Hoover, Herbert

Hoover, Herbert (1874–1964), thirty‐first president of the United States.Born in West Branch, Iowa, of Quaker parents, Herbert Clark Hoover was orphaned at the age of nine and subsequently reared by relatives in Oregon, where he attended Friends Pacific Academy. After graduating from the newly founded Stanford University in 1895, he entered the employ of mining engineer Louis Janin. Hoover next joined the British firm of Bewick, Moering, initially as a manager in Australia, later as a company representative in China, and after 1901 as a partner. In business for himself after 1908, he specialized in reorganizing and refinancing “sick” mining enterprises. He married Lou Henry, a fellow Stanford graduate in 1899; they had two sons.

During World War I, Hoover achieved world stature as both an engineer and a humanitarian. His role in rescuing stranded Americans and feeding starving Belgians made him the “master of relief.” As food administrator in the Woodrow Wilson administration he engaged in “Hooverizing” U.S. consumption habits to conserve scarce commodities and became the best known of America's wartime domestic managers. He remained in the limelight after the war, first as director of American relief abroad, then as a progressive leader of the engineering profession, and, after 1921, as an active and highly visible secretary of commerce in the Republican presidential administrations of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. In 1928 a legion of admirers helped him secure the Republican presidential nomination, and in November he easily defeated Democratic opponent Alfred E. Smith.

During his pre‐presidential government career, Hoover had launched regulatory and welfare agencies heavily reliant on private‐sector resources, and in the process had worked out a progressive social agenda to be realized through government‐encouraged “associational action” rather than through public administration. In 1928 he spoke of a New Day to be ushered in by this “cooperative system.” As president, Hoover made extensions of this ideology the basis of his reform agenda and his battle against the Great Depression, which set in after the stock market crash of October 1929. Rejecting laissez‐faire prescriptions, including those of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, he tried to raise spending levels through government‐sponsored cooperative action by business leaders and through federalization of parts of the credit system, creating in 1932 the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, modeled on the federal lending agency of World War I, to extend credit to major economic institutions such as banks and insurance companies. But he rejected allegedly “dangerous” forms of federal investment, financing, relief, and market control. Perversely, his success in raising tariffs in 1930 and other taxes in 1932 worked at cross purposes with his economic recovery aims. Moreover, the Depression's persistence undercut most of the reform agenda he kept trying to implement. The construction of Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, begun in 1931, and passage of the Federal Home Loan Bank System Act in 1932, designed to help hard‐pressed homeowners avoid foreclosure, were lasting achievements. But most of Hoover's attempts to promote cooperative, private‐sector recovery and relief efforts, including those involving agricultural marketing associations, oil and timber conservation, and social‐welfare organizations, eventually failed.

Abroad, Hoover's administration made only limited responses to the Depression's corrosive effects on international order. Disarmament initiatives produced only the ineffectual London Naval Treaty of 1930. Concerns about international debts brought only the one‐year Hoover Debt Moratorium of 1931 and a renunciation of forced debt collection in Latin America. Japan's aggression in China produced only a policy of not recognizing Japan's puppet state in Manchuria. Proposals for war‐debt cancellation, economic sanctions against aggressors, and the United States's becoming the international lender of last resort were all ruled out. These options were not only politically difficult but beyond the limits of Hoover's internationalism.

Meanwhile, the deepening Depression was also sparking political realignment and a growing anti‐Hoover national mood. The one‐time “great engineer” and “great humanitarian” now became a national scapegoat. The floating communities of jobless men in the nation's cities were dubbed Hoovervilles. Making matters worse were such public relations fiascoes as Hoover's opposition to more generous drought relief, his continued support for prohibition, and his administration's 1932 military action against a “bonus army” of veterans in the nation's capital. Hoover won renomination in 1932, but in the November election he carried only six states. In March 1933, after a four‐month interregnum marked by governmental stalemate and collapse of the banking system, his presidency gave way to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal.

After leaving the White House, Hoover remained active in Republican party politics and in debates concerning the New Deal. As World War II approached, he backed the noninterventionist cause and tried unsuccessfully to establish food relief programs in German‐occupied countries. After the war, he gradually attained elder‐statesman status, advising on postwar relief problems, heading commissions on governmental reorganization, and publishing his memoirs and other works. He is buried in West Branch, Iowa, near the Hoover presidential library.

A man of immense energy, a sincere commitment to public service, legendary organizational and administrative skills, and enduring Quaker sensibilities, Hoover served his nation well as a relief director, wartime food czar, commerce department secretary, and promoter of executive reorganization. But he lacked the political skills, charisma, and capacity for economic learning needed to lead a nation caught in the throes of the Great Depression. And while scholars now reject the older label of “do‐nothingism” and see his presidency as activist, reformist, intellectually sophisticated, and in some ways anticipatory of the New Deal, most still judge it a failure overall.
See also Corporatism; Depressions, Economic; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Other Departments (Department of Commerce); Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; Foreign Relations; New Deal Era, The; Society of Friends; Taxation; Temperance and Prohibition; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Craig Lloyd , Aggressive Introvert: A Study of Herbert Hoover and Public Relations Management, 1912–1932, 1972.
Joan Hoff Wilson , Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive, 1975.
David Burner , Herbert Hoover: A Public Life, 1979.
George H. Nash , The Life of Herbert Hoover, 3 vols., 1983, 1988, 1996.
William J. Barber , From New Era to New Deal: Herbert Hoover, the Economists, and American Economic Policy, 1921–1933, 1985.
Martin L. Fausold , The Presidency of Herbert C. Hoover, 1985.

Ellis W. Hawley