Making the case for Herbert Hoover
‘Loser’ tag was incomplete reading of the historical record
For a biographer there’s arguably no more daunting a challenge than to reframe a life that for decades has been perceived through a less-than-flattering lens.
That is certainly the case with Herbert Hoover, the 31st president of the United States and a man who, perhaps unfairly, has taken the historical rap for failing to respond adequately to the social and economic challenges of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
This is clearly the task Kenneth Whyte, the one-time editor of the National Post, and Saturday Night and Maclean’s magazines, has assigned himself with his formidable new 700-plus-page biography, Hoover, An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. Previously, Whyte penned a critically acclaimed biography of the newspaper tycoon, William Randolph Hearst, one of whose one-time hacks coined the term “Hooverville” to describe the shantytowns across America housing the dispossessed and the unemployed during the Great Depression. It was a sobriquet that stuck like a dirty rash, and one of the reasons why Hoover’s reputation desperately needs an overhaul.
That assault on Hoover’s reputation was compounded exponentially by the reverence felt by vast swaths of the public for his successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a man who bestrides the 20th century’s historical narrative for first saving mankind from the social and material deprivations of the Depression and then from war-mongering despots like Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini. After FDR was elected on Nov. 8, 1932, Hoover has been dismissed as one of history’s great losers and FDR as one of its most vaunted heroes.
In his exhaustively researched new biography, Whyte makes a very compelling case that this is an incomplete reading of the historical record and an unfair assessment of Hoover, a man whose achievements before, during and after his one-term presidency —1929-33 — make his life worthy of the modifier used in the book’s subtitle: Extraordinary. And part of his appeal is his rather humble Lincolnesque backstory.
Hoover was not born in a log cabin like Honest Abe but “Bert,” as he was known, was born into a modest Quaker family in the pioneering hamlet of West Branch, Iowa. His father was a blacksmith and his mother an itinerant Quaker preacher. But the truly defining experience of Hoover’s early life was the early deaths of both parents by the time he was just 9.
The orphaned boy ended up in the care of an uncle in Oregon who practised tough love but likely nurtured in Bert a single-minded determination to succeed. And succeed he did — at a very early age.
In very short order, Hoover earned a geology degree from Stanford at age 20, from whence he embarked on a very lucrative career in the global mineral business. He was based for most of his early manhood in London, England, but along the way, he rode roughshod over roughneck colleagues in the Australian outback; possibly helped fleece an august mandarin out of a massive mining asset in China; and settled into a luxurious expat life overseas with his wife, Lou, and sons, Herbert Jr. and Alan. During the Great War, he also found time to organize a massive relief effort that saved the Belgian people from starvation.
When, at 43, Hoover eventually returned home, he was rich, famous, a renowned humanitarian and ready for public service, initially as the U.S. wartime Food Administrator and later as the Commerce Secretary in the cabinets of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. By the time he ran for president in 1928, he was known as “The Wonder Boy,” a term coined by Coolidge.
The high hopes the public had for him and his new administration weighed heavily on Hoover: “My friends have made the American people think me a sort of superman, able to cope successfully with the most difficult and complicated problems. They expect the impossible from me and should there arise in the land conditions which with the political machinery is unable to cope, I will be the one to suffer.”
Within months of entering the Oval Office, those prophetic words would be tested. He took office in March, and the stock market crashed six months later in October, starting the financial crisis that ended his presidency.
One of the greatest myths about Hoover that Whyte dispels was that he was a rabid right-winger hell-bent of sticking to a laissez-faire approach to economic management no matter how grim the situation. But that seems not to be the case. Later in life, he moved ever more right, becoming a modern-style conservative in the sense of supporting the idea of limited government, free markets, etc.
But during his presidential years, he clearly tacked more to the progressive side of the political spectrum. As Whyte notes, “Programs like Reconstruction Finance Corporation, universally recognized as the president’s creation, was a massive $4-billion depression-fighting behemoth.”
David Lawrence, a Washington journalist of the period, predicted Hoover would be “As radical as the times demand.” And up to a point he was. But as Lawrence also notes, “Mr. Roosevelt brought him face to face with the limits of his radicalism.”
FDR was likely the right man for the times and in this book Whyte makes a compelling case that Hoover was an exceptionally talented man and, in less trying times, would have been more highly lauded. Robert Collison is a Toronto writer and editor.