Hoover, Herbert Clark

I

Introduction

Hoover, Herbert Clark (1874-1964), 31st president of the United States (1929-1933), 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 August 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 in that institution's first year, Hoover studied geology and mining. There he met Lou Henry, then the only woman geology student attending Stanford, who became his wife in 1897.

Managing and reorganizing mining properties in Western Australia and China (where he and Mrs Hoover endured the siege of Tianjin during the Boxer Rebellion) and elsewhere, Hoover was a millionaire by the time he was 40 years old.

II

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 tonnes of food.

Returning home after the US 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.

III

Secretary of Commerce

Hoover's reputation as engineer and humanitarian projected him on to the political stage. Mentioned as a presidential possibility as early as 1920, he served (1921-1928) 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, radio broadcasting 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.

IV

Hoover as President

Nominated for president by the Republicans in 1928, Hoover defeated Governor 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.