Hoover Herbert - Herbert Hoover: a life

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

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

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

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

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

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

Although the war ended in 1918, Hoovers relief work was only beginning. His postwar American Relief Administration (ARA) fed nations from the North Sea to the Urals. The ARAs European Childrens Fund, the forerunner to CARE, fed millions of children. During 192123, when drought, famine, and disease threatened 15 million people in the newborn Soviet Union, Secretary of Commerce Hoover set aside his antipathy toward Communism and persuaded President Warren G. Harding and Congress to allocate $20 million to distribute food and medicine to the Soviet peasants. Ironically, although most Americans remember Hoover for the anguish of the Great Depression, abroad he earned a reputation among common people as a selfless patron who staved off starvation, typhoid, and cholera during their periods of distress. In 1927, Hoover brought his reputation as a Master of Emergencies home when he rescued and rehabilitated the Mississippi Valley during the Great Flood that inundated hundreds of thousands of acres, sweeping away towns, cattle, and people.