Herbert Hoover
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:
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Herbert Clark Hoover
(born Aug. 10, 1874, West Branch, Iowa, U.S.died Oct. 20, 1964, New York, N.Y.) 31st president of the U.S. (192933). After graduating from Stanford University (1895), he became a mining engineer, administering engineering projects on four continents (18951913). He then headed Allied relief operations in England and Belgium. As U.S. national food administrator during World War I, he instituted programs that furnished food to the Allies and to famine-stricken areas of Europe. Appointed U.S. secretary of commerce (192127), he reorganized the department, creating divisions to regulate broadcasting and aviation. He oversaw commissions to build Boulder (later Hoover) Dam and the St. Lawrence Seaway. In 1928, as the Republican presidential candidate, he soundly defeated Alfred E. Smith. His hopes for a New Day program were quickly overwhelmed by the Great Depression. In response, he called business leaders to the White House to urge them not to lay off workers or cut wages, and he urged state and local governments to join private charities in caring for destitute Americans. Believing that a dole would sap the will of Americans to provide for themselves, he adamantly opposed direct federal relief payments to individuals, though in 1932 he finally allowed relief to farmers through the Reconstruction Finance Corp. After his electoral defeat in 1932 by Franklin D. Roosevelt, he regularly spoke out against what he considered the radicalism of the New Deal and Roosevelt's attempts to involve the U.S. in countering German and Japanese aggression. After World War II he participated in famine-relief work in Europe and was appointed head of the Hoover Commission.
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Oxford Dictionary of Political Biography:
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Herbert Clark Hoover
(b. West Branch, Iowa, 10 Aug. 1874; d. New York, 20 Oct. 1964) US; President 1929 – 1933 Raised by Quaker relatives — his father and mother died while he was still a child — Hoover was educated at Newberg Academy and Stanford University (then a new university) and trained as an engineer. After an uncertain start, including a stint when he was without a job, he set up his own company and was a millionaire by the time he reached the age of 30. As an international engineer of renown, he travelled the globe.
During the First World War, he was appointed to head a relief agency in Europe and after US entry into the war he was appointed as US Food Administrator. At the end of the war, he returned to Europe to help tackle food shortages. They were tasks to which Hoover — a highly effective administrator and philanthropist — was ideally suited. His work attracted praise on both sides of the Atlantic and established him as a public figure. In 1921, President Warren Harding invited him to become Commerce Secretary. Hoover accepted and completely transformed the Department, using it to cut down on bureaucratic waste and to encourage business. He held the post under President Calvin Coolidge and in 1928 was sufficiently prominent to be a candidate for the Republican nomination for President. He was nominated on the second ballot and won an easy victory over Democrat Al Smith in the election. He amassed 21.3 million or 58 per cent votes to Smith's 15 million. At a time of economic boom, there was little doubt that the business-oriented Republican would win over the Democrat, and first Roman Catholic, candidate for the office.
Hoover was one of the most able men to be elected as President and also one of the unluckiest. He was inaugurated on 4 March 1929. Seven months later the Stock Market crashed. The new President was a believer in self-reliance and self-help and was loathe to see government intervention in economic affairs. He sought, ineffectually, to encourage expansion through a tax cut and by urging business to expand. Spending measures passed by Congress that threatened a balanced budget were rejected. As the ranks of the unemployed swelled, Hoover's popularity plummeted. Soup kitchens became common sights. Many factories became desolate sites. The production index fell to its lowest point in the country's history.
Settlements of unemployed men sprang up and were dubbed "Hoovervilles". The army was used to remove war veterans who had marched to Washington, DC, to ask for advance payment of their war bonuses. Hoover stuck to his principles and continued to urge local and state action. The states proved unable to cope. As conditions worsened, Hoover established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend money to firms that could offer collateral, but it had little impact.
Other issues also served to increase Hoover's unpopularity. He opposed repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, which imposed prohibition. At one baseball match, he was booed and chants of "We Want Beer" rang in his ears as he left. The election year of 1932 was a bad one for Hoover. He criticized and later vetoed the Wagner — Garner unemployment relief bill, which included provision for $500 million for public works. The Republican Convention was dominated by a debate over prohibition and not by debate over the state of the economy. The Democrats nominated the Governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and committed themselves to the repeal of prohibition. Roosevelt in his acceptance speech emphasized the need for economic recovery. Hoover was easily beaten in the election. Though he won 15.7 million votes, or 40 per cent, he carried few states — the only large state that he carried was Pennsylvania — and secured only 59 electoral college votes. Roosevelt, with 22.8 million votes, amassed 472 electoral college votes.
Hoover retired to his home in Palo Alto, California, but was to emulate a predecessor, William Howard Taft, in finding his true vocation after service in the White House. He opposed American entry into the Second World War, but in 1946 – two years after the death of his wife — responded to the call of President Harry S Truman to help the food distribution programme in Europe. He was appointed Co-ordinator of Food Supply for World Famine. A combination of his humanitarianism and organizational skills made him an ideal candidate for the post, and he served with distinction. His service, for which he refused any remuneration, helped restore his reputation at home. In 1947 President Truman appointed him to head a commission on the reorganization of the executive branch, resulting in various changes designed to make government more efficient. President Dwight Eisenhower recalled Hoover to head a second Hoover Commission in 1953. Hoover was by this time approaching 80 and was looked upon as an elder statesman. He lived for another decade, dying in New York in October 1964 at the age of 90.
Hoover was a dedicated and extremely able individual. He shone in all the public positions he held, bar one. His tenure of the presidency was fated. His ideology clashed with conditions that would not respond to his prescription. A man of great humanity, he was unable to convey that effectively while occupying the White House, but was able to demonstrate it to great effect in later years. When he left the White House, he was extraordinarily unpopular. By the time of his death, he was a widely respected figure.
Oxford Companion to US Military History:
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Herbert C. Hoover
(1874–1964), U.S. president
Born in West Branch, Iowa, son of a Quaker blacksmith, Hoover was orphaned, then raised by relatives in Oregon. Graduating from Stanford University in 1895, he soon became a millionaire as a global metallurgical engineer.
His humanitarian reputation stemmed from his direction of food relief for occupied Belgium, 1914–17. As head of the U.S. Food Administration (1917–18) under Democratic president Woodrow Wilson, and as secretary of commerce under Republican presidents Harding and Coolidge (1921–28), Hoover also established a reputation for efficient administration. Defeating Al Smith, he became president, 1929–33.
Although a progressive Republican, Hoover's popularity was undermined by the onset of the depression. In his foreign policy, he struck a balance between internationalism and traditional U.S. unilateralism, supporting open trade, but accepting a congressional high tariff. Thinking in terms of economic self‐sufficiency for the western hemisphere, he repudiated Theodore Roosevelt's interventionism and withdrew the Marines from Nicaragua.
Hoover emphasized arms reduction and nonmilitary strategies. He obtained some success in the London Naval Disarmament Treaty (1930), extending the 1922 battleship limitation to cruisers and submarines. His pacifism appeared most clearly after Japan's conquest of Manchuria in 1931. When the League of Nations failed to act, Hoover eschewed economic sanctions, which he thought might lead to war in an area not vital to the United States. Instead, he had Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson respond with the doctrine of nonrecognition of the illegal conquest.
Hoover's fear of an expansionist Soviet Union led him to oppose U.S. intervention in Europe on the Pacific before 7 December 1941, because although he abhorred the German and Japanese regimes, he feared Josef Stalin more. In 1942, he co‐authored The Problems of Lasting Peace, emphasizing that military success alone would not ensure peace, and urging a new postwar international organization to settle disputes peacefully; gradual disarmament; and a ban on military alliances. Hoover coordinated European food relief again in 1945–47. During the Cold War, he advocated U.S. naval and air defense of the western hemisphere and island bastions from Britain to Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines. Against commitment of U.S. ground troops overseas, he opposed NATO and the Korean War, and supported President Eisenhower's increased reliance upon airpower.
[See also Nicaragua, U.S. Military Involvement in; World War I: Causes; World War I: Postwar Impact; World War II: Postwar Impact.]
Bibliography
- David Burner, Herbert Hoover: A Public Life, 1979.
- Gary Dean Best, Herbert Hoover: The Postpresidential Years,
2 vols., 1983. - Richard Norton Smith, An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover, 1984
Oxford Dictionary of the US Military:
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Herbert Clark Hoover
Hoover, Herbert Clark (1874-1964) 31st president of the United States (1929-33), born in West Branch, Iowa. As a mining engineer with multiple foreign investments, Hoover became a millionaire by the age of forty. He came to public attention through his active leadership role in various relief efforts during and following World War I, primarily in the area of food distribution. He was sought as a presidential nominee by both parties in 1920, but refused to run. As secretary of commerce in the administrations of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, Hoover made that department one of the most important and well publicized by developing advanced economic theories about business cycles, promoting government regulation of radio and aviation, and supporting federal supervision of foreign loans. By 1928 he was viewed as a postwar economic superman and he easily defeated Democrat Alfred E. Smith for the presidency. But implementation of his progressive principles, which included cooperative economic organization, self-regulation by business, and voluntary activity through American society, was almost immediately thwarted by the stock market crash in October 1929. Remedial legislation failed to deal with the growing problem of the unemployed, but Hoover remained adamantly opposed to direct federal relief. Though he signed the Emergency and Relief Construction Act (1932), he placed many restrictions on its implementation. Perhaps Hoover's greatest blunder was accepting responsibility for Douglas MacArthur's burning of the veterans' camps that had been set up outside Washington, D.C., to protest the government's refusal to redeem veteran certificates, which Hoover considered equivalent to the dole. He left office in disgrace, blamed for the Depression and the routing of the veterans, which had been done in violation of his orders. His conservative fiscal policies, aversion to direct federal relief, and failure of relief initiatives (such as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the earlier Federal Farm Board) left millions unemployed at the end of his term. In foreign relations Hoover met with better success. Drawing on his early Quaker training, he relied on negotiation rather than the use of force, and supported arms limitation as well as international arbitration, positions which he continued to advocate after leaving office. Throughout the 1920s, World War II, and into the 1940s and 1950s, he supported various ways to avoid military conflict. His belief in the superiority of American capitalism made him fear neither fascism nor communism. Both Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower called upon Hoover's administrative skills to head up the reorganization of the executive branch of government, resulting in two Hoover Commission reports (1949 and 1955), many of whose recommendations were adopted.
See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.
Gale Encyclopedia of Biography:
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Herbert Clark Hoover
Herbert Clark Hoover (1874-1964), thirty-first president of the United States, could not halt the severest economic depression in American history because his governmental theories prevented him from taking drastic steps.
On Aug. 10, 1874, Herbert Hoover was born at West Branch, Iowa, of Quaker ancestry. His father died when he was 6 and, after his mother's death less than 3 years later, he went to live with an uncle in Oregon. In 1891 he entered Stanford University, where he specialized in geology.
After graduating, Hoover worked as a mining engineer in the western United States, Australia, and China. In 1901 he became a junior partner in a London-based mining firm and 7 years later set up on his own. During these years he amassed a fortune estimated at $4 million. On Feb. 10, 1899, he married his college sweetheart, Lou Henry; they had two sons, Herbert, Jr., and Allan.
In London when World War I broke out, Hoover was asked to head the Belgian relief program. He was so successful that in May 1917 President Woodrow Wilson called him back to head the U.S. Food Administration. After the armistice he was placed in charge of the American Relief Administration, organized to feed war-ravaged Europe. When the congressional appropriation ran out, Hoover successfully appealed for private contributions to keep the work going.
Hoover was talked of as a possible 1920 presidential candidate by admirers in both parties. Although he publicly declared himself a Republican, the party's Old Guard disliked him because he was a late convert, and its isolationist wing disapproved of his advocacy of the League of Nations. Republican president Warren G. Harding, however, appointed him secretary of commerce, a post he held through the following administration of Calvin Coolidge.
Secretary of Commerce
During the 1920s Hoover set forth the basic philosophy that would guide him throughout his career. His central tenet was individualism, by which he meant equality of opportunity for each man to make the fullest possible use of his abilities. But he insisted that individualism be tempered by a sense of social responsibility and voluntary cooperation for the general good; he rejected old-fashioned free competition as wasteful. He believed that the government's function was to conserve natural resources, protect equality of opportunity, encourage business efficiency, promote scientific research, and build major public works.
Hoover transformed the Commerce Department into an effective instrument for implementing his philosophy. He fostered the growth of trade associations to bring improved efficiency and stability to industry, promoted American foreign trade, and expanded the Department's information and statistical services. He also set up a Division of Housing to encourage home building, built the Bureau of Standards into one of the country's leading scientific research institutions, and successfully pushed for stronger government regulation of the commercial aviation and radio industries.
Hoover's influence became increasingly important in all economic questions facing the Federal government. Believing that management and labor must cooperate for the good of all, he favored collective bargaining (though not the closed shop), worked behind the scenes to resolve labor disputes, and encouraged development of privately financed unemployment insurance. For relief to farmers he opposed government price-fixing of agricultural products, instead favoring increased Federal assistance to farm marketing cooperatives.
After Coolidge decided not to run again in 1928, Hoover was the popular choice of the party rank and file and won the Republican presidential nomination on the first ballot. In the election he defeated Democrat Alfred E. Smith by over 6 million votes, even breaking the "solid South."
Foreign Affairs
Hoover's record in foreign affairs was mixed. Immediately after his election he made a successful goodwill tour of Latin America, and throughout his term he actively worked for a good-neighbor policy south of the border. He was interested in promoting international disarmament, but the London Naval Conference of 1930 was only partly successful, and his efforts at the Geneva Disarmament Conference (which met in 1932 to secure abolition or reduction of offensive weapons) failed. His administration's worst mistake concerned the Japanese invasion and occupation of Manchuria in 1931. Secretary of State Henry Stimson was willing to impose economic sanctions against Japan, but Hoover, fearful of instigating a war, limited the American response to the ineffectual Stimson Nonrecognition Doctrine.
Domestic Policy
Domestically, Hoover expanded the national forests and parks, laid the groundwork for many of the later New Deal accomplishments in water-resource development, increased Federal highway spending, was instrumental in setting up the privately financed Research Committee on Social Trends, reorganized the Federal prison system, promoted the growth of civilian aviation, and even approved a bill which drastically limited the use of injunctions in labor disputes.
On the other hand, Hoover's opposition to government competition with business led him to veto a bill for government operation of the hydroelectric facilities at Muscle Shoals, Ala. And despite warnings from economists of its disastrous consequences for international trade and economic stability, he signed legislation which raised the average level of tariff duties from roughly 30 to about 59 percent. But what most damaged his reputation was the inadequacy of his response to the depression that followed the stock market crash of October-November 1929.
Voluntarism versus Federal Intervention
Although previous chief executives had taken the position that the business cycle would simply have to run its course, Hoover believed that the government could and should act to cushion economic shocks. When the Depression hit, he made repeated optimistic statements about the economy to bolster business confidence, had the Federal Reserve Board follow an "easy money" policy, and accelerated work on Federal projects. However, his major emphasis was on voluntary action rather than government intervention: he exhorted industry to maintain employment and wages, induced bankers to establish the National Credit Corporation to assist threatened banks, and relied upon the traditional agencies of private charity and local government to provide relief for the unemployed.
But this voluntarism was a failure. The business community lacked the discipline and sense of social responsibility for effective cooperation. Yet, despite increasing hardship in all sectors, Hoover was convinced that the country was basically sound. He held that the causes of the Depression lay outside the United States. To prevent the threatened breakdown of the German economy under the burden of reparations payments - which would have jeopardized millions of dollars of American loans - he arranged a one-year moratorium on payment both of reparations and inter-Allied war debts.
By late 1931 Hoover was driven to embrace more direct Federal intervention. He established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to make emergency loans to financial institutions and certain corporations. He supported the Glass-Steagall Act, which liberalized the Federal Reserve System's credit requirements; and the Federal Home Loan Bank Act, to assist building and loan societies, savings banks, and insurance companies in expanding loans for residential construction. Hoover's program rested on the assumption that infusing additional credit into the economy would be enough to revive business activity. Still the economy continued its downward slide.
Nevertheless, Hoover stood firm against the massive public-works spending that Democrats and progressive Republicans increasingly demanded. He was adamantly against any direct Federal relief for the unemployed, not only for budgetary reasons, but because he was determined to preserve what he regarded as the fundamental American principles of individual and local responsibility.
Despite sharp Republican losses in the 1930 congressional elections, Hoover largely had his way. He successfully fought a proposal to strengthen the ineffective U.S. Employment Service. And the Relief and Construction Act (1932), which authorized loans of $1.5 billion to state and local agencies for self-liquidating public works and $300 million to the states for relief purposes, was watered down to meet his specifications. He suffered only two major legislative defeats: a proposed sales tax for balancing the budget and an overridden veto on the bill permitting veterans to borrow up to 50 percent of the face value of their bonus certificates.
"Bonus Army" Blunder
In his personal relations Hoover was affable and genial, a sensitive and humane idealist - qualities he was unable to project to the public. His sensitivity to criticism led to poor relations with the press, and his resistance to direct Federal relief made him appear callous to the suffering around him.
Perhaps Hoover's worst blunder was his handling of the "bonus army." An estimated 17, 000 former servicemen flocked to Washington in the spring of 1932 to demand that Congress authorize the immediate payment in full of their bonus certificates. When the Senate, under Hoover's prodding, defeated the measure, most returned to their homes. An attempt by Washington police to evict those remaining resulted in the death of two veterans and two policemen. Hoover then called out Federal troops on July 28, 1932 - an action that made him even more unpopular.
New Deal Triumphs
In the 1932 campaign Hoover warned that the program of Democratic nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt threatened a "radical departure" from the American way of life. His efforts to cooperate with the president-elect came to naught, because Roosevelt and his "Brain Trust" correctly suspected that Hoover wanted to commit the new administration to a continuation of his own policies. When Hoover left office in March 1933, nearly the entire United States economy was paralyzed.
In the years that followed, Hoover remained politically active, attacking Roosevelt's New Deal policies, which he blamed for prolonging the Depression by destroying business confidence. Prior to Pearl Harbor, Hoover was a strong isolationist; after World War II he was a leading exponent of the "Fortress America" theory.
Elder Statesman
When Hoover left office, he was probably the most hated president in American history. Only the passage of time led to a fairer judgment. In 1947 President Harry S. Truman appointed him chairman of the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government. In 1953 President Dwight Elsenhower appointed him to the same job. The work of these two Hoover commissions provided the basis for a major reorganization of the executive branch. When he died on Oct. 20, 1964, Hoover was widely respected as one of the nation's foremost elder statesmen.
Hoover did more than any previous chief executive to combat a depression, but the limitations of his political and social philosophy proved his undoing. Perhaps the most significant result of his experiment in voluntarism was that its failure prepared the public to accept the farreaching expansion of Federal authority under the New Deal.
Further Reading
Before his death Hoover completed his Memoirs (3 vols., 1951-1952), covering the years up to 1941. There is no adequate biography. Eugene Lyons, Herbert Hoover: A Biography (1964), is superficial and eulogistic. Harris Gaylord Warren, Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression (1959), and Albert U. Romansco, The Poverty of Abundance: Hoover, the Nation, the Depression (1965), are useful, but both suffer from lack of access to the Hoover papers. See also Harold Wolfe, Herbert Hoover, Public Servant and Leader of the Loyal Opposition: A Study of his Life and Career (1956). A discussion of foreign policy is Robert H. Ferrell, American Diplomacy in the Great Depression: Hoover-Stimson Foreign Policy, 1929-1933 (1957).
Oxford Guide to the US Government:
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Herbert C. Hoover, 31st President
• Born: Aug. 10, 1874, West Branch, Iowa
• Political party: Republican
• Education: Stanford University, B.A., 1895
• Military service: none
• Previous government service: U.S. food administrator, 1917–19; U.S. secretary of commerce, 1921–29
• Elected President, 1928; served, 1929–33
• Subsequent government service: administrator, civilian relief in Europe, 1945–47; chair of two Commissions on the Organization of the Executive Branch of Government, 1947–49, 1953–55
• Died: Oct. 20, 1964, New York, N.Y. Herbert Clark Hoover became President just as the Great Depression put millions of Americans out of work. He had made his reputation as an engineer and business entrepreneur and then had been one of the most effective cabinet secretaries in the administrations of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Yet Hoover made minimal efforts to end the depression because he was convinced that the business cycle would take care of economic recovery with minimal intervention and that “prosperity was just around the corner.” His failure to provide effective leadership doomed him to a one-term Presidency and gave the Democrats an opportunity to dominate national politics for a generation.
Hoover was the first President born west of the Mississippi River. His father was a blacksmith and his mother a school-teacher; both died in his childhood, and he grew up in his uncle's house in Oregon. Hoover worked his way through school beginning at age 10. He studied geology and mining engineering at Stanford University, graduating in 1895, and he became a supervisor of mining operations in Australia and then in China. He and his wife, Lou, became fluent in Chinese and were active in the relief of foreigners trapped in the Boxer Rebellion. The Hoovers traveled all over the world on business. By 1908 Herbert Hoover was the head of his own engineering and oil exploration company. In 1909 his lectures at Columbia and Stanford Universities were published as Principles of Mining, which became a standard textbook.
In 1914 Hoover was asked by the U.S. consul general in London to supervise the evacuation of 120,000 Americans trapped in Europe at the outbreak of World War I. That same year he became chairman of the privately organized Committee for Relief in Belgium, with the mission of preventing famine in that nation. In three years he raised and spent $1 billion for food relief in Europe. When the United States entered the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson named him U.S. food administrator. In the next two years Hoover supervised the rationing and conservation of foodstuffs in the United States and the export of food to U.S. and Allied troops. At the end of the war he became the director general of European Relief and Rehabilitation, in charge of U.S. food relief efforts to more than 20 nations in Europe with a total population of more than 300 million. He supported Wilson's efforts to join the League of Nations. Hoover also found time to collect wartime manuscripts and documents from many nations, which formed the nucleus of the Hoover Library on War, Revolution, and Peace established at Stanford University.
In 1920 Hoover was an unsuccessful contender for the Republican Presidential nomination, due in part to the opposition of fellow Californian Senator Hiram Johnson, who did not forgive Hoover for his support of the League of Nations. Hoover was named secretary of commerce by President Harding in 1921 and was considered the most capable and honest official in the administration. President Coolidge kept him on and he served through 1928. His department tried to improve the productivity of American industry and to promote international trade and the conservation of reSources.
In 1924 he received 300 votes for Vice President at the Republican convention but did not get the nomination.
In 1928 Hoover was the favorite to win the Republican nomination for President, largely because of his capable handling of relief efforts during a disastrous flood in Mississippi in 1927. He won several primaries over the opposition of party leaders and was nominated on the second ballot at the national convention. He won a landslide victory over Alfred E. Smith, the first Catholic candidate for President. Hoover's campaign slogan was “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” His promise of continued prosperity ensured his election.
At first Hoover tried to modernize government by creating national commissions on conservation and law enforcement and study groups to improve management of Indian affairs, veterans hospitals, and federal prisons. He got Congress to create a new Federal Farm Board, which helped farmers market their products at stable prices. But Hoover's administration was soon preoccupied with the effects of the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, known as Black Tuesday. Following the crash, industrial production plummeted, the gross national product (the total amount of goods and services produced) fell by almost a third, and unemployment soared from 3 to 25 percent by the end of his term.
Hoover responded with a tax cut to stimulate demand for goods and $400 million in public works projects. He also gotthe Federal Reserve Board to increase the supply of money, which resulted in lower interest rates and enabled corporations to borrow money cheaply for new projects. In 1930 he signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which raised tariff rates and depressed international trade. Though designed to protect U.S. industry, it further weakened the position of American companies by reducing their exports and led to even higher unemployment, especially in the farm sector, because of foreign retaliation against U.S. farm exports.
Democrats won control of the House in 1930 and came close to winning the Senate. By May 1931 the crash of European stock markets and the resultant depression in Europe made the situation in U.S. industries dependent on foreign trade and investment even worse. Hoover vetoed a bill passed by the Republican Senate to provide $1 billion in veterans' bonuses, an action Democrats seized upon as an indication of his callousness. In 1932 his administration convinced Congress to create and fund the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend money to new enterprises, banks, and city and state governments, but Hoover initially balked at the large amounts Congress was willing to appropriate. The nation viewed his efforts as too little, too late. When more than 100,000 unemployed veterans of World War I marched to Washington in 1932 to ask for early payment of their bonuses and other federal assistance, two of the Bonus Marchers were killed in clashes with local police. On July 28, Hoover ordered General Douglas MacArthur to use the army to disperse the marchers. MacArthur went beyond Hoover's orders and sent his troops in to destroy their tent city as well. Hoover had turned the military against the very soldiers who had fought for the flag in 1918.
Hoover's record in international affairs was dismal. The London Naval Treaty of 1930 acceded to the Japanese naval preeminence in the Pacific. In September 1931 the Japanese embarked on a course of aggression by attacking Manchuria, in northern China. Hoover refused to respond with economic sanctions. An attempt to gain U.S. entry to the World Court, the organization that applied international law to disputes between nations, was defeated by the Senate. The European depression made it difficult for Germany to pay World War I reparations to Allied nations or for those nations to pay back their war loans to the United States. Hoover refused to support proposals to cancel some debts, coordinate monetary policy with Europeans, or lower tariffs to stimulate trade. All the European nations except Finland reneged on their debts.
In 1932, although renominated by his party, Hoover was defeated by Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt. His defeat was the worst suffered by an incumbent President since William Howard Taft's in 1912. In his last months in office, unemployment climbed to more than one-quarter of the work force. Banks failed in record numbers as people panicked and took their money out.
Hoover wrote 30 books after he retired from the White House, including three volumes of memoirs and The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson, a study of Wilson's failure to obtain Senate consent to the Treaty of Versailles. It was the first time one former President had written a book about another former President. During World War II Hoover tried unsuccessfully to organize food relief efforts to nations occupied by Nazi Germany. After the war he served as coordinator of the European Food Program, advised the U.S. government on occupation policies in Germany and Austria, and chaired two Commissions on the Organization of the Executive Branch of Government that made recommendations for greater efficiency. He remained associated with the conservative wing of the Republican party, and he was asked for advice by leading politicians from his party, including Richard Nixon. Hoover died at the age of 90; John Adams was the only President who lived longer.
See also Coolidge, Calvin; Harding, Warren G.; Roosevelt, Franklin D.; Wilson, Woodrow
Sources
- Martin Fausold, The Presidency of Herbert C. Hoover (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985).
- Herbert Hoover, Memoirs, 3 vols. (1951–52; reprint, New York: Garland, 1979).
- Joan Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975)
Houghton Mifflin Companion to US History:
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Hoover, Herbert
(1874-1964), engineer, philanthropist, and thirty-first president of the United States. Born in West Branch, Iowa, into a Quaker family, Hoover was orphaned at the age of nine and was reared by relatives in Iowa and Oregon.
Although Hoover's religious training was quite rigorous, he retained few outward signs of his Quaker upbringing, aside from his style of dress. His personal and professional aggressiveness (which made him a millionaire by the age of forty) was inconsistent with Quaker ideas of moderation, and he could swear with the roughest of the miners he directed as an engineer. Moreover, he was a habitual smoker, enjoyed a drink, and often fished on Sundays, albeit in a high collar and necktie. But he exhibited his early Quaker training as president by relying more on the power of negotiation than on force (especially in Central America and the Caribbean) and by supporting arms limitation, international arbitration, and moral suasion in foreign relations.
Hoover is still remembered primarily as a heartless depression president despite his philanthropic and government work during the First World War as head of the Commission for the Relief of Belgium, then as director general of the postwar American Relief Administration, and finally as President Woodrow Wilson's U.S. food administrator and director general of relief for Europe. These activities had made him such a popular figure by 1920 that both parties courted him as a presidential nominee. He refused to run but did serve as secretary of commerce in the administrations of Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, transforming his department into one of the most important and well-publicized agencies of the federal government. As commerce secretary Hoover helped develop some advanced economic theories on business cycles and industrial standardization, and he supervised regulation of the nascent radio and aviation industries.
In 1927 when Coolidge enigmatically "did not choose to run" again, Hoover decided to run for the presidency against the seasoned New York Democratic governor, Al Smith. Hoover's popularity and reputation and the prevailing prosperity in major areas of the country helped the Republicans win in this classic confrontation between two self-made men.
After he entered the White House, Hoover's previous business, philanthropic, and public relations skills seemed to fail him in the face of the worst depression in the country's history. Nevertheless, some of his ideas for combating the depression, such as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, aid to agriculture, and long-term public works and relief appropriations, were adopted and popularized by his successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. "We didn't admit it at the time," fdr's aide Rexford Tugwell recalled in a 1974 interview, "but practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started." Hoover proved to be his own worst enemy as president, often clinging publicly to his least rather than most advanced economic thinking, approving, for example, the Smoot-Hawley protectionist tariff in 1930.
After he left office, he often attacked the New Deal on grounds that, ironically, were echoed in New Left criticisms in the 1960s. He was largely ignored by his own party, however, until Democratic president Harry S. Truman and later Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower put his organizational skills to work. They appointed him to head the Commissions on Organization of the Executive Branch of Government, known as the Hoover Commissions.
Bibliography:
George H. Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, 2 vols. (1983, 1988); Joan Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive (1974).
Author:
Joan Hoff
See also Depressions; Elections: 1928 , 1932.
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Herbert Hoover
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From our Archives: Today's Highlights, August 10, 2006
Columbia Encyclopedia:
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Herbert Hoover
Hoover, Herbert Clark, 1874-1964, 31st President of the United States (1929-33), b. West Branch, Iowa.
Wartime Relief Efforts
After graduating (1895) from Stanford, he worked as a mining engineer in many parts of the world. He became an independent mining consultant and established offices in New York City, San Francisco, and London. When World War I broke out in 1914, Hoover, then in London, was made chairman of the American Relief Commission. In this post he arranged the return to the United States of some 150,000 Americans stranded in Europe. As chairman (1915-19) of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, he secured food and clothing for civilians of war-devastated Belgium and N France. After the United States entered the war, he became U.S. Food Administrator, a member of the War Trade Council, and chairman of the Interallied Food Council.
Appointed a chairman of the Supreme Economic Council and director of the European Relief and Reconstruction Commission at the Paris Peace Conference, he coordinated the work of the various relief agencies; he was given direct authority over the transportation systems of Eastern Europe in order to ensure efficient distribution of supplies. After the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, Hoover returned (1919) to the United States, although he continued to direct the American Relief Administration, which was to feed millions in the 1921-23 famine in the USSR.
Presidency
As Secretary of Commerce (1921-29) under Presidents Harding and Coolidge, Hoover reorganized and expanded the department, sponsored conferences on unemployment, fostered trade associations, and gave his support to such engineering projects as the St. Lawrence Waterway and the Hoover Dam. Hoover gained great popular approval, and he easily won the Republican nomination for President in 1928 and defeated Democratic candidate Alfred E. Smith.
In the first year of his administration Hoover established the Federal Farm Board, pressed for tariff revision (which resulted in the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act), and appointed the National Commission on Law Observance and Law Enforcement, with George W. Wickersham as chairman, to study the problem of enforcing prohibition. The rest of his administration was dominated by the major economic depression ushered in by the stock market crash of Oct., 1929.
Hoover, believing in the basic soundness of the economy, felt that it would regenerate spontaneously and was reluctant to extend federal activities. Nonetheless he did recommend, and Congress gave the funds for, a large public works program, and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation was created (1932) to stimulate industry by giving loans unobtainable elsewhere. Congress, which had a Democratic majority after the 1930 elections, passed the Emergency Relief Act and created the federal home loan banks. As the Great Depression deepened, veterans demanded immediate payment of bonus certificates (issued to them in 1924 for redemption in 1945). In 1932 some 15,000 ex-servicemen, known as the Bonus Marchers, marched on Washington; Hoover ordered federal troops to oust them from federal property.
In foreign affairs Hoover was confronted with the problems of disarmament, reparations and war debts, and Japanese aggression in East Asia. The United States participated in the London Conference of 1930 (see naval conferences) and signed the resulting treaty; it also took part in the abortive Disarmament Conference. In 1931, Hoover proposed a one-year moratorium on reparations and war debts to ease the financial situation in Europe. The administration's reaction to the Japanese invasion (1931) of Manchuria was expressed by Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, who declared that the United States would not recognize territorial changes achieved by force or by infringement of American treaty rights. Hoover ran for reelection in 1932 but was overwhelmingly defeated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The Hoover Commissions
Except for major speeches before the Republican conventions and a 1938 European tour, Hoover retired from public life until the close of World War II, when he undertook (1946) the coordination of food supplies to countries badly affected by the war. He then headed (1947-49) the Hoover Commission, a committee empowered by Congress to study the executive branch of government. Many of its recommendations were adopted, including establishment of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Under President Eisenhower he headed the second Hoover Commission (1953-55), which made recommendations on policy as well as organization. The Herbert Hoover Library was dedicated at West Branch, Iowa, in 1962. Hoover died on Oct. 20, 1964, in New York City.
Bibliography
Among Hoover's writings are Principles of Mining (1909), The Challenge to Liberty (1934), The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson (1958), and An American Epic (3 vol., 1959-61). With his wife, Lou Henry Hoover (1875-1944), he translated Agricola's De re metallica (1912).
See his memoirs (3 vol., 1951-52); biographies by E. Lyons (1948, repr. 1964), H. Wolfe (1956), and C. Wilson (1968); H. G. Warren, Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression (1959); A. U. Romasco, Poverty of Abundance (1965, repr. 1968); J. Hoff, Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive (1975).
Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: History:
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Hoover, Herbert
A political leader of the twentieth century, who was president from 1929 to 1933. Hoover became famous for his direction of relief work in Europe after World War I. He had been president only a few months when the Great Depression began (see stock market Crash of 1929, stock market, and Hoovervilles). A Republican, he was reluctant to use the power of the federal government against the Depression. Hoover tried to persuade voters that private enterprise could turn the economy around, but he lost the election of 1932 to Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the late 1940s, he was head of a commission to make the federal government more efficient.
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Hoover, Herbert Clark
Herbert Clark Hoover was the thirty-first president of the United States, serving from 1929 to 1932. A wealthy mining engineer, Hoover directed humanitarian relief efforts during and after World Wars I and II. His presidency was devastated by the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression.
Hoover was born August 10, 1874, in West Branch, Iowa. His father and mother died when he was young, and he was raised by an uncle in Oregon. He entered the first first-year class at Stanford University and graduated in 1895 with a degree in mining engineering. He became an expert on managing and reorganizing mines throughout the world. He spent time in Australia and China before setting up his own engineering firm in London in 1908. By 1914 Hoover had become a millionaire.
Hoover became involved in relief work during World War I. In 1914 he served as director of the American Relief Commission in England, which helped one hundred twenty thousand U.S. citizens return home after being stranded at the outbreak of the war. The British government then asked him to lead the Commission for Relief in Belgium. His main achievement during this period was the distribution of supplies to civilian victims of the war in Belgium and France.
After the United States entered the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson named Hoover U.S. food administrator. In this capacity Hoover coordinated the production and conservation of food supplies that could be used for the war effort. Hoover also chaired the European Relief and Reconstruction Commission, directing activities of numerous relief departments and organizing the distribution of provisions. After the war Hoover coordinated the American Relief Administration. This agency provided food to millions during the famine of 1921 in the Soviet Union.
Hoover's humanitarian efforts made him an international figure. Democrats and Republicans sought to make him a presidential candidate in 1920, but Hoover rejected their offers. Instead, in 1921 he accepted the position of secretary of commerce in the administration of President Warren G. Harding, a Republican. Hoover was an energetic administrator, reorganizing the department and expanding its oversight into commercial aviation, highway safety, and radio broadcasting. He chaired commissions that established the Hoover Dam and the St. Lawrence Seaway.
In 1928 Hoover won the Republican presidential nomination. He easily defeated Democrat Alfred E. Smith, on a platform of continued economic prosperity and support for Prohibition.
Hoover devoted the early days of his presidency to improving the economic conditions of farmers. He advocated foreign tariffs on imported farm products as a way to protect domestic farm prices. Congress went beyond Hoover's recommendation and in 1930 enacted the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act (19 U.S.C.A. § 1303 et seq.), which placed tariffs on nonfarm products as well. The act severely damaged U.S. foreign trade.
The control of Prohibition pursuant to the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act (41 Stat. 305 [1919]) had become a serious problem by 1929. Organized crime had seized the opportunity to sell illegal alcohol. The only way large-scale liquor and speakeasy traffic could flourish was with the cooperation of law enforcement, so state and local law enforcement agencies were tainted with corruption. In 1929 Hoover established the National Commission on Law Observance and Law Enforcement, appointing George W. Wickersham to direct an investigation of the effectiveness of law enforcement practices in the United States. The Wickersham Commission report was an important inquiry into the practices of the U.S. criminal justice system. The report examined all facets of police work and, for the first time, discussed police brutality and the "third degree" method of interrogating suspects. The report called for the professionalization of police.
The U.S. economy appeared to be robust in 1929, but a rising stock market had been built on stock purchases financed by widespread borrowing. When the stock market crashed on October 29, individuals, banks, and other economic institutions were devastated. Hoover sought to inspire public confidence by meeting with business leaders and by proclaiming that the economic downturn would be brief.
Hoover's prediction was wrong. The United States slid into the worst economic depression in its history. Hoover resisted massive federal intervention because he believed that the economy would correct itself. He did approve some federal public works projects that provided jobs, but he opposed federal aid to the unemployed. In his view private charity should help those who had fallen on hard times.
In 1932, with 12 million people out of work and hundreds of banks failing, Hoover created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) to extend loans to revitalize industry and to keep banks from going into bankruptcy. Congress authorized the RFC to loan up to $300 million to states for relief. Many persons viewed these actions as too little and too late.
The troubles of the Hoover administration culminated in the Bonus Army March on Washington, D.C. In 1932 World War I veterans demanded monetary bonuses that had been promised them in 1924, even though the bonuses were not scheduled to be paid until 1945. The House of Representatives had passed a bill authorizing early payment, and the veterans sought to pressure the Senate to follow suit. Over fifteen thousand veterans, in desperate need of funds, organized a march on Washington, D.C., to secure immediate payment from the government. The "bonus army" constructed a makeshift city and declared that its members were ready to stay until their goal was achieved. Hoover dispatched federal troops to destroy the encampment and drive the veterans out of the nation's capital. For doing so he received nationwide criticism.
The Republican party nominated Hoover for a second term in 1932, but his candidacy attracted little enthusiasm. The Democratic party nominee, Governor Franklin D. Roose- velt of New York, mounted a vigorous campaign against Hoover's economic policies, calling for a "new deal" for U.S. citizens. Roosevelt promised to balance the budget, provide relief to the unemployed, help the farmer, and repeal Prohibition. He carried forty-two of the forty-eight states.
Hoover was angered by Roosevelt's New Deal, which made the federal government the dominant player in the national economy. In 1934 he published The Challenge to Liberty, which attacked Roosevelt and his policies. He then withdrew from public life until 1946, when President Harry S. Truman asked him to return to relief work. Hoover subsequently directed the Famine Emergency Commission, which distributed food supplies to war-torn nations. In 1947 Truman authorized him to investigate the executive department of the U.S. government. The resulting Hoover Commission proposed changes in the executive branch that saved money and streamlined government.
Hoover had a continuing interest in the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, which he founded at Stanford in 1919 and which remains an important research center. He published his memoirs in three volumes (1951-52) and The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson (1958).
Hoover lived longer after leaving the presidency than did any other president. He died at age ninety on October 20, 1964, in New York City.
Quotes By:
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Herbert Clark Hoover
Quotes:
"Freedom is the open window through which pours the sunlight of the human spirit and human dignity."
"Words without actions are the assassins of idealism."
"In the great mass of our people there are plenty individuals of intelligence from among whom leadership can be recruited."
"About the time we can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends."
"Peace is not made at the council table or by treaties, but in the hearts of men."
"In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land."
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Herbert Clark Hoover
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Herbert Hoover
| Herbert Hoover | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| 31st President of the United States | |
| In office March 4, 1929 – March 4, 1933 |
|
| Vice President | Charles Curtis |
| Preceded by | Calvin Coolidge |
| Succeeded by | Franklin D. Roosevelt |
| 3rd United States Secretary of Commerce | |
| In office March 5, 1921 – August 21, 1928 |
|
| President | Warren G. Harding Calvin Coolidge |
| Preceded by | Joshua W. Alexander |
| Succeeded by | William F. Whiting |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Herbert Clark Hoover August 10, 1874 West Branch, Iowa, United States |
| Died | October 20, 1964 (aged 90) New York City, U.S. |
| Political party | Republican |
| Spouse(s) | Lou Henry Hoover |
| Children | Herbert Hoover, Jr. Allan Hoover |
| Alma mater | George Fox University Stanford University |
| Profession | Mining engineer Civil engineer Businessperson Humanitarian |
| Religion | Quaker |
| Signature |  |
Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874 – October 20, 1964) was the 31st President of the United States (1929–1933). Hoover was originally a professional mining engineer and author. As the United States Secretary of Commerce in the 1920s under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he promoted partnerships between government and business under the rubric "economic modernization". In the presidential election of 1928, Hoover easily won the Republican nomination, despite having no previous elected-office experience. Hoover is the most recent cabinet secretary to be elected President of the United States, as well as one of only two Presidents (along with William Howard Taft) to have been elected without previous electoral experience or high military rank. America was prosperous and optimistic at the time, leading to a landslide victory for Hoover over Democrat Al Smith.
Hoover, a trained engineer, believed strongly in the Efficiency Movement, which held that the government and the economy were riddled with inefficiency and waste, and could be improved by experts who could identify the problems and solve them. He also believed in the importance of volunteerism and the role of individuals in playing a role in American society and the economy. Hoover, who had made a small fortune in mining, was the first of two Presidents to redistribute their salary (President Kennedy was the other; he donated all his paychecks to charity).[1] When the Wall Street Crash of 1929 struck less than eight months after he took office, Hoover tried to combat the ensuing Great Depression with volunteer efforts, public works projects such as the Hoover Dam, tariffs such as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, an increase in the top tax bracket from 25% to 63%, and increases in corporate taxes. These initiatives did not produce economic recovery during his term, but served as the groundwork for various policies laid out in Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. After 1933 he became a leading conservative spokesman in opposition to the domestic and foreign policies of the New Deal. In 1947 President Harry S. Truman brought him back to help make the federal bureaucracy more efficient through the Hoover Commission. The consensus among historians is that Hoover's defeat in the 1932 election was caused primarily by failure to end the downward economic spiral. As a result of these factors, Hoover is ranked poorly among US Presidents.
Family background and early life
Hoover was born on August 10, 1874, in West Branch, Iowa. He was the first president born west of the Mississippi River and remains the only Iowan President. His father, Jessie Hoover, was a blacksmith and farm implement store owner who was of German (Pfautz, Wehmeyer) and German-Swiss (Huber, Burkhart) descent. Hoover's mother, Hulda Randall (Minthorn) Hoover (1849–84), was born in Norwich, Ontario, Canada, of English and Irish descent. Both were Quakers.
His father died in 1880, and his mother in 1884, leaving Hoover an orphan at the age of nine. Fellow Quaker Lawrie Tatum was appointed as Hoover's guardian. After a brief stay with one of his grandmothers in Kingsley, Iowa, Hoover lived for the next 18 months with his uncle Allen Hoover in West Branch. In November 1885 he went to Newberg, Oregon, to live with his uncle John Minthorn, a frontier physician and businessman whose own son had died the year before. For two and a half years, Hoover attended Friends Pacific Academy (now George Fox University), and then worked as an office assistant in his uncle's real estate office, the Oregon Land Company, in Salem, Oregon. Though he did not attend high school, the young Hoover attended night school and learned bookkeeping, typing, and mathematics.[2]
Hoover entered Stanford University in 1891, the new California college's first year. The first-year students were not required to pay tuition.[2] Hoover claimed to be the first student ever at Stanford, by virtue of having been the first person in the first class to sleep in the dormitory.[3] While at the university, he was the student manager of both the baseball and football teams and was a part of the inaugural Big Game versus rival University of California (Stanford won).[3] In one game in 1894, as manager of the baseball team, Hoover found the receipts were short. Hoover graduated in 1895 with a degree in geology.[4]
Mining engineer
Hoover went to Australia in 1897 as an employee of Bewick, Moreing & Co., a London-based mining company. Hoover first went to Coolgardie, then the center of the Western Australian goldfields, where he worked under Edward Hooper, a company partner. Conditions were harsh as these goldfields were centered in the Great Victoria Desert and Hoover described the region as a land of "black flies, red dust, and white heat."[5] He served as a geologist and mining engineer while searching the Western Australian goldfields for investments. After being appointed as mine manager at the age of 23, he led a major program of expansion for the Sons of Gwalia gold mine at Gwalia, Western Australia, and brought in many Italian immigrants to cut costs and counter the union militancy of the Australian miners.[6][7] He believed "the rivalry between the Italians and the other men was of no small benefit."[6] He also described Italians as "fully 20 per cent superior"[6] to other miners.
Hoover worked at gold mines in Big Bell, Cue, Leonora, Menzies and Coolgardie, Western Australia.[8][9] During his time at Gwalia, Hoover first met FJ (Jim) Lyster, a pioneering metallurgist.[10][11]
Hoover married his Stanford sweetheart, Lou Henry, in 1899. The Hoovers had two sons, Herbert Clark Hoover Jr. (1903–69) and Allan Henry Hoover (1907–93). The family went to China, where Hoover worked for Bewick, Moreing & Co. as the company's lead engineer. Hoover and his wife learned Mandarin Chinese while he worked in China and used it during his tenure at the White House when they wanted to foil eavesdroppers.[12] The Boxer Rebellion trapped the Hoovers in Tianjin in June 1900. For almost a month, the settlement was under fire. Hoover himself guided U.S. Marines around Tianjin during the battle, using his knowledge of the local terrain.[13]
Hoover was made a partner in Bewick, Moreing & Co. in 1901 and assumed responsibility for various Australian operations and investments. The company would eventually control approximately 50% of gold production in Western Australia.[14][page needed] By now, Hoover was no longer living in Australia, instead he visited the country in 1902, 1903, 1905 and 1907 as an overseas investor.
In August–September 1905, he founded the Zinc Corporation (later, following various mergers, to become part of the Rio Tinto Group) with William Baillieu and others, with the intention to purchase and treat the zinc rich-tailings in Broken Hill, New South Wales. Known as "the Sulphide Problem",[15] it had been noticed that considerable zinc in the lead-silver could not be recovered and was lost as tailings. Initially, Broken Hill mining companies mostly extracted the silver by crushing and gravitation methods by the turn of the century. Hydro-metallurgical, and magnetic separation methods were also tried,[16] but the main breakthrough came in 1902 when Delprat and Potter independently devised processes that would eventually be patented as the Delprat-Potter method.[17][18] This was a part of the overall effort being made in Broken Hill to devise a practical and profitable method to use the newly developed froth flotation process to treat these tailings and recover the zinc.[19] Flotation, an important mineral separation process, was pioneered in Broken Hill and numerous efforts were being made in various locations around the world to refine this process. The Delprat-Potter process became the main method used in various companies in Broken Hill, although the Zinc Corporation struggled to gain success using this process. During Hoover's 1907 visit to Australia, Jim Lyster relocated from Gwalia to Broken Hill and began experiments which resulted in the "Lyster Process",[10] which enabled the Zinc Corporation to operate the world's first selective or differential flotation plant, from September 1912.[20] Lyster signed US patents in 1916 and 1921, securing the international rights to these developments for a UK based company, Minerals Separation, Limited. Working with his brother, Theodore J. Hoover, Minerals Separation Ltd and his own company, Hoover was supplying the world's industries, such as steel, with zinc and other vital base minerals.
Hoover left Bewick Moreing & Co in 1908 and, setting out on his own, eventually ended up with investments on every continent and offices in San Francisco, London, New York City, St. Petersburg, Paris and Mandalay, Burma. He had his second majorly successful venture with the British firm Burma Corporation, again producing silver, lead and Zinc in large quantities at the Namtu Bawdwin Mine, where he caught malaria in 1907.[14][page needed]
By 1914, Hoover was an extremely wealthy man, with an estimated personal fortune of $4m.[14][page needed] He was once quoted as saying "If a man has not made a million dollars by the time he is forty, he is not worth much".[14][page needed] Sixty-six years after opening the mine in 1897, Hoover still had a partial share in the Sons of Gwalia mines when it finally closed in 1963, just one year before the former President's death in New York City in 1964. The successful mine had yielded $55m in gold and $10m in dividends for investors.[14][page needed] Herbert Hoover, acting as a main investor, financier, mining speculator and organiser of men, played a major role in the important metallurgical developments that occurred in Broken Hill in the first decade of the twentieth century, developments that had a great impact on the world mining and production of silver, lead and zinc.[14][page needed][21][22][23][24][25][26]
In 1908 Hoover became an independent mining consultant, traveling worldwide until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. His lectures at Columbia and Stanford universities were published in 1909 as Principles of Mining,[27] which became a standard textbook. Hoover and his wife also published their English translation of the 1556 mining classic De re metallica in 1912. This translation from the Latin of Renaissance author Georgius Agricola is still the most important scholarly version and provides its historical context.[28] It is still in print.
After World War II, Hoover's mining work in the Kyshtym area of Russia proved invaluable to American intelligence agencies. They had been unable to find detailed maps of the area, which contained the Soviets' first military plutonium production facility at Mayak, making knowledge of the area vital in the event of war with the Soviet Union. It was determined that Hoover had given extremely detailed maps of the area to Stanford University.[29]
Humanitarian
When World War I began in August 1914, Hoover helped organize the return of 120,000 Americans from Europe. He led 500 volunteers in distributing food, clothing, steamship tickets and cash. "I did not realize it at the moment, but on August 3, 1914, my career was over forever. I was on the slippery road of public life."[30] Hoover liked to say that the difference between dictatorship and democracy was simple: dictators organize from the top down, democracies from the bottom up.
When Belgium faced a food crisis after being invaded by Germany, Hoover undertook an unprecedented relief effort with the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB). As chairman of the CRB, Hoover worked with the leader of the Belgian Comite National de Secours et Alimentation (CN), Emile Francqui, to feed the entire nation for the duration of the war. The CRB obtained and imported millions of tons of foodstuffs for the CN to distribute, and watched over the CN to make sure the German army didn't appropriate the food. The CRB became a veritable independent republic of relief, with its own flag, navy, factories, mills, and railroads. Private donations and government grants supplied an $11-million-a-month budget.
For the next two years, Hoover worked 14-hour days from London, administering the distribution of over two million tons of food to nine million war victims. In an early form of shuttle diplomacy, he crossed the North Sea forty times to meet with German authorities and persuade them to allow food shipments, becoming an international hero. The Belgian city of Leuven named a prominent square Hooverplein after him.
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After the United States entered the war in April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Hoover to head the U.S. Food Administration. Hoover believed "food will win the war", and beginning on September 29, this slogan was introduced and put into frequent use.[31] Hoover established set days to encourage people to avoid eating particular foods to save them for soldiers' rations: meatless Mondays, wheatless Wednesdays, and "when in doubt, eat potatoes." This program helped reduce consumption of foodstuffs needed overseas and avoided rationing at home. It was dubbed "Hooverizing" by government publicists, in spite of Hoover's continual orders that publicity should not mention him by name.
After the war, as a member of the Supreme Economic Council and head of the American Relief Administration, Hoover organized shipments of food for millions of starving people in Central Europe. He used a newly formed Quaker organization, the American Friends Service Committee, to carry out much of the logistical work in Europe.
Hoover provided aid to the defeated German nation after the war, as well as relief to famine-stricken Bolshevik-controlled areas of Russia in 1921, despite the opposition of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and other Republicans. When asked if he was not thus helping Bolshevism, Hoover retorted, "Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!" At war's end, the New York Times named Hoover one of the "Ten Most Important Living Americans". In July 1922, Soviet author Maxim Gorky wrote to Hoover:
Your help will enter history as a unique, gigantic achievement, worthy of the greatest glory, which will long remain in the memory of millions of Russians whom you have saved from death.[32]
Hoover confronted a world of political possibilities when he returned home in 1919. Democratic Party leaders saw him as a potential Presidential candidate, and President Wilson privately preferred Hoover as his successor. "There could not be a finer one," asserted Franklin D. Roosevelt, then a rising star from New York. Hoover briefly considered becoming a Democrat, but he believed that 1920 would be a Republican year. Also, Hoover confessed that he could not run for a party whose only member in his boyhood home had been the town drunk.
Hoover realized that he was in a unique position to collect information about the Great War and its aftermath. In 1919 he established the Hoover War Collection at Stanford University. He donated all the files of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, the U.S. Food Administration, and the American Relief Administration, and pledged $50,000 as an endowment. Scholars were sent to Europe to collect pamphlets, society publications, government documents, newspapers, posters, proclamations, and other ephemeral materials related to the war and the revolutions that followed it. The collection was later renamed the Hoover War Library and is now known as the Hoover Institution.
Secretary of Commerce
Hoover rejected Democratic overtures in 1920. He had been a registered Republican before the war, though in 1912 he had supported Theodore Roosevelt's "Bull Moose" Progressive Party. Now he declared himself a Republican and a candidate for the Presidency.
He placed his name on the ballot in the California state primary election, where he came close to beating popular Senator Hiram Johnson. But having lost in his home state, Hoover was not considered a serious contender at the convention. Even when it deadlocked for several ballots between Illinois Governor Frank Lowden and General Leonard Wood, few delegates seriously considered Hoover as a compromise choice. Although he had personal misgivings about the capability of the nominee, Warren G. Harding, Hoover publicly endorsed him and made two speeches for Harding.
After being elected, Harding rewarded Hoover for his support, offering to appoint him either Secretary of the Interior or Secretary of Commerce. Hoover ultimately chose Commerce. Commerce had existed for just eight years, since the division of the earlier Department of Commerce and Labor. Commerce was considered a minor Cabinet post, with limited and vaguely defined responsibilities.
Hoover aimed to change that, envisioning the Commerce Department as the hub of the nation's growth and stability. From Harding he demanded, and received, authority to coordinate economic affairs throughout the government. He created many sub-departments and committees, overseeing and regulating everything from manufacturing statistics, the census and radio, to air travel. In some instances he "seized" control of responsibilities from other Cabinet departments when he deemed that they were not carrying out their responsibilities well. Hoover became one of the most visible men in the country, often overshadowing Presidents Harding and Coolidge. Washington wags referred to Hoover as "the Secretary of Commerce... and Under-Secretary of Everything Else!"
As secretary and later as President, Hoover revolutionized relations between business and government. Rejecting the adversarial stance of Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson, he sought to make the Commerce Department a powerful service organization, empowered to forge cooperative voluntary partnerships between government and business. This philosophy is often called "associationalism".
Many of Hoover's efforts as Commerce Secretary centered on eliminating waste and increasing efficiency in business and industry. This included reducing labor losses from trade disputes and seasonal fluctuations, reducing industrial losses from accident and injury, and reducing the amount of crude oil spilled during extraction and shipping. One major achievement was to promote product standardizations. He energetically promoted international trade by opening offices overseas that gave advice and practical help to businessmen. Hoover was especially eager to promote Hollywood films overseas.[33]
His "Own Your Own Home" campaign was a collaboration to promote ownership of single-family dwellings, with groups such as the Better Houses in America movement, the Architects' Small House Service Bureau, and the Home Modernizing Bureau. He worked with bankers and the savings and loan industry to promote the new long-term home mortgage, which dramatically stimulated home construction.[34]
It has been suggested that Herbert Hoover was the best Secretary of Commerce in United States history.[35][36] Hoover was the last President to have held a full cabinet position.
Radio conferences
Hoover's radio conferences played a key role in the early organization, development and regulation of radio broadcasting. Prior to the radio act of 1927, the Secretary of Commerce was unable to deny radio licensing or re-assign broadcast frequencies. With help from supporters Senator Dill and Representative White, Hoover brought the issue of radio control to the Senate floor. Hoover fought for more power to control the proliferation of licensed radio stations (which in 1927, stood at 732 stations). With help from Dill and White, Hoover promoted the Dill-White Bill which eventually would become the Radio Act of 1927. This act allowed the government to intervene and abolish radio stations that were deemed "non-useful" to the public. Hoover's attempts at regulating radio were not supported by all Congressmen, and he received much opposition from the Senate and from radio station owners. However, Hoover's contributions to regulate radio in its infancy heavily influenced the modern radio system.[37]
Hoover contributed to major projects for navigation, irrigation of dry lands, electrical power, and flood control. As the new air transport industry developed, Hoover held a conference on aviation to promote codes and regulations. He became President of the American Child Health Organization, and he raised private funds to promote health education in schools and communities.
Although he continued to consider Harding ill-suited to be President, the two men nevertheless became friends. Hoover accompanied Harding on his final trip out West in 1923. It was Hoover who called for a specialist to tend to the ailing Chief Executive, and it was also Hoover who contacted the White House to inform them of the President's death. The Commerce Secretary headed the group of dignitaries accompanying Harding's body back to the capital.
By the end of Hoover's service as Secretary, he had raised the status of the Department of Commerce. This was reflected in its modern headquarters built during the Roosevelt Administration in the 1930s in the Federal Triangle in Washington, D.C.
Traffic conferences
As Commerce Secretary, Hoover also hosted two national conferences on street traffic, in 1924 and 1926 (a third convened in 1930, during Hoover's presidency). Collectively the meetings were called the National Conference on Street and Highway Safety. Hoover's chief objective was to address the growing casualty toll of traffic accidents, but the scope grew and soon embraced motor vehicle standards, rules of the road, and urban traffic control. He left the invited interest groups to negotiate agreements among themselves, which were then presented for adoption by states and localities. Because automotive trade associations were the best organized, many of the positions taken by the conferences reflected their interests. The conferences issued a model Uniform Vehicle Code for adoption by the states, and a Model Municipal Traffic Ordinance for adoption by cities. Both were widely influential, promoting greater uniformity between jurisdictions and tending to promote the automobile's priority in city streets.[38]
Mississippi flood
The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 broke the banks and levees of the lower Mississippi River in early 1927, resulting in flooding of millions of acres and leaving 1.5 million people displaced from their homes. Although such a disaster did not fall under the duties of the Commerce Department, the governors of six states along the Mississippi specifically asked for Herbert Hoover in the emergency. President Calvin Coolidge sent Hoover to mobilize state and local authorities, militia, army engineers, the Coast Guard, and the American Red Cross.
With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Hoover set up health units to work in the flooded regions for a year. These workers stamped out malaria, pellagra, and typhoid fever from many areas. His work during the flood brought Herbert Hoover to the front page of newspapers almost everywhere, and he gained new accolades as a humanitarian. The great victory of his relief work, he stressed, was not that the government rushed in and provided all assistance; it was that much of the assistance available was provided by private citizens and organizations in response to his appeals. "I suppose I could have called in the Army to help," he said, "but why should I, when I only had to call upon Main Street."
The treatment of African-Americans during the disaster endangered Hoover's reputation as a humanitarian. Local officials brutalized blacks and prevented them from leaving relief camps, aid meant for African-American sharecroppers was often given to the landowners instead, and many times black males were conscripted by locals into forced labor, sometimes at gun point.[39] Knowing the potential ramifications on his presidential aspirations if such knowledge became public, Hoover struck a deal with Robert Russa Moton, the prominent African-American successor to Booker T. Washington as president of the Tuskegee Institute. In exchange for keeping the suffering of African-Americans out of the public eye, Hoover promised unprecedented influence for African-Americans if he was elected president. Moton agreed, and consistent with the accommodationist philosophy of Washington, worked actively to suppress information about mistreatment of blacks from being revealed to the media. Following election, Hoover broke his promises. This led to an African-American backlash in the 1932 election that shifted allegiance from the Republican party to the Democrats.[40]
Presidential election of 1928
Main article: United States presidential election, 1928
Southern strategy
To gain Republican votes in Southern states, Hoover pioneered an electoral tactic later known as the "Southern Strategy". Hoover's appeal to white voters yielded substantial results, including Republican victories in Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, and Texas. It marked the first time that a Republican candidate for president had carried Texas. This outraged the black leadership, which largely broke from the Republican Party, and began seeking candidates who supported civil rights within the Democratic Party.[41]
Republican primaries
When Calvin Coolidge announced in 1928 that he would not seek a full term of office in the 1928 Presidential Election, Hoover became the leading Republican candidate, despite the fact Coolidge was lukewarm on Hoover, often deriding his ambitious and popular Commerce Secretary as "Wonder Boy".[42] His only real challenger was Frank Orren Lowden. Hoover received much favorable press coverage in the months leading up to the convention. Lowden's campaign manager complained that newspapers were full of "nothing but advertisements for Herbert Hoover and Fletcher's Castoria". Hoover's reputation, experience, and popularity coalesced to give him the nomination on the first ballot, with Senator Charles Curtis named as his running mate.
General election
Hoover campaigned for efficiency and the Republican record of prosperity against Democrat Alfred E. Smith. Smith likewise was a proponent of efficiency earned as governor of New York. Both candidates were pro-business, and each promised to improve conditions for farmers, reform immigration laws, and maintain America's isolationist foreign policy. Where they differed was on the Volstead Act which outlawed the sale of liquor and beer. Smith was a "wet" who called for its repeal, whereas Hoover gave limited support for prohibition, calling it an "experiment noble in purpose". His use of "experiment" suggested it was not permanent. While Smith won extra support among Catholics in the big cities Smith was the target of intense anti-Catholicism from some Protestant communities, especially as Southern Baptists and German Lutherans.[43] Overall the religious factor worked to the advantage of Hoover, although he took no part in it.[44]
Historians agree that Hoover's national reputation and the booming economy, combined with deep splits in the Democratic Party over religion and prohibition, guaranteed his landslide victory with 58% of the vote.[45] Hoover managed to crack the so-called "Solid South", winning such Democratic strongholds as Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Texas and Tennessee; the Deep South stood with Smith.
Presidency 1929–1933
See also: Inauguration of Herbert Hoover
Hoover held a press conference on his first day in office, promising a "new phase of press relations".[46] He asked the group of journalists to elect a committee to recommend improvements to the White House press conference. Hoover declined to use a spokesman, instead asking reporters to directly quote him and giving them handouts with his statements ahead of time. In his first 120 days in office, he held more regular and frequent press conferences than any other President, before or since. However, he changed his press policies after the 1929 stock market crash, screening reporters and greatly reducing his availability.[46]
Unlike many previous first ladies, when Hoover's wife, Lou Henry Hoover, came to the White House, she had already carved out her own reputation, having graduated from Stanford as the only woman in her class with a degree in geology. Although she never practiced her profession formally, she typified the new woman of the post–World War I era: intelligent, robust, and aware of multiple female possibilities.
Hoover invented his own sport to keep fit while in the White House, a combination of volleyball and tennis, which he played every morning.[47]
Policies
On poverty, Hoover said that "Given the chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation",[48] and promised, "We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land," but within months, the Stock Market Crash of 1929 occurred, and the world's economy spiraled downward into the Great Depression.[49]
Hoover entered office with a plan to reform the nation's regulatory system, believing that a federal bureaucracy should have limited regulation over a country's economic system.[50] A self-described progressive and reformer, Hoover saw the presidency as a vehicle for improving the conditions of all Americans by encouraging public-private cooperation—what he termed "volunterism". Hoover saw volunterism as preferable to governmental coercion or intervention which he saw as opposed to the American ideals of individualism and self-reliance.[51] Long before he had entered politics, he had denounced laissez-faire thinking.[52]
Hoover expanded civil service coverage of Federal positions, canceled private oil leases on government lands, and by instructing the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service to pursue gangsters for tax evasion, he enabled the prosecution of mobster Al Capone. He appointed a commission that set aside 3,000,000 acres (12,000 km²) of national parks and 2,300,000 acres of national forests; advocated tax reduction for low-income Americans (not enacted); closed certain tax loopholes for the wealthy; doubled the number of veterans' hospital facilities; negotiated a treaty on St. Lawrence Seaway (which failed in the U.S. Senate); wrote a Children's Charter that advocated protection of every child regardless of race or gender; created an antitrust division in the Justice Department; required air mail carriers to adopt stricter safety measures and improve service; proposed federal loans for urban slum clearances (not enacted); organized the Federal Bureau of Prisons; reorganized the Bureau of Indian Affairs; instituted prison reform; proposed a federal Department of Education (not enacted); advocated $50-per-month pensions for Americans over 65 (not enacted); chaired White House conferences on child health, protection, homebuilding and home-ownership; began construction of the Boulder Dam (later renamed Hoover Dam); and signed the Norris – La Guardia Act that limited judicial intervention in labor disputes.[citation needed]
On November 19, 1928, Hoover embarked on a seven-week goodwill tour of several Latin American nations to outline his economic and trade policies to other nations in the Western Hemisphere.
Foreign relations
Following the release in 1930 of the Clark Memorandum, Hoover began formulating what would become Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy. He began withdrawing American troops from Nicaragua and Haiti; he also proposed an arms embargo on Latin America and a one-third reduction of the world's naval power, which was called the Hoover Plan. The Roosevelt Corollary ceased being part of U.S. foreign policy. In response to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, he and Secretary of State Henry Stimson outlined the Hoover–Stimson Doctrine which held that the United States would not recognize territories gained by force.[53]
Hoover mediated between Chile and Peru to solve a conflict on the sovereignty of Arica and Tacna, that in 1883 by the Treaty of Ancón had been awarded to Chile for ten years, to be followed by a plebiscite that had never happened. By the Tacna–Arica compromise at the Treaty of Lima in 1929, Chile kept Arica, and Peru regained Tacna.
Civil rights
Hoover seldom mentioned civil rights while he was President. He believed that African-Americans and other races could improve themselves with education and wanted the races assimilated into white culture.[54] Hoover attempted to appoint John J. Parker of North Carolina to the Supreme Court in 1930 to replace Edward Sanford. The NAACP claimed that Parker had made many court decisions against African-Americans, and they fought the nomination. The NAACP was successful in gaining Senator Borah's support and the nomination was defeated by one vote in the Senate.[55]
First Lady Lou Hoover defied custom and invited an African-American Republican, Oscar DePriest, a member in the House of Representatives, to dinner at the White House. Booker T. Washington was the previous African-American to have dined at the White House, with Theodore Roosevelt in 1901.[56]
Charles Curtis, the nation's first Native American Vice President, was from the Kaw tribe in Kansas.[57] Hoover's humanitarian and Quaker reputation, along with Curtis as a vice-president, gave special meaning to his Indian policies. His Quaker upbringing influenced his views that Native Americans needed to achieve economic self-sufficiency. As President, he appointed Charles J. Rhoads as commissioner of Indian affairs. Hoover supported Rhoads' commitment to Indian assimilation and sought to minimize the federal role in Indian affairs. His goal was to have Indians acting as individuals (not as tribes) and to assume the responsibilities of citizenship granted with the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.[58]
Great Depression
Main article: Great Depression in the United States
Hoover had long been a proponent of the concept that public-private cooperation was the way to achieve high long-term growth.[59] Hoover feared that too much intervention or coercion by the government would destroy individuality and self-reliance, which he considered to be important American values. Both his ideals and the economy were put to the test with the onset of the Great Depression.
Although Hoover is regularly criticized for his laissez-faire approach to the Depression,[60] in his memoirs, Hoover claims that he rejected Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's suggested "leave-it-alone" approach,[61] and called many business leaders to Washington to urge them not to lay off workers or cut wages.[62]
Lee Ohanian, from UCLA takes a controversial stance, arguing that Hoover adopted pro-labor policies after the 1929 stock market crash that "accounted for close to two-thirds of the drop in the nation's gross domestic product over the two years that followed, causing what might otherwise have been a bad recession to slip into the Great Depression".[63] This argument is at odds with the more commonly accepted Keynesian view of the causes of the Depression, and has been challenged as revisionist by many economists including Brad DeLong of U.C. Berkeley.[64]
Calls for greater government assistance increased as the U.S. economy continued to decline. Hoover rejected direct federal relief payments to individuals, as he believed that a dole would be addictive, and would reduce the incentive to work. He was also a firm believer in balanced budgets, and was unwilling to run a budget deficit to fund welfare programs.[65] However, Hoover did pursue many policies in an attempt to pull the country out of depression. In 1929 he authorized the Mexican Repatriation program to combat rampant unemployment, reduce the burden on municipal aid services, and remove people seen as usurpers of American jobs. The program was largely a forced migration of approximately 500,000 Mexicans and Mexican Americans to Mexico, and continued until 1937. In June 1930, over the objection of many economists, Congress approved and Hoover signed into law the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act. The legislation raised tariffs on thousands of imported items. The intent of the Act was to encourage the purchase of American-made products by increasing the cost of imported goods, while raising revenue for the federal government and protecting farmers. However, economic depression now spread through much of the world, and other nations increased tariffs on American-made goods in retaliation, reducing international trade, and worsening the Depression.[66]
In 1931 Hoover issued the Hoover Moratorium, calling for a one-year halt in reparation payments by Germany to France and in the payment of Allied war debts to the United States. The plan was met with much opposition, especially from France, who saw significant losses to Germany during World War I. The Moratorium did little to ease economic declines. As the moratorium neared its expiration the following year, an attempt to find a permanent solution was made at the Lausanne Conference of 1932. A working compromise was never established, and by the start of World War II, reparations payments had stopped completely.[67][68] Hoover in 1931 urged the major banks in the country to form a consortium known as the National Credit Corporation (NCC).[69] The NCC was an example of Hoover's belief in volunteerism as a mechanism in aiding the economy. Hoover encouraged NCC member banks to provide loans to smaller banks to prevent them from collapsing. The banks within the NCC were often reluctant to provide loans, usually requiring banks to provide their largest assets as collateral. It quickly became apparent that the NCC would be incapable of fixing the problems it was designed to solve, and it was replaced by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
The Great Depression had spread across the globe by 1932. In the U.S., unemployment had reached 24.9%,[70] a drought persisted in the central United States particularly Oklahoma and Texas, businesses and families defaulted on record numbers of loans, and more than 5,000 banks had failed.[71] Tens of thousands of Americans found themselves homeless and began congregating in the numerous Hoovervilles (also known as shanty towns or tent cities) that began to appear across the country. Hoover's stance on the economy had been based largely on voluntarism.[72] That is, expecting churches and social institutions to aid the poor. However, faced with a tide of poverty, Hoover and the Congress approved the Federal Home Loan Bank Act, to spur new home construction and reduce foreclosures. The plan seemed to work, as foreclosures dropped, but it was seen as too little, too late.
Prior to the start of the Great Depression, Hoover's first Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon, had proposed and seen enacted, numerous tax cuts, which cut the top income tax rate from 73% to 24% (under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge). When combined with the sharp decline in incomes during the early depression, the result was a serious deficit in the federal budget. Congress, desperate to increase federal revenue, enacted the Revenue Act of 1932, which was the largest peacetime tax increase in history.[73] The Act increased taxes across the board, so that top earners were taxed at 63% on their net income. The 1932 Act also increased the tax on the net income of corporations from 12% to 13.75%.
The final attempt of the Hoover Administration to rescue the economy occurred in 1932 with the passage of the Emergency Relief and Construction Act, which authorized funds for public works programs and the creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). The RFC's initial goal was to provide government-secured loans to financial institutions, railroads and farmers. The RFC had minimal impact at the time, but was adopted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and greatly expanded as part of his New Deal.
Economy
To pay for these and other government programs and to make up for revenue lost due to the Depression, Hoover agreed to roll back several tax cuts that his Administration had enacted on upper incomes. In one of the largest tax increases in American history, the Revenue Act of 1932 raised income tax on the highest incomes from 25% to 63%. The estate tax was doubled and corporate taxes were raised by almost 15%. Also, a "check tax" was included that placed a 2-cent tax (over 30 cents in today's economy) on all bank checks. Economists William D. Lastrapes and George Selgin,[74] conclude that the check tax was "an important contributing factor to that period's severe monetary contraction." Hoover also encouraged Congress to investigate the New York Stock Exchange, and this pressure resulted in various reforms.
For this reason, years later libertarians argued that Hoover's economics were statist. Franklin D. Roosevelt blasted the Republican incumbent for spending and taxing too much, increasing national debt, raising tariffs and blocking trade, as well as placing millions on the government dole. Roosevelt attacked Hoover for "reckless and extravagant" spending, of thinking "that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible."[75] Roosevelt's running mate, John Nance Garner, accused the Republican of "leading the country down the path of socialism".[76]
Even so, New Dealer Rexford Tugwell[77] later remarked that although no one would say so at the time, "practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started."
Bonus Army
Main article: Bonus Army
Thousands of World War I veterans and their families demonstrated and camped out in Washington, DC, during June 1932, calling for immediate payment of a bonus that had been promised by the World War Adjusted Compensation Act in 1924 for payment in 1945. Although offered money by Congress to return home, some members of the "Bonus army" remained. Washington police attempted to remove the demonstrators from their camp, but they were outnumbered and unsuccessful. Shots were fired by the police in a futile attempt to attain order, and two protesters were killed while many officers were injured. Hoover sent U.S. Army forces led by General Douglas MacArthur and helped by lower ranking officers Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton to stop a march. MacArthur, believing he was fighting a communist revolution, chose to clear out the camp with military force. In the ensuing clash, hundreds of civilians were injured. Hoover had sent orders that the Army was not to move on the encampment, but MacArthur chose to ignore the command. Hoover was incensed, but refused to reprimand MacArthur. The entire incident was another devastating negative for Hoover in the 1932 election. That led New York governor and Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt to declare of Hoover: "There is nothing inside the man but jelly!"
1932 campaign
Main article: United States presidential election, 1932
Although Hoover had come to detest the presidency, he agreed to run again in 1932, not only as a matter of pride, but also because he feared that no other likely Republican candidate would deal with the depression without resorting to what Hoover considered dangerously radical measures.
Hoover was nominated by the Republicans for a second term. He had originally planned to make only one or two major speeches, and to leave the rest of the campaigning to proxies, but when polls showed the entire Republican ticket facing a resounding defeat at the polls, Hoover agreed to an expanded schedule of public addresses. In his nine major radio addresses Hoover primarily defended his administration and his philosophy. The apologetic approach did not allow Hoover to refute Democratic nominee Franklin Roosevelt's charge that he was personally responsible for the depression.[78]
In his campaign trips around the country, Hoover was faced with perhaps the most hostile crowds of any sitting president. Besides having his train and motorcades pelted with eggs and rotten fruit, he was often heckled while speaking, and on several occasions, the Secret Service halted attempts to kill Hoover by disgruntled citizens, including capturing one man nearing Hoover carrying sticks of dynamite, and another already having removed several spikes from the rails in front of the President's train.[79]
Osro Cobb, a leader of the Republican Party in Arkansas who became politically and personally close to Hoover, recalls:
President Hoover had become convinced that the Democrats deliberately were destroying the economy of the country and erecting roadblocks against every measure he offered to the Congress to restore balance to the economy ... all for the purpose of winning an election. Just a few weeks before the 1932 election, we were standing near a window in the Oval Office. His cigar was frayed and out, and he was in deep thought and obviously troubled. He turned aside and said that he had accepted a speaking engagement in Des Moines, Iowa, in three days and that the U.S. Secret Service had warned him that it had uncovered evidence of plots by radical elements to assassinate him if he keep it. Turmoil and uncertainty prevailed in the country, but there was absolutely no fear in his expression; to the contrary, there appeared to be an abundance of personal courage. Frankly, my heart went out to him, but I pointed out that fate and destiny played a part in the lives of all presidents and that I felt all possible precautions should be taken to protect him but that he should appear and make one of the greatest speeches of his administration. He smiled and said, "Osro, that's what I have already decided to do. Your concurrence is comforting." ...[80]
Despite the late campaign endeavors, Hoover sustained a large defeat in the election, having procured only 39.7 percent of the popular vote to Roosevelt's 57.4 percent. Hoover's popular vote was reduced by 26 percentage points from his result in the 1928 election. In the electoral college he carried only Pennsylvania, Delaware, and four other Northeastern states to lose 59–472. The Democrats extended their control over the U.S. House and gained control of the U.S. Senate.
After the election, Hoover requested that Roosevelt retain the Gold standard as the basis of the US currency, and in effect, continue many of the Hoover Administration's economic policies. Roosevelt refused.
Administration and cabinet
| The Hoover Cabinet | ||
|---|---|---|
| Office | Name | Term |
| President | Herbert Hoover | 1929–1933 |
| Vice President | Charles Curtis | 1929–1933 |
| Secretary of State | Henry L. Stimson | 1929–1933 |
| Secretary of Treasury | Andrew Mellon | 1929–1932 |
| Ogden L. Mills | 1932–1933 | |
| Secretary of War | James W. Good | 1929–1929 |
| Patrick J. Hurley | 1929–1933 | |
| Attorney General | William D. Mitchell | 1929–1933 |
| Postmaster General | Walter F. Brown | 1929–1933 |
| Secretary of the Navy | Charles F. Adams | 1929–1933 |
| Secretary of the Interior | Ray L. Wilbur | 1929–1933 |
| Secretary of Agriculture | Arthur M. Hyde | 1929–1933 |
| Secretary of Commerce | Robert P. Lamont | 1929–1932 |
| Roy D. Chapin | 1932–1933 | |
| Secretary of Labor | James J. Davis | 1929–1930 |
| William N. Doak | 1930–1933 | |
Supreme Court appointments
Main article: Herbert Hoover Supreme Court candidates
Hoover appointed the following Justices to the Supreme Court of the United States:[81]
| Supreme Court Appointments by President Herbert Hoover | ||
|---|---|---|
| Position | Name | Term |
| Chief Justice | Charles Evans Hughes | 1930–1941 |
| Associate Justice | Owen Roberts | 1930–1945 |
| Benjamin N. Cardozo | 1932–1938 | |
Hoover broke party lines to appoint the Democrat Cardozo. He explained that he "was one of the ancient believers that the Supreme Court should have a strong minority of the opposition's party and that all appointments should be made from experienced jurists. When the vacancy came... [Hoover] canvassed all the possible Democratic jurists and immediately concluded that Justice Cardozo was the right man and appointed him."[82]
Post-presidency
Hoover departed from Washington in March 1933 with some bitterness, disappointed both that he had been repudiated by the voters and unappreciated for his best efforts. The Hoovers went first to New York City, where they stayed for a while in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Later that spring, they returned to California to their Palo Alto residence. Hoover enjoyed returning to the men's clubs that he had long been involved with, including the Bohemian Club, the Pacific-Union Club, and the University Club in San Francisco.[83]
Hoover liked to drive his car, accompanied by his wife or a friend (former Presidents did not get Secret Service protection until the 1960s), and drive on wandering journeys, visiting Western mining camps or small towns where he often went unrecognized, or heading up to the mountains, or deep into the woods, to go fishing in relative solitude. A year before his death, his own fishing days behind him, he published Fishing For Fun—And To Wash Your Soul, the last of more than sixteen books in his lifetime.
Although many of his friends and supporters called upon Hoover to speak out against FDR's "New Deal" and to assume his place as the voice of the "loyal opposition", he refused to do so for many years after leaving the White House, and he largely kept himself out of the public spotlight until late in 1934. However, that did not stop rumors from springing up about him, often fanned by Democratic politicians who found the former President to be a convenient scapegoat.
The relationship between Hoover and Roosevelt was one of the most severely strained in Presidential history. Hoover had little good to say about his successor. FDR, in turn, supposedly engaged in various petty official acts aimed at his predecessor, ranging from dropping him from the White House birthday greetings message list to having Hoover's name struck from the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, which would officially be known only as Boulder Dam for many years to come.
In 1936, Hoover entertained hopes of receiving the Republican presidential nomination again, and thus facing Roosevelt in a rematch. However, although he retained strong support among some delegates, there was never much hope of his being selected. He publicly endorsed the nominee, Kansas Governor Alf Landon. But Hoover might as well have been the nominee, since the Democrats virtually ignored Landon, and they ran against the former President himself, constantly attacking him in speeches and warning that a Landon victory would put Hoover back in the White House as the secret power "behind the throne". Roosevelt won 46 of the 48 states, burying Landon in the Electoral College, and the Republican Party in Congress in another landslide.
Although Hoover's reputation was at its low point, circumstances began to rehabilitate his name and restore him to prominence. Roosevelt overreached on his Supreme Court packing plan, and a further financial recession in 1937 and 1938 tarnished his image of invincibility.
By 1940, Hoover was again being spoken of as the possible nominee of the party in the presidential election. Although he trailed in the polls behind Thomas Dewey, Arthur Vandenberg, and his own former protege, Robert A. Taft, he still had considerable first-ballot delegate strength, and it was believed that if the convention deadlocked between the leading candidates, the party might turn to him as its compromise. However, the convention nominated the utility company president Wendell Willkie, who had supported Roosevelt in 1932 but turned against him after the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority forced him to sell his company. Hoover dutifully supported Willkie, although he despaired that the nominee endorsed a platform that, to Hoover, was little more than the New Deal in all but name.
The road to war and World War II
Hoover visited 10 European countries in March 1938, the month of Nazi Germany's Anschluss of Austria, and stated "I do not believe a widespread war is at all probable in the near future. There is a general realization everywhere ... that civilization as we know it cannot survive another great war."[84] Like many, he initially believed that the European Allies would be able to contain Germany, and that Imperial Japan would not attack American interests in the Pacific.
Unlike Roosevelt's administration, Hoover was a vocal supporter of providing relief to countries in Nazi-occupied Europe.[85] He was instrumental in creating the Commission for Polish Relief and Finnish Relief Fund.[86][87]
When the Germans overran France and then had Britain held in a stalemate, many Americans saw Britain as on the verge of collapse. Nonetheless, Hoover declared that it would be folly for the United States to declare war on Germany and to rush to save the United Kingdom. Rather, he held, it was far wiser for this nation to devote itself to building up its own defenses, and to wash its hands of the mess in Europe. He called for a "Fortress America" concept, in which the United States, protected on the East and on the West by vast oceans patrolled by its Navy and its Air Corps (the USAAF), could adequately repel any attack on the Americas.
During a radio broadcast on June 29, 1941, one week after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Hoover disparaged any "tacit alliance" between the U.S. and the USSR by saying:
If we go further and join the war and we win, then we have won for Stalin the grip of communism on Russia... Again I say, if we join the war and Stalin wins, we have aided him to impose more communism on Europe and the world. At least we could not with such a bedfellow say to our sons that by making the supreme sacrifice, they are restoring freedom to the world. War alongside Stalin to impose freedom is more than a travesty. It is a tragedy.[88]
When the United States entered the war following the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hoover swept aside all feelings of neutrality and called for total victory. He offered himself to the government in any capacity necessary, but the Roosevelt Administration did not call upon him to serve.
Post–World War II
Because of Hoover's previous experience with Germany at the end of World War I, in 1946 President Harry S. Truman selected the former president to tour Germany to ascertain the food status of the occupied nation. Hoover toured what was to become West Germany in Hermann Göring's old train coach and produced a number of reports critical of U.S. occupation policy. The economy of Germany had "sunk to the lowest level in a hundred years."[89] He stated in one report:
There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a "pastoral state". It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it.[90]
On Hoover’s initiative, a school meals program in the American and British occupation zones of Germany was begun on April 14, 1947. The program served 3,500,000 children aged six through 18. A total of 40,000 tons of American food was provided during the Hooverspeisung (Hoover meals).
In 1947, President Harry S. Truman appointed Hoover to a commission, which elected him chairman, to reorganize the executive departments. This became known as the Hoover Commission. He was appointed chairman of a similar commission by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953. Both found numerous inefficiencies and ways to reduce waste. The government enacted most of the recommendations that the two commissions had made: 71% of the first commission's and 64% of the second commission's.
Following World War II, Hoover became friends with President Harry S. Truman. Hoover joked that they were for many years the sole members of the "trade union" of former Presidents (since Calvin Coolidge and Roosevelt were dead already).
Throughout the Cold War, Hoover, always an opponent of Marxism, became even more outspokenly anti-Communist.[91] However, he vehemently opposed American involvement in the Korean War, saying that "'To commit the sparse ground forces of the non-communist nations into a land war against this communist land mass [in Asia] would be a war without victory, a war without a successful political terminal... that would be the graveyard of millions of American boys and the exhaustion of the United States."[92]
Despite his advancing years, Hoover continued to work nearly full-time both on writing (among his literary works is The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson, a bestseller, and the first time one former President had ever written a biography about another), as well as overseeing the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, which housed not only his own professional papers, but also those of a number of other former high ranking governmental and military servants. He also threw himself into fund-raising for the Boys Clubs (now the Boys & Girls Clubs of America), which became his pet charity.
In 1960 Hoover appeared at his final Republican National Convention. Since the 1948 convention, he had been feted as the guest of "farewell" ceremonies (the unspoken assumption being that the aging former President might not survive until the next convention). Joking to the delegates, he said, "Apparently, my last three good-byes didn't take." Although he lived to see the 1964 convention, ill health prevented him from attending. The Presidential nominee Barry Goldwater acknowledged Hoover's absence in his acceptance speech.
Hoover died following massive internal bleeding at the age of 90 in his New York City suite at 11:35 a.m. on October 20, 1964,[93] 31 years and seven months, sixteen days after leaving office. To date, he has the longest retirement of any President. Former President Jimmy Carter will surpass the length of Hoover's retirement on September 7, 2012. At the time of his death he was the second longest-lived president after John Adams; both were since surpassed by Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. He had outlived by 20 years his wife, Lou Henry Hoover, who had died in 1944, and he was the last living member of the Coolidge administration. He also outlived both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt who died in 1945 and 1962, respectively. By the time of his death, he had rehabilitated his image.[94] His birthplace in Iowa and an Oregon home where he lived as a child, became National Landmarks during his lifetime. His Rapidan fishing camp in Virginia, which he had donated to the government in 1933, is now a National Historic Landmark within the Shenandoah National Park. Hoover and his wife are buried at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa. Hoover was honored with a state funeral, the last of three in a span of 12 months, coming as it did just after the deaths of President John F. Kennedy and General Douglas MacArthur, former Chaplain of the Senate Frederick Brown Harris officiated. All three have two things in common: the commanding general of the Military District of Washington during those funerals was Army Major General Philip C. Wehle and the riderless horse was Black Jack, who also served in that role during Lyndon B. Johnson's funeral.
Heritage and memorials
The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum is located in West Branch, Iowa next to the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site. The library is one of twelve presidential libraries run by the National Archives and Records Administration. The Lou Henry and Herbert Hoover House, built in 1919 in Palo Alto, California, is now the official residence of the president of Stanford University, and a National Historic Landmark. Hoover's rustic rural presidential retreat, Rapidan Camp (also known as Camp Hoover) in the Shenandoah National Park, Virginia, has been restored and opened to the public. The Hoover Dam was named in his honor, as are five Herbert Hoover High Schools.
On December 10, 2008, Hoover's great-granddaughter Margaret Hoover and Senate of Puerto Rico President Kenneth McClintock unveiled a life-sized bronze statue of Hoover at Puerto Rico's Territorial Capitol. The statue is one of seven honoring Presidents who have visited the United States territory during their term of office.
One line in the All in the Family theme song—an ironic exercise in pre–New Deal nostalgia—says "Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again".
The Belgian city of Leuven named a square in the city center after Hoover, honoring him for his work as chairman of the "Commission for Relief in Belgium" during World War I. The square is near the Central Library of the Catholic University of Leuven, where a bust of the president can be seen.
The Polish capital of Warsaw also has a square named after Hoover alongside the Royal Route leading to the Old Town.[95]
George Burroughs Torrey painted a portrait of him.
Media
See also
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See more Wikipedia articles related to Herbert Hoover. |
Notes
- ^ "Salary", Hoover, Archive, http://hoover.archives.gov/info/faq.html#salary.
- ^ a b "Chronology", Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, Archives, http://hoover.archives.gov/education/chronology.html, retrieved November 30, 2006.
- ^ a b Revsine, David ‘Dave’, "One-sided numbers dominate Saturday's rivalry games", ESPN (Go), http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/columns/story?columnist=revsine_dave&id=2680873, retrieved November 30, 2006.
- ^ "Hoover Online". US NARA. http://www.ecommcode.com/hoover/hooveronline/hoover_bio/stan.htm. Retrieved October 6, 2008.
- ^ "What did the President do in Western Australia?", FAQ, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, http://hoover.archives.gov/info/faq.html#Australia
- ^ a b c Gwalia Historic Site, AU, http://www.gwalia.org.au/.
- ^ "Hoover's Gold" (PDF). Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 2005. http://www.abc.net.au/programsales/studyguide/StG_Hoovers_Gold.pdf. Retrieved June 17, 2010.
- ^ "Cue Heritage Trail" (PDF). Western AustraliaHeritage Trails Network. Government of Western Australia. June 4, 1999. pp. 4, 12. Archived from the original on March 16, 2003. http://web.archive.org/web/20030316044858/http://trails.heritage.wa.gov.au/ht_pdf/Cue.pdf. Retrieved January 29, 2012.
- ^ "Historic pictures", Leonora Gwalia Historical Museum, http://www.gwalia.org.au/historicpics.html. His former house in Gwalia is now a historical tourist attraction, and as of 2004, a bed and breakfast inn. Hoover is profiled as a mining pioneer in the Kalgoorlie Miners Hall of Fame, although his biography fails to mention his subsequent role as U.S. President.
- ^ a b Fairweather, DF, "Lyster, Fleury James (Jim) (1872–1948)", Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lyster-fleury-james-jim-10883/text19323, retrieved 19 February 2012.
- ^ Nash, George H, "Hoover, Herbert Clark (1874–1964)", Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/hoover-herbert-clark-6729/text11619, retrieved 19 February 2012.
- ^ King, David (2009). Herbert Hoover. Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavendish. ISBN 0-7614-3626-X. http://books.google.com/?id=QrBeocgL5gIC&pg=PA35&dq=herbert+hoover+mandarin+chinese&cd=1#v=onepage&q=mandarin. Retrieved March 22, 2010.
- ^ Hoover, Herbert C. (1952). The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover Years of Adventure 1874–1920. London: Hollis & Carter. p. 53
- ^ a b c d e f Nash 1983.
- ^ Geoffrey Blainey, The Rise of Broken Hill (Melb, 1968)P.51
- ^ Geoffrey Blainey, The Rise of Broken Hill (Melb, 1968)P.74-75
- ^ Davey, Christopher J, "Potter, Charles Vincent (1859–1908)", Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/potter-charles-vincent-8084/text14107, retrieved 20 February 2012.
- ^ Osborne, Graeme, "Delprat, Guillaume Daniel (1856–1937)", Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/delprat-guillaume-daniel-5947/text10143, retrieved 20 February 2012.
- ^ Burner, David (1984), Herbert Hoover: a Public Life, New York: Atheneum, pp. 24–43
- ^ Geoffrey Blainey, The Rush that Never Ended (Melb, 1963) - Froth and Bubble, pp. 267–8
- ^ "Hoover Biography", SOE, USA: Stanford University, http://soe.stanford.edu/about/bio_hoover.html
- ^ Rice, Arnold S, ed. (1971), Herbert Hoover, 1874–1964 (chronology-documents-bibliographical aids).
- ^ About us, Rio Tinto Group, http://www.riotinto.com/aboutus/, retrieved 2012-02-13.
- ^ The Silver City: The Mining History, Line of Load Association, 2002, archived from the original on 20090723063317, http://web.archive.org/web/20090723063317/http://au.geocities.com/bhsilvercity/zcnbhc.htm, retrieved 2012-02-13.
- ^ (PDF) Rio Tinto Review, Rio Tinto Group, September 2006, http://www.riotinto.com/documents/Investors/dlcsep06.pdf, retrieved 2012-02-13
- ^ Herbert Hoover, just another Stanford (blog), Hoover Institution and Archives, June 2011, http://hooverinstitutionla.blogspot.com.au/2011/06/herbert-hoover-just-another-stanford.html, retrieved 2012-02-20
- ^ Hoover, Herbert C (1909). Principles of Mining (First ed.). London: McGraw-Hill Book Company. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/26697. Retrieved September 25, 2008.
- ^ Agricola 1912.
- ^ Brugioni, Dino A. (March 1990). "The Kyshtym Connection". The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 46 (2): 12. ISSN 0096-3402. http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=hAwAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA12&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false.
- ^ "The Humanitarian Years", The Museum Exhibit Galleries, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, http://hoover.archives.gov/exhibits/Hooverstory/gallery02/index.html, retrieved February 16, 2011.
- ^ "16000 Women to Aid Food Campaign", The New York Times, October 1, 1917, p. 15
- ^ "How the U.S. saved a starving Soviet Russia: PBS film highlights Stanford scholar's research on the 1921-23 famine". Stanford University. April 4, 2011
- ^ Hart 1998.
- ^ Hutchison, Janet (1997), "Building for Babbitt: the State and the Suburban Home Ideal", Journal of Policy History 9 (2): 184–210, doi:10.1017/S0898030600005923.
- ^ "The Cabinet: Good-Times Charlie". Time. January 30, 1950. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,856478-2,00.html. Retrieved May 4, 2010.
- ^ Poetry of the people: poems to the.... Google Books. 1996–2006. ISBN 978-0-87972-704-8. http://books.google.com/books?id=-pKj2JDXFOoC&pg=PA14&lpg=PA14. Retrieved June 17, 2010.
- ^ Barnouw, Erik (1966). A Tower In Babel; A history of Broadcasting in the United States to 1933. New York: Oxford University Press.
- ^ Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (MIT Press, 2008), pp. 178–197 ISBN 0-262-14100-0
- ^ Kosar, Kevin R. (2005). "Disaster Response and the Appointment of a Recovery Czar: The Executive Branch's Response to the Flood of 1927" U.S. Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service, pp. 9–10. Washington D.C.
- ^ Barry, John M. (1998). Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. New York: Simon & Schuster. pp. 412–415. ISBN 0-684-84002-2.
- ^ Lewis, David Levering (2000). W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963. pp. 245–247
- ^ "The Duncan Group – Interviews". Duncanentertainment.com. December 2007. http://www.duncanentertainment.com/interview_walch.php. Retrieved June 17, 2010.[dead link]
- ^ Edmund A. Moore, A Catholic runs for President;: The campaign of 1928 by Edmund Arthur Moore (1956)
- ^ Allan J. Lichtman (2000). Prejudice and the old politics: the presidential election of 1928. Lexington Books. pp. 74–. ISBN 978-0-7391-0126-1. http://books.google.com/books?id=KbGiJpDk6pwC&pg=PA74.
- ^ Elesha Coffman, "The 'Religious Issue' in Presidential Politics," American Catholic Studies, (Winter 2008) 119#4 pp 1-20
- ^ a b Rouse, Robert. "Happy Anniversary to the first scheduled presidential press conference – 93 years young!", American Chronicle, March 15, 2006
- ^ Saslow, Eli. "As Duties Weigh Obama Down, His Faith in Fitness Only Increases",The Washington Post, December 25, 2008
- ^ "Frequentlt Asked Questions". Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum. Retrieved January 17, 2012
- ^ Glen Jeansonne, The Life of Herbert Hoover: Fighting Quaker, 1928-1933 (Palgrave Macmillan; 2012)
- ^ Joyce, C. Alan. World Almanac 2009, World Almanac Books, 2009, p. 524
- ^ Biography, Miller center, http://millercenter.org/president/hoover/essays/biography/1.
- ^ Hoover, Herbert. "American Individualism", 1922
- ^ Richard N. Current, "The Stimson Doctrine and the Hoover Doctrine," American Historical Review Vol. 59, No. 3 (Apr., 1954), pp. 513–542 in JSTOR
- ^ Lisio, Donald J. Hoover, Blacks, & Lily-Whites: A Study of Southern Strategies, University of North Carolina Press, 1985 (excerpt)
- ^ "Herbert Clark Hoover, Domestic Affairs", American President, An On Line Reference Resource, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia
- ^ "The American Franchise", American President, An On Line Reference Resource, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia
- ^ "Charles Curtis, 31st Vice President (1929–1933)", U.S. Senate, Art and History, Senate.gov
- ^ Britten, Thomas A. (1999). "Hoover and the Indians: the Case for Continuity in Federal Indian Policy, 1900–1933". Historian 61 (3): 518–538. ISSN 0018-2370.
- ^ Leuchtenburg, William E., "The Wrong Man at the Wrong Time", American Heritage, Summer 2009
- ^ "The Great Depression and New Deal"
- ^ Social history of the United States, Volume 1, Brian Greenberg, Linda S. Watts
- ^ Hoover, Herbert. The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, 1952 [Full citation needed]
- ^ Ohanian, Lee. "Hoover's pro-labor stance spurred Great Depression", University of California, August 2009
- ^ DeLong, J. Bradford (August 29, 2009), "Herbert Hoover: A Working Class Hero Is Something to Be". Retrieved March 3, 2010
- ^ "Herbert Hoover". Encyclopædia Britannica. http://www.britannica.com/presidents/article-9040997. Retrieved July 5, 2010.
- ^ "Smoot-Hawley Tariff", U.S. Department of State
- ^ "Hoover Moratorium", u-s-History.com
- ^ "Lausanne Conference", u-s-History.com
- ^ "Reconstruction Finance Corporation", EH.net Encyclopedia
- ^ "What Caused the Great Depression of the 1930s", Shambhala.com
- ^ "Great Depression in the United States", Microsoft Encarta Archived November 1, 2009
- ^ Alan Brinkley, The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People, vol 1. (McGraw-Hill, 2006). p. 647
- ^ James Ciment. Encyclopedia of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Sharpe Reference, 2001. Originally from the University of Michigan. p. 396
- ^ "The Check Tax: Fiscal Folly and The Great Monetary Contraction", Journal of Economic History 57 (4): 859–78, December 1997, http://www.terry.uga.edu/~selgin/files/check_tax.pdf.
- ^ Lekachman, Robert (1966). The age of Keynes. Random House. p. 114. http://books.google.com/?id=noGaAAAAIAAJ. Retrieved May 26, 2009.
- ^ Friedrich, Otto (February 1, 1982). "FDR's Disputed Legacy". Time. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,954983-4,00.html. Retrieved March 24, 2008.
- ^ Dunar, Andrew J, 1930s Engineering, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/goldengate/sfeature/sf_30s.html.
- ^ Carcasson, Martin. "Herbert Hoover and the Presidential Campaign of 1932: the Failure of Apologia", Presidential Studies Quarterly 1998 28(2): 349–365
- ^ Gibbs, Nancy (November 10, 2008). "When New President Meets Old, It's Not Always Pretty". Time. http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1857862,00.html.
- ^ Osro Cobb, Osro Cobb of Arkansas: Memoirs of Historical Significance, Carol Griffee, ed., (Little Rock, Arkansas: Rose Publishing Company, 1989), p. 119
- ^ Eisler, A Justice for All, pages 39–40, ISBN 0-671-76787-9
- ^ Eisler, A Justice for All, p. 40, ISBN 0-671-76787-9
- ^ Dulfer & Hoag. Our Society Blue Book, pp. 177–178. San Francisco, Dulfer & Hoag, 1925
- ^ "The Entry into Vienna Rocks Europe". Life: pp. 19. 1938-03-28. http://books.google.com/books?id=3UoEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA2&pg=PA19#v=onepage&q&f=true. Retrieved November 26, 2011.
- ^ Timothy Walch (September 2003). Uncommon Americans: the lives and legacies of Herbert and Lou Henry Hoover. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 216. ISBN 978-0-275-97996-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=Y3R2ikuvYV8C&pg=PA216. Retrieved March 1, 2011.
- ^ "Foreign Relief Activities", Herbert Hoover Public Positions and Honors
- ^ Herbert Hoover (1964). An American Epic: The guns cease killing and the saving of life from famine begins, 1939–1963. H. Regnery Co.. pp. 4. http://books.google.com/books?id=GnU8AAAAIAAJ. Retrieved March 1, 2011.
- ^ Robinson, Edgar Eugene, "Hoover, Herbert Clark", Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. 11 (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1973), pp. 676–7
- ^ Beschloss, Michael R (2002), The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941–1945, p. 277.
- ^ UN Chronicle (March 18, 1947). "The Marshall Plan at 60: The General’s Successful War on Poverty". The United Nations. http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/2008/webarticles/080103_marshallplan.html. Retrieved June 17, 2010.
- ^ "Gigantic US Spending is the road to Socialism, warns Hoover", Garston towers, Google Blogger, http://garstontowers.blogspot.com/2011/01/gigantic-us-spending-is-road-to.html
- ^ Rothbard, Murray N, Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal, Ludwig von Mises Institute, http://www.mises.org/story/1842.
- ^ Phillips, McCandlish (October 21, 1964). "Herbert Hoover Is Dead; Ex-President, 90, Served Country in Varied Fields". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0810.html. Retrieved July 2, 2011.
- ^ Fausold, Martin L (1985), The presidency of Herbert C. Hoover, p. 244.
- ^ "An American Friendship: Herbert Hoover and Poland", Library & Archives, Stanford University: Hoover Institution, June 1 – August 1, 2005, http://www.hoover.org/library-and-archives/exhibits/27245, retrieved February 17, 2011.
Further reading
Biographies
- Best, Gary Dean. The Politics of American Individualism: Herbert Hoover in Transition, 1918–1921 (1975)
- Bornet, Vaughn Davis, An Uncommon President. In: Herbert Hoover Reassessed. (1981), pp. 71–88
- Burner, David. Herbert Hoover: A Public Life. (1979). one-volume scholarly biography
- Clements, Kendrick A. The Life of Herbert Hoover: Imperfect Visionary, 1918–1928 (2010), 507pp scholarly biography. ISBN 978-0-230-10308-5
- Gelfand, Lawrence E. ed., Herbert Hoover: The Great War and Its Aftermath, 1914–1923 (1979)
- Hatfield, Mark. ed. Herbert Hoover Reassessed (2002)
- Hawley, Ellis. Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce: Studies in New Era Thought and Practice (1981). A major reinterpretation
- Hawley, Ellis (1989), Herbert Hoover and the Historians.
- Hoff-Wilson, Joan. Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive. (1975). short biography
- Jeansonne, Glen. The Life of Herbert Hoover: Fighting Quaker, 1928-1933 (Palgrave Macmillan; 2012) 539 pages
- Leuchtenburg, William E. Herbert Hoover. (2009). American Presidents Series
- Lloyd, Craig. Aggressive Introvert: A Study of Herbert Hoover and Public Relations Management, 1912–1932 (1973.
- Nash, George H. The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Engineer 1874–1914 (1983), the definitive scholarly biography
- Nash, Lee, ed. Understanding Herbert Hoover: Ten Perspectives (1987)
- Smith, Gene. The Shattered Dream: Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression (1970)
- Smith, Richard Norton. An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover, (1987) full-length scholarly biography
- Walch, Timothy. ed. Uncommon Americans: The Lives and Legacies of Herbert and Lou Henry Hoover Praeger, 2003
- Wert, Hal Elliott. Hoover, The Fishing President: Portrait of the Private Man and his Life Outdoors (2005). ISBN 0-8117-0099-2
Scholarly studies
- Extensive annotated bibliography at the University of Virginia Miller Center of Public Affairs
- Claus Bernet (2009). Bautz, Traugott. ed (in German). Hoover, Herbert. Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). 30. Nordhausen. cols. 644–653. ISBN 3-88309-478-6. http://www.bautz.de/bbkl/h/hoover_h_c.shtml.
- Barber, William J. From New Era to New Deal: Herbert Hoover, the Economists, and American Economic Policy, 1921–1933. (1985)
- Barry, John M. Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (1998), Hoover played a major role
- Britten, Thomas A. "Hoover and the Indians: the Case for Continuity in Federal Indian Policy, 1900–1933" Historian 1999 61(3): 518–538. ISSN 0018-2370
- Calder, James D. The Origins and Development of Federal Crime Control Policy: Herbert Hoover's Initiatives Praeger, 1993
- Carcasson, Martin. "Herbert Hoover and the Presidential Campaign of 1932: the Failure of Apologia" Presidential Studies Quarterly 1998 28(2): 349–365
- Clements, Kendrick A. Hoover, Conservation, and Consumerism: Engineering the Good Life. University Press of Kansas, 2000
- DeConde, Alexander. Herbert Hoover's Latin American Policy. (1951)
- Dodge, Mark M., ed. Herbert Hoover and the Historians. (1989)
- Doenecke, Justus D. "Anti-Interventionism of Herbert Hoover". Journal of Libertarian Studies, (Summer 1987), 8(2): 311–340
- Fausold, Martin L. The Presidency of Herbert C. Hoover. (1985) standard scholarly overview
- Fausold Martin L. and George Mazuzan, eds. The Hoover Presidency: A Reappraisal (1974)
- Ferrell, Robert H. American Diplomacy in the Great Depression: Hoover–Stimson Foreign Policy, 1929–1933. (1957)
- Goodman, Mark and Gring, Mark. "The Ideological Fight over Creation of the Federal Radio Commission in 1927" Journalism History 2000 26(3): 117–124
- Hamilton, David E. From New Day to New Deal: American Farm Policy from Hoover to Roosevelt, 1928–1933. (1991)
- Hart, David M. "Herbert Hoover's Last Laugh: the Enduring Significance of the 'Associative State' in the United States". Journal of Policy History 1998 10(4): 419–444
- Hawley, Ellis. "Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an 'Associative State', 1921–1928". Journal of American History, (June 1974) 61(1): 116–140
- Houck, Davis W. "Rhetoric as Currency: Herbert Hoover and the 1929 Stock Market Crash" Rhetoric & Public Affairs 2000 3(2): 155–181. ISSN 1094-8392
- Hutchison, Janet. "Building for Babbitt: the State and the Suburban Home Ideal" Journal of Policy History 1997 9(2): 184–210
- Lichtman, Allan J. Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928 (1979)
- Lisio, Donald J. The President and Protest: Hoover, MacArthur, and the Bonus Riot, 2d ed. (1994)
- Lisio, Donald J. Hoover, Blacks, and Lily-whites: A Study of Southern Strategies (1985)
- Malin, James C. The United States after the World War. 1930. extensive coverage of Hoover's Commerce Dept. policies
- Olson, James S. Herbert Hoover and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, 1931–1933 (1977)
- Robinson, Edgar Eugene and Vaughn Davis Bornet. Herbert Hoover: President of the United States. (1976)
- Romasco, Albert U. The Poverty of Abundance: Hoover, the Nation, the Depression (1965)
- Schwarz, Jordan A. The Interregnum of Despair: Hoover, Congress, and the Depression. (1970). Hostile to Hoover
- Stoff, Michael B. "Herbert Hoover: 1929–1933". The American Presidency: The Authoritative Reference. New York, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company (2004), 332–343
- Sobel, Robert Herbert Hoover and the Onset of the Great Depression 1929–1930 (1975)
- Tracey, Kathleen. Herbert Hoover–A Bibliography: His Writings and Addresses. (1977)
- Wilbur, Ray Lyman, and Arthur Mastick Hyde. The Hoover Policies. (1937). In depth description of his administration by two cabinet members
- Wueschner, Silvano A. Charting Twentieth-Century Monetary Policy: Herbert Hoover and Benjamin Strong, 1917–1927. Greenwood, 1999
Primary sources
- Myers, William Starr; Walter H. Newton, eds. The Hoover Administration; a documented narrative. 1936.
- Hawley, Ellis, ed. Herbert Hoover: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, 4 vols. (1974–1977)
- Agricola, Georgius (1912), "De Re Metallica", The Mining Magazine (London: Farlang), http://www.farlang.com/gemstones/agricola-metallica/page_001, retrieved June 17, 2010, Hoover, Herbert Clark and Lou Henry Hoover, trans.
- Hoover, Herbert Clark (1934), The Challenge to Liberty.
- Hoover, Herbert Clark; Gibson, Hugh (1942), The Problems of Lasting Peace.
- Dwight M. Miller and Timothy Walch, eds; Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Documentary History. Greenwood Press. 1998
- Hoover, Herbert Clark (2011), Nash, George H, ed., Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and its Aftermath, Hoover Institution Press Publication, Stanford, CA, USA: Hoover Institution Press, ISBN 978-0-8179-1234-5.
Bibliography
- Eisler, A Justice for All
External links
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- In 1929, President Herbert Hoover dedicated the completion of the Ohio River canalization.
- Hoover Presidential Library Association
- Inaugural Address
- Audio clips of Hoover's speeches[dead link]
- White House Biography
- Herbert Hoover's 1946–1947 factfinding mission to Germany. (Report No.1), (Report No.3)
- Hoover and Truman
- The Last Salute: Civil and Military Funeral, 1921–1969, CHAPTER XXV, Former President Herbert C. Hoover, State Funeral, October 20–25 1964 by B. C. Mossman and M. W. Stark. United States Army Center of Military History.
- Collection of Editorial Cartoons including 300 featuring Herbert Hoover
- Hoover Genealogy, Herbert Hoover National HIstoric Site, National Park Service
- 1915 passport photo; Herbert Hoover
- Herbert Hoover at C-SPAN's American Presidents: Life Portraits
- Herbert Hoover's Some Notes on Industrial Readjustment in The Saturday Evening Post
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Mentioned in
Hoovervilles
(History)
Hoover, Lou Henry
(First Lady of the United States)
Smith, Alfred Emanuel
(American politician)
Charles Francis Adams
(1866–1954, U.S. Secretary of the Navy)
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