SEVENTEEN
Tempest and Triumph
On October 22, 1964, the presidential campaign was temporarily halted to permit both candidates to fly to New York City, where Herbert Hoover’s body lay in state at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church. Some 17,500 mournful citizens filed by his coffin the first day. The setting was ornate, yet the ceremony itself was in keeping with the simplicity of Hoover’s youth.1
From New York, the casket traveled by train to the nation’s capital. It was carried from Union Station on a caisson drawn by seven horses, and a crowd stood seven deep along sidewalks while soldiers fired a twenty-one-gun salute as Hoover made his final trip to the Capitol. Afterward, the casket was flown to Cedar Rapids, where 5,000 mourners met the plane, and then driven to its final resting place at West Branch, where 75,000 gathered for the burial on the grounds of the Hoover Library. Later, Lou, who had been buried at Stanford, was moved to a grave adjoining her husband’s.2
The peripatetic life that had begun in a tiny whitewashed cottage at the corner of Main and Downey streets in the idyllic hamlet of West Branch had ended ninety years and two months later in a $32,000-per-year suite in the Waldorf Astoria, high above Manhattan’s Park Avenue. Born to a father who shod horses, Bertie had risen to the pinnacle of American power and had lived to witness the space race, yet he never relinquished the values inculcated by his Quaker parents and relatives.3
Hoover circled the world as a trailblazing engineer. Between 1914 and 1923, he had earned himself titles such as the “Great Humanitarian,” the “Napoleon of Mercy,” and “Samaritan to a Continent.” He had managed, orchestrated, and assisted an array of relief operations unparalleled in world history, all without a cent of remuneration, declining even expenses. During and after World War I he was responsible for the delivery of nearly 34 million metric tons of food, clothing, and medicine to those endangered by famine and pestilence in Europe and Asia. These supplies were worth some $5,234,000,000 in the currency of his time, an estimated $50 billion today. Most of these undertakings were initiated by Hoover; none of them could have been accomplished without him. Hoover fed an estimated 83 million people and was doubtless responsible for saving more lives than any individual in history. This does not even include the role he played when beckoned by President Truman to survey relief needs and supplies in the wake of World War II, the distribution of which he did not personally supervise.4
Returning to his homeland after the war, under presidents Harding and Coolidge he made an obscure cabinet post the most important force behind 1920s prosperity and became the greatest commerce secretary in history and one of the three or four most influential men in America. Hoover’s presidency was a disappointment, but he redeemed himself by sheer persistence, character, and steadfast unselfishness. Often swimming against the tide during the 1930s and 1940s, he wrote industriously, spoke widely, raised money for charities, and created one of the world’s great research facilities, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford. Returned to public service by Harry Truman, he played leading roles in relief and in government reorganization and became the glue of the GOP during its own political exile, which lasted until 1953. If suffering brings redemption, Hoover knew both the agony and the ecstasy, regaining respect and deference, if never the adulation he had commanded prior to his presidency. He outlived most of his enemies and persuaded much of the public that he was a useful citizen of sterling character. When he was asked how he had survived the ostracism of the Roosevelt era, his eyes twinkled and he cackled, “I outlived the bastards.”5 Yet he never quite achieved historical vindication. If democracy is a cruel and fickle employer, historians abet the process of adulation and demonization to a degree often undeserved at both extremities. Herbert Hoover is the only U.S. president who never made the cover of Time as a sitting president—although he was on the cover four times while out of office.6
During the thirty-one years from the end of his presidency to his death, Hoover served as the purest spokesman of American conservatism. While the country veered increasingly leftward during the New Deal, his views remained remarkably consistent. He never strayed from his conviction that free-market capitalism, reasonably regulated, produced the world’s highest standard of living. Inextricably linked were the fundamental American values of political, religious, and intellectual freedom, which contributed to the quality of life and complemented the cornucopia of productivity.7
Nonetheless, Hoover questioned the efficacy of selfish big business, an octopus second only to the government bureaucracy that could strangle individual initiative and siphon off the nation’s wealth. Considering many businessmen narrow-minded and self-serving, he never believed money was an end in itself. He was as inveterate a foe of business monopoly as he was of government bureaucracy, and he remained proud of his party’s early role in containing both. Having sprung from the grass roots, Hoover believed the core of sagacity lay in the lower realms of government, bottom-up, not top-down. Too much government inspired a demand for more government to solve the dilemmas it had created itself.8
Because Hoover was frequently on the losing side of the ideological debates of the 1930s and 1940s, historians have been too quick to leap to the conclusion that he was wrong on the merits of his causes, or even misguided to raise the arguments. Yet today, his ideas remain at the heart of American politics. In the 1980s, a groundswell of conservatism swept Ronald Reagan into power, reigniting the debate about big government, fiscal policy, welfare, overregulation of business, special interests, and endemic public spending. Hoover’s concern that prodigious public debt would eventually paralyze the government in time of real need still resonates with voters. Today, polarization and paralysis increasingly characterize American politics, yet at the core we remain a centrist nation, whether right-center or left-center. Although political prophets, like biblical prophets, are often scorned in their own lands, they are as necessary today as they were in Jeremiah’s times. It is possible that the “weaning of America” for which Hoover yearned might yet take place.
Hoover remained proudly patriotic throughout his life, yet he worried about the future of his nation during his declining years. He questioned whether America had become a country of sheep, splintered into selfish interest groups. In their seeking economic security as their chief priority, he worried that they might shut the door to other values. “Freedom is the open window,” Hoover said, “through which pours the sunlight of the human spirit, of human dignity.”9
Hoover’s life was one of undeniable accomplishment and indefatigable industriousness, even in lost causes. But most important about his life are his ideas, his ideals, and his character, which stand undiminished generations after his death. For him, there was no substitute for hard work and perseverance. In almost any pursuit, drive was more important than intelligence. Herbert Hoover did not gain the whole world, but neither did he lose his soul.