HERBERT HOOVER

THE 31ST PRESIDENT OF
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(1929-1933)

HOOVER, Herbert Clark (1874–1964), 31st president of the U.S. (1929–33), who held office during the early part of the Great Depression and presided over the transition from a business-managed economy to the government intervention of the New Deal. Hoover was born on Aug. 10, 1874, in West Branch, Iowa. His parents and most of his close relatives were rural Quakers, an influence that was decisive and lifelong. Entering Stanford University with that institution’s first freshman class, Hoover studied geology and mining. There he met Lou Henry (1875–1944), then the only woman geology major attending Stanford, who later became (1897) his wife. Managing and reorganizing mining properties in Western Australia and China (where he and Mrs. Hoover endured the siege of Tientsin during the Boxer Rebellion) and elsewhere, Hoover was a millionaire by the time he was 40 years old.   Relief Work. At the outbreak of World War I in 1914 Hoover organized and assisted the return of thousands of Americans stranded in Europe and then turned to the aid of war-torn Belgium. Overcoming resistance from the warring powers, Hoover’s Commission for the Relief of Belgium during the next five years spent $1 billion in government loans and private donations, operated its own fleet of 200 ships, and transported 5 million metric tons of food. Returning home after the U.S. entry into the war in 1917, Hoover headed the Food Administration, which sought by voluntary methods to curb wartime profiteering in food supplies. After the war an American Relief Administration under Hoover’s leadership distributed food, clothing, and medical supplies to refugees in Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union, although Hoover personally detested communism.   Secretary of Commerce. Hoover’s reputation as engineer and humanitarian projected him onto the political stage. Mentioned as a presidential possibility as early as 1920, he served (1921–28) as secretary of commerce under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Believing neither in traditional laissez-faire nor in economic planning and direction by the state, Hoover preached a doctrine of voluntary cooperation by privately associated Americans with the support, but not the control, of government. His management of flood relief on the Mississippi in 1927 showed this philosophy in action. He did, however, sponsor the expansion of government regulation in two areas of new technology, radiobroadcasting and commercial aviation. He made federally collected statistics more usefully available and encouraged manufacturers to standardize parts and supplies. Hoover saw the Department of Commerce as an important support for the expansion of American business overseas, and in the area of foreign commerce the department expanded its operations tremendously—at the expense, some felt, of the State Department’s traditional role.   Hoover as President. Nominated for president by the Republicans in 1928, Hoover defeated Gov. Alfred E. Smith of New York, the Democratic candidate, in a campaign marred by partisan use of the issue of religion (Smith was a Roman Catholic), a controversy in which Hoover, to his credit, did not participate.   Assassination attempt. On November 19, 1928, President-elect Hoover embarked on a seven-week goodwill tour of several Latin American countries. While in Argentina, he escaped an assassination attempt by Argentine anarchists, led by Severino Di Giovanni, who tried to blow up his railroad car. The plotters had an itinerary but the bomber was arrested before he could place the explosives on the rails. Hoover did not refer to the incident. His complimentary remarks on Argentina were well-received in both the host country and in the press.   The depression. Inaugurated in March 1929, Hoover enjoyed only a half year of the economic prosperity with which the country had become familiar during the 1920s. In the fall, after the stock market had crashed, he took unprecedented measures to deal with the depression that followed. In the interest of maintaining consumer purchasing power, he urged business leaders not to cut wages, as had been their usual custom during hard times. The policy was only temporarily successful; production declined, unemployment grew, and eventually wages for those still employed were cut after all. In addition, the government’s own policies, leading to a drastic decline in the money supply, may have hastened the slide into the depression. Hoover sanctioned increasing government expenditure for useful public works, and after some prodding, government loans to business firms through a Reconstruction Finance Corporation. As the economy continued in stagnation, however, private and local relief funds became exhausted; against his own voluntaristic principles, therefore, Hoover reluctantly turned to direct federal spending for welfare purposes. Politically, it was too late; Hoover’s Democratic opponents had fashioned an image of him as a reactionary unwilling to do anything to help people in distress. Unfair though it was, in light of Hoover’s previous record, this stereotype haunted him, and his party, for the rest of his life, even though his opponents, when they came to power in 1933, wrestled with the same intractable problems until wartime production and employment came to their rescue. Hoover believed that the causes of the Great Depression were international and that the remedy for it must be sought in the same fashion. He therefore sponsored (1931) a moratorium on interallied war debts. He was planning an international monetary conference in London when his defeat for reelection intervened.   Foreign affairs. Hoover’s foreign policy was also based on voluntary cooperation. His overtures to Latin America, in contrast to the traditional U.S. imperialism in that area, foreshadowed the good neighbor policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his secretary of state, Cordell Hull. He opposed retaliation against Japan for its invasion of Manchuria (1931), rejecting the idea that the U.S. had a responsibility to police the world.   Later Career. Nominated for reelection in 1932, Hoover was defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt. He wrote and spoke against Roosevelt’s New Deal, but little attention was paid to him except at Republican national conventions, where he ritually appeared every four years to be hailed as an elder statesman. Under Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, however, he headed two groups (known as the Hoover Commissions) that planned an extensive reorganization of the executive branch of the government. Hoover’s books include American Individualism (1922), The Challenge to Liberty (1934), and Memoirs (3 vol., 1951–52). He died Oct. 20, 1964, in New York City.   Final years and Death. From Coolidge's death in 1933 to Dwight D. Eisenhower's last day of serving the presidency in 1961, Hoover had been the only living Republican former president. 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. In 1962, Hoover had a malignant intestinal tumor removed. Ten months later he had severe gastrointestinal bleeding and seemed terminally ill and frail, but his mind was clear and he maintained a great deal of correspondence. Although the illness would get worse over time, he refused to be hospitalized. 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, 31 years, seven months, and sixteen days after leaving office. At the time of his death, he had the longest retirement of any President. Former President Jimmy Carter surpassed 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 his successor Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt who died in 1945 and 1962, respectively. By the time of his death, he had rehabilitated his image. 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 had 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 thirteen 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 is named in his honor, as are numerous elementary, middle, and high schools across the United States. 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. George Burroughs Torrey painted a portrait of him. The historic townsite of Gwalia, Western Australia contains the Sons of Gwalia Museum and the Hoover House Bed and Breakfast, the renovated and restored Mining Engineers residence that was the original residence of Herbert Hoover and where he stayed in subsequent visits to the mine during the first decade of the twentieth century.