the town drunk voted for abstention.¹⁸

The Hoovers lived in their small cottage only a few years before Jesse sold the house and blacksmith shop, began selling and repairing farm implements and home accessories, and purchased a second, larger home. Here, sister May was born. Bertie enjoyed watching his father coat barbed wire with smoldering tar in order to preserve the barbs. Once, while alone in the shop, wondering whether tar might burn, the boy tossed a hot ember into the boiling vat, which burst into flames, nearly destroying Jesse’s business and engulfing an adjacent store. Quickly, townsmen assembled a bucket brigade to douse the inferno. Two years later, his business prospering, Jesse bought a more spacious home. A mansion by the standards of Bertie’s tiny birthplace, the house sat on about an acre of land. Five red maples grew on the front lawn, with a crab apple tree and a vegetable and flower garden in the backyard. The Hoover boys later recalled family picnics, Fourth of July celebrations, county fairs, and visits to relatives. Nonetheless, the happy memories were overshadowed by the tragic events of those years.¹⁹

Until the winter of his sixth year, Bertie’s world seemed nearly idyllic. His parents nurtured their children and enjoyed life. A strong, robust man in his prime, Jesse exuded vibrant health. Energetic and fun loving, he had a new home, a large circle of friends, and a thriving business. Then Jesse contracted what initially appeared to be merely a cold, but actually constituted the early symptoms of typhoid. An epidemic had spread throughout the village, disseminated by contaminated water. The children were sent to visit their uncle Benjah, who owned a farm near West Branch, while Jesse recovered, but he grew worse. On December 15, Benjah loaded Jesse’s children into his one-horse sleigh and sped them home, where they found their aunts and uncles praying over the corpse of their father, dead at thirty-four. Tad took the loss hardest, writing that his father’s unexpected death had created “a void unfillable and unfilled forever. Here, then, passed out of my life my hero, the one in whom were found all those qualities and noble attributes which, in the budding ambition of later years, I desired for my own.”²⁰

Huldah now became the dominant figure in the children’s lives and virtually their sole support. Though she inherited his small estate, Jesse left a modest life insurance policy, and his farm-implement business was sold. To supplement her family’s income, Huldah harvested vegetables from the garden, took in sewing, and rented rooms to boarders. With her husband gone, profound religious emotions began to surface in the sensitive young widow. She spoke out more frequently at meetings, earned a reputation for inspired soliloquies, and soon became an itinerant preacher, traveling to nearby meetinghouses. As her reputation grew, she sometimes stayed away several weeks, boarding her children with relatives. Huldah was conflicted by the varied responsibilities of raising her family, earning a meager subsistence, and serving God. She wrote her sister Agnes, “I just keep myself ready first for service to my master—then to work at whatever I can to earn a little to add to our living and then the care of my little ones.” Her life a constant tug-of-war between her preaching and her children, she was plagued by a guilty conscience because she loved both. “Every day is full,” she explained, “and sometimes the nights. I will try to do what I can and not neglect the children.”²¹

While Huldah was traveling, Bertie, Tad, and May often stayed with their uncle Benjah and aunt Ellen. Benjah had married a Methodist and converted to his wife’s faith, but that did not disrupt the family relationship; they had habitually dined with Bertie’s parents and their children each Sabbath. Bertie and Tad became close friends with their cousin George and enjoyed high jinks on the farm, where discipline was somewhat milder. On one occasion the boys kidnapped an owlet from its mother’s nest and tried vainly to train it as a pet. The nocturnal bird provided little amusement; it was awake only when the boys slept, and eventually it escaped.²²

Bertie and Tad spent one magic summer in the company of six young Osage Indian braves who attended the Indian Industrial School at West Branch and remained during the vacation period. The young Native Americans and the Hoover boys built a hideaway secluded within a twenty-acre grove of trees, away from the prying eyes of adults. The boys learned Native American lore, such as making and shooting bows and arrows and building fires by rubbing sticks or rocks together to strike a spark. Tad and Bertie also made slingshots for shooting birds, which could be concealed from their mother more easily than a quiver. Usually they shot at robins, doves, or prairie chickens, but on one occasion they ambushed and roasted a flock of domestic chickens that had strayed from a farm. Bertie was too young to hunt seriously, but he tagged along, and the expeditions whetted his appetite to spend more time in the wilderness.²³

A few years later, Hoover spent an entire summer on the Osage Reservation in Indian Territory (Oklahoma), where his uncle, Laban Miles, was the Indian agent. Bert and the Miles family were the only white people on the reservation, and Bert played daily with a tribe of young Osage Indians who taught him their wilderness lore, lessons that were implanted for life. Bert attended the Indian school and immersed himself in their lifestyle. For the moment, he experienced a summer of glorious freedom without Quaker restraint, onerous chores, or loneliness.²⁴

If the death of Jesse had been a trauma to the children, the next loss was devastating. In the bitter winter cold of 1884, Huldah left home for Muscatine to preach. With no transportation available, she walked about four miles after she had given her bed to an older person the previous night and slept on a chilly floor. She contracted a severe cold, which worsened, despite treatment, and evolved into pneumonia. Huldah died on February 24 at the age of thirty-six and was buried next to Jesse in the family plot. Tad was inconsolable. He complained of “a poignant grief for the early ending of a life of one who was always loving and kind and tender.” He expressed his anguish with heartrending words: “The lady of the golden sunshine of the little brown house had gone away and there were left only three small children, adrift on the wreck of their little world.”²⁵

Bertie, age nine, was publicly stoic, yet the pain carved a gorge of despair that the years could not bridge. The final prop of stability had been knocked from beneath the heartbroken orphans. The trauma compelled Hoover to become independent and self-reliant while yet a boy. It deprived him of love and physical affection, which as an adult he found difficult to express demonstrably. Some fifty years later, he wrote of the time spent in West Branch: “As gentle as are the memories of that time I am not recommending a return to the good old days. Sickness was greater and death came sooner.”²⁶ Still, he repeatedly advised children to take their time growing up, enjoy their early years, and avoid trepidation about the future. He was speaking from experience.

Huldah had entrusted a local Quaker attorney, Lawrie Tatum, respected for his scrupulous probity, to become legal guardian of the children should she die, and the probate court approved her choice. The family property was auctioned, and Tatum invested the revenue at 8 percent interest, to be preserved, if possible, for the children’s college education. Bertie’s share of the estate was $718.32, his sole financial resource between the ages of ten and twenty-one. All the relatives were young and none could afford to take in all three orphans, so the despondent children were apportioned among relatives in the West Branch area. May, age eight, was raised by Grandmother Minthorn. Tad, about fourteen, lived for a time with his uncle Merlin, then was taken in by his uncle Davis, who dwelled in a sod house and groomed the boy to become a yeoman farmer like himself. Bertie’s fourth-grade teacher, Mollie Brown, offered to adopt her favorite pupil, but the family council rejected Brown on the grounds that she was unmarried and worked full-time.²⁷

Bertie was thus assigned to his uncle Allan, who owned a farm about two miles outside of West Branch, and had a son, Wally, near Bertie’s age, who became his cousin’s best friend. Allan was a subsistence farmer whose life was a constant struggle to meet payments on his mortgaged farm, with little remaining disposable cash. Bert adapted well, though he had to work harder than he had for his own parents. Together the family boiled soap, weaved carpets, refined sorghum into sugar, churned butter and cheese, canned fruits and vegetables, and made jam. The children helped to plant and harvest crops, feed the livestock, milk cows, and curry horses. Bert and Wally walked ten miles to the nearest forest to cut trees for firewood, diced them into smaller pieces, and carried them home in repeated trips. Allan paid the boys 1 cent per hundred for capturing potato bugs, 2 cents for cleaning out the barn, and 5 cents for each hundred thistles cut. Bertie never shirked the tedious work and enjoyed being outside. He liked his hardworking, good-humored uncle and would have been content to grow to maturity in this familiar and cheerful environment. Yet his odyssey was unfinished. His life had come to resemble The Pilgrim’s Progress, with similar challenges and segues. But like all challenges, it meant opportunity for growth.²⁸

In the fall of 1885, Uncle Allan received a letter from Huldah’s brother, Dr. Henry John Minthorn, an erudite, versatile, devout man who was superintendent of Friends Pacific Academy in Newberg, Oregon. Minthorn’s son had died recently and he wished to adopt Bert, whom he could provide with a better education and superior vocational opportunities than were available at West Branch. The Hoover-Minthorn clan ruminated about uprooting the boy again, yet the educational argument clinched their decision. Eleven-year-old Bertie, who rarely cried, burst into tears. He was leaving everyone and everything he loved. He soon boarded an emigrant train, a barely spruced-up cattle car in which travelers had to supply their own food and bedding, for the seven-day, two-thousand-mile journey. With Aunt Millie’s repast of fried chicken, ham, bread, and meat pies, the apprehensive youngster was dispatched under the watchful eyes of Oliver Hammel and his emigrant family of West Branch Quakers. Hoover later reflected that the Minthorns were correct in believing that he could obtain a better education in the Far West, and without being transplanted, he would not have become the same man.²⁹

Dr. Minthorn met Bertie at the train depot in Portland and they boarded a stern-wheeled steamer down the Willamette River to Newberg, a rustic Quaker trading post barely larger than West Branch. The orphan’s new home was a wonderland of virgin fir trees, which, clustered closely, shaded out the underbrush and created the canopy of an arched cathedral. The Willamette Valley was a place like none Bertie had seen, an enchanting frontier of beauty and mystery, permeated with a mild, inviting climate. The rivers were majestic, leaping with schools of silvery fish. If West Branch had been Utopia, this was Eden.³⁰

John Minthorn had trekked west with his Quaker family to build a New Jerusalem in the green forests of Oregon. He settled on land near Newberg, where in 1885 he helped construct the Friends Pacific Academy he hoped would grow into a college—today called George Fox University. Minthorn was humorless and less indulgent than Uncle Allan, and he loathed wasted time. There was no devil in Minthorn’s workshop because there was no idleness. If Cedar County had stamped a work ethic onto Bertie, life in Oregon hammered it in on an anvil. Minthorn, the same man who had breathed life into Hoover when the boy lay dying of croup, was a dominant figure in the Quaker community. He managed a land company, was the town’s sole physician, and acted as superintendent at the academy where both he and his wife also taught. A devout Quaker, he possessed unusual drive and a vivid imagination, as did his protégé.

Bertie, now called Bert, worked arduously. Before school and on weekends, he watered and curried Minthorn’s ponies, fed the livestock, milked the cows, and split firewood. Once, after the boy forgot to water the animals, Minthorn wakened him after midnight and sent him scurrying to the pump. During the summer recess Bert helped Minthorn saw down trees, some of them four feet in diameter, then burn the stumps, wasting priceless timber in a headlong rush to till the virgin soil. Hoover swept and mopped the academy and, because Minthorn’s three daughters were too young to help, did household chores such as washing dishes and laundering clothes. Bert’s childhood had evaporated. Gone was much of the leisure of youth, the latitude to grow up slowly. Minthorn was hard yet not heartless, tolerant and fair, yet all business, habitually clad in drab Quaker colors. He further instilled a work ethic in Hoover, yet he admitted, “I do not think he was very happy.”³¹ He added, “Our home was not like the one he left with his own parents and almost no work.”³² Bert did not grumble, but neither did he beam.

If the weekdays were demanding, the Sabbath seemed downright grueling. Chores began at dawn, followed by the interminable observance in the meetinghouse, frequently in stoic silence. Then the family walked home in silent contemplation. Following a period of enforced meditation, there was a meeting of the Band of Hope in which the instructor depicted the damnation of an alcoholic by exhibiting graphic photographs of emaciated, broken-down hard drinkers. At home, Bert was expected to read a redeeming book before falling asleep exhausted. One Sunday he persuaded some of his cousins to skip Sunday school to go fishing. They accidentally tipped over the boat and returned covered with mud. The next day, the local Quakers prayed for twelve hours for the sinners. Yet Bert did not believe God frowned at him. “My God is a good, kind God,” he said privately.³³

Minthorn was no ogre—quite the contrary. Beneath the stern exterior lay a gentle heart. He was unselfish and forgiving, possessing a superb mind, which he did not flaunt; he and Bert were, in fact, much alike. John possessed imagination, communication skills, and human empathy for his patients. Hoover concluded that Minthorn was “a severe man on the surface but like all Quakers kindly at the bottom.”³⁴ Before he left Oregon, they had forged bonds that went beyond mere acceptance. Not the least of the lessons Bert partook of were self-discipline and sympathy for the world’s downtrodden. Though demanding, Minthorn was not cruel, and he could be generous. He treated the poor free of charge. As a young man Minthorn had driven a wagon on the Underground Railroad. He was a Quaker pacifist, yet with a caveat: he served in the Union Army as a surgeon and participated in the Battle of Shiloh. “Turn your other cheek once,” he told Bert, “but if he smites it, then punch him.”³⁵

The physician invited his adopted son to ride his buggy with him when making house calls, and on these long rides he unwound and regaled the boy with exciting stories about his adventurous life, exhibiting the same low-voltage magnetism that would later be attributed to Hoover himself. Having served as a missionary and Indian agent among Native Americans in Oklahoma and Oregon, John had a strong sense of social justice. At Friends Pacific Academy, he taught not only physiology, drawn from his medical expertise, but history and literature, in which he was well-read. Intellectually, he was a cut above Hoover’s West Branch relatives and Bert’s own parents. Unlike Bert’s parents, Uncle John believed in reading a variety of genres and could discuss national politics. He encouraged the young Hoover to delve into fiction, poetry, and classical literature, and he stocked Friends Pacific Academy and his home with an eclectic selection of books. The physician gave Bert his own room in their spacious home and respected his privacy. He had no objection to having fun, so long as chores were done first. Minthorn was a man of character, impeccably honest, who taught the youth valuable lessons from books and from life. He was resolute and organized and set priorities, all qualities Hoover took to heart.³⁶

When land prices soared in 1888, Minthorn seized the opportunity to reap a quick profit by moving his land company to the town of Salem, the rapidly growing territorial capital. Hoover, now fourteen, moved with the family and became the office boy for the land company rather than completing high school. Bert quickly adapted to the world of business. “My boyhood ambition,” the orphan later explicated, “was to be able to earn my own living without the help of anybody, anywhere.”³⁷ Life had forged a strong, determined, independent young man.

The new office boy quickly mastered the rudiments of typing, bookkeeping, and filing while striving to improve his writing skills, penmanship, and organizational abilities. The company grew, as did Hoover’s responsibilities. The boy bought and sold land, planted and cultivated orchards, constructed houses, and placed new settlers. The company built a church, school, and hotel; operated a sawmill, flour mill, and railroad; laid out streets; and installed sewers. Hoover was involved in all facets of this expansion. Hundreds of letters a week poured in, and he could locate any specific letter in less than a minute. He was placed in charge of advertising and drafted ads that appeared in a thousand Eastern newspapers, bringing hundreds of emigrants weekly to Salem. Bert met them at the train depot, found temporary quarters and food, showed them homes and lots, and demonstrated the potential for fruit orchards.³⁸

Bert even participated in stockholders’ meetings. The young Hoover possessed vision; he knew the country was migrating west, that Oregon was a magnet and real estate seemed likely to soar. Salem had opened new horizons for Bert, and he thrived. The young entrepreneur enrolled in night school at a new business college in Salem. His instructor, finding him gifted at math, tutored him in algebra, geometry, and advanced arithmetic, and also in Latin, at which he was less adept. Sometimes Bert slept in the back room of the land office after returning late from night school. Briefly, Tad and May moved to Salem and the family was temporarily reunited.³⁹

Bert acquired a second teacher-mentor, Miss Jennie Gray, daughter of a Salem banker, and his learning curve arced upward. Gray took him to the public library, signed him up for borrowing privileges, and channeled his imagination into new dimensions. He eagerly digested classics by Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and Voltaire. He sped through David Copperfield and his favorite, Ivanhoe, and dived into Thackeray, Shakespeare, and American history. His appetite for books unveiled another side to his practical, mechanically oriented mind, and for the first time people came to see flashes of brilliance and to note his unusually supple intelligence, his curiosity to explore the universe of knowledge. Miss Gray, who also became Bert’s Sunday school teacher, invited him to socials and picnics, where he met young people, including at least one brief paramour, Daisy Trueblood. Bert participated in a Quaker debate club in which he successfully vanquished his opponent with his argument that war had destroyed more men than alcohol had.⁴⁰

Hoover made time for fun in his crowded life, cultivating friendships, playing baseball, swimming, and configuring jigsaw puzzles. As always, the outdoors beckoned. He grew to love Oregon’s vast expanses of forests, mountains, and streams. He found a greater variety of fish than in Iowa, and he learned the art of fly-fishing. While using worms to fish with young companions, Bert was approached by a kindly stranger who gave each boy three flies. Suddenly, Bert caught more and bigger fish. From that point onward, he fished exclusively with flies and dismissed as amateurs anyone who used live bait. He fished the Willamette and its tributaries, as well as other rivers, streams, and, occasionally, millponds for panfish. His favorite adversary was the cutthroat trout, hungry as it battled upstream to spawn. As an adult, he returned frequently to Oregon, enjoying not only the fishing, but frying and eating his finny prey, the camaraderie of the campfire, and camping in the wilderness. Solaced beneath the sunset or the stars, his mind rested.⁴¹

The description Hoover paints in his Memoirs verges on poetry. “Oregon lives in my mind for its gleaming wheat fields, its abundant fruit, its luxuriant forest vegetation, and the fish in the mountain streams,” he writes. “To step into its forests with their tangles of berry bushes, their ferns, their masses of wild flowers, stirs up odors peculiar to Oregon. . . . Within these woods are never-ending journeys of discovery.” He remembered waters crowded with hungry trout, where fishermen were sparse and nature bounteous, where one could catch a day’s limit within hours, where descending a thousand-foot canyon to a stream and climbing back up loaded with fish was an afternoon’s diversion. Years later, the joy reverberated.⁴²

In hindsight, the time spent at Newberg and Salem assumed a positive perspective. Uncle John was less a demon than a reasonably perceptive foster parent, the tension between the boy and the man basically a struggle between two strong-willed individualists, each well-meaning. When Bert left Oregon, he learned that Minthorn had not deducted a penny for board or expenses during the six years he lived there, and Bert’s remainder of his parents’ estate, wisely invested, had actually increased.⁴³

Salem broadened Hoover’s vistas. Every day a host of individuals tromped through the waiting room of the land company, where Bert tuned in to their conversations and serendipitous facts stuck to his magnetic brain. Hoover soaked up information from farmers, ranchers, soldiers, explorers, lawyers, businessmen, speculators, and migrants. The boy heard familiar names such as Jefferson and Lincoln, and new ones such as Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, and Benjamin Harrison. At times the conversations drifted to the dawn of the Republic and the Civil War, and the men hashed out the relative merits of Robert E. Lee and U. S. Grant, as well as the merits of free trade versus protectionism. Hoover’s curiosity was titillated by one argument between Quaker Republicans who embraced transferring the county seat and Democrats who opted for the status quo. Democrats were reactionaries who never wanted to change anything, Bert complained. Already as a teenager, he was a Progressive Republican.⁴⁴

While political discussions whetted the young man’s appetite, they were less important to his immediate future than his meeting with a mining engineer named Robert Brown. Unlike conversation with most visitors, theirs was neither trivial nor accidental. Brown was an old friend of Bert’s father who had come to Salem to meet Jesse’s son. Their conversations extended over several days, focusing on the geological engineer’s profession. He explained to Bert that mining engineers spent most of their time roaming the outdoors, exploring the boundaries of their minds. Brown emphasized the importance of precision and management, which Hoover possessed. Skill at mathematics, Hoover’s forte, was essential. Mathematics was to an engineer what a scalpel was to a surgeon. The chat with Brown was a spark that struck kindling waiting to burst into flame. It infused the youth with a sense of purpose for the first time—of fitting his gifted mind to an undertaking molded for it. Further, geologists were rare in the West, where opportunities were greatest. A college degree, however, was essential. The encounter proved providential, yet Hoover never met Brown again.⁴⁵

The teenager ruminated over his future. He talked to other engineers, visited local foundries, and inspected sawmills, repair shops, and mines before settling on the specialty of mining engineering. Then he began scrutinizing college catalogs. Substantial obstacles existed. He lacked sufficient money and had not earned a high school diploma. His relatives approved of his ambition to attend college and encouraged it, raising no objections to his becoming an engineer. However, the close-knit family insisted that Bert enroll at a Quaker university. Dr. Minthorn even obtained a scholarship for his foster son at Earlham College, a Quaker institution in Indiana. Yet Earlham did not offer a diploma in mining engineering and Hoover could find no Quaker college that did. A war of wills seemed to leave Bert at a dead end. It would not profit Hoover, his God-fearing relatives inveighed, to sharpen his mind and yet mortgage his soul.⁴⁶

Bert read in a Portland daily newspaper a prominent story pertaining to the founding of a new public university to open October 1, 1891, for admission of its first, or pioneer, class. California’s millionaire U.S. senator Leland Stanford, a railroad magnate who had lost his only son, intended to devote much of his fortune to the creation of a university at his ranch near present-day Palo Alto that would become the West Coast equivalent of the Ivy Leagues. The faculty would be recruited nationally and already promised star quality. Dr. David Starr Jordan, a prominent scientist, left Indiana University to become Stanford’s first president. He raided the Indiana faculty for luminaries that included Dr. Joseph Swain to head the Mathematics Department and Dr. John Casper Branner to chair the Department of Geology and Mining. Bert read further that Swain would arrive in Portland that spring to administer entrance examinations. Hoover craved the opportunity, yet his family resisted stubbornly. Then Minthorn, who was well connected, asked if the Dr. Swain giving the exam was Joseph Swain, a devout Quaker, which indeed he was. That carried the argument. No institution that employed Swain could be either second-rate or worldly, the physician declared.⁴⁷

Now all Bert had to do was pass the exam. He had a meager formal education, but a sharp mind and a ton of determination. Swain talked with the youth beforehand and watched him industriously plow through the lengthy test. Hoover did extraordinarily well on some sections, yet fell woefully short on others. He could not be admitted on the basis of the exam. His Achilles’ heel was English, which would continue to challenge him throughout his collegiate career. Hoover had sound, imaginative ideas and could express himself clearly, yet his spelling, punctuation, and grammar, largely self-taught, were lacking, and he could not conjugate irregular verbs. Nonetheless, Swain was impressed by Hoover’s tenacity and his intention to make something of himself. He was exactly the type of student Stanford wanted, given encouragement and embellishment, perhaps the proverbial diamond in the rough. Swain encouraged Bert to come to Stanford during the summer, receive tutoring in his weak areas, and retake the exam in time for the fall opening on October 1. As for money, he could work his way through. It was a gamble, but Swain recognized the young man’s character and spirit.⁴⁸

Hoover boarded the train for Palo Alto that summer with all his belongings, including a bicycle, and his modest savings, plus a surprise $50 given to him by Uncle John at the station. Having arrived at Newberg a small boy of eleven, he left not quite seventeen, a tall, gangly, yet muscular young man. He was opening a new chapter of his education. Grandmother Minthorn, now living in Oregon, tearfully kissed him good-bye and said, “I think thy mother would like to see thee now.”⁴⁹ It might seem that the distance from Oregon to Stanford was much shorter than Hoover’s journey from Iowa to Newberg, Oregon. Actually, it was much greater.