Orphaned at the age of nine, he began an odyssey that would make him a multi-millionaire, international humanitarian, secretary of commerce, and President of the United States.
Hoover lived with the Minthorns for six years; at the age of 14 he left school to work as a clerk in his uncle's real estate business. Three years later, having decided to pursue a career as mining engineer, Hoover sought to resume his studies and applied to a new school, Leland Stanford Junior University, set to open in It was at Stanford that he made life long friends, found a mentor in Professor John Caspar Branner; and met his future wife, Lou Henry.
He was active in extracurricular activities, serving as student body treasurer and as manager of both the baseball and football teams. Hoover graduated in over the next two decades to make his fortune as an international mining engineer and financier. By , however, he yearned for more than wealth, and World War I provided him with an opportunity for public service.
Initially, he aided Americans stranded in Europe. Later, he established the Commission for Relief in Belgium to provide food for the civilians trapped in the war zone. Food Administrator in In this capacity, Hoover rationed domestic food supplies to feed the allied armies as well as the American people. In the years after the war, Hoover was director general of the American Relief Administration, an agency established to address the widespread famine in Europe.
At the Department of Commerce, where he served through both the Harding and Coolidge administrations, he established a wide range of standards for manufactured products, campaigned against waste and inefficiency in industry, and encouraged the growth of new industries such as radio and aviation.
He became one of the most admired men Washington, but his fame reached new heights in because of his extraordinary service to assist the victims of the Mississippi River Flood that year. His Agricultural Marketing Act had little impact on the prospects of American farmers. Hoover eventually did support some interventionist government programs aimed at combating the Depression.
Though undersized, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation used federal money in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to stabilize the nation's banking and financial sector. The RFC was also aimed at corporations rather than at the growing ranks of the suffering poor, a policy that reflected Hoover's own beliefs. Fearing that government aid would breed a sense of dependence among the poor, Hoover largely refused to extend such assistance to millions of the nation's unemployed and hungry who were overwhelming private relief agencies.
In the public eye, Hoover seemed uncaring, unwilling to admit that people were starving and that his ideas were failing. He lost significant public support in the summer of when General Douglas MacArthur— in defiance of Hoover's orders—removed the World War I veterans known as Bonus Marchers who had massed peacefully in Washington, D.
MacArthur was brutal in his treatment of the marchers, using cavalry, tanks, and bayonet-bearing soldiers. In the riot that followed, U. Hoover ran for reelection in , anxious to prove that his policies could still ameliorate the economic crisis.
Americans, though, rallied around Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt and his "New Deal," with its vague promises of a "crusade to restore America to its own people. Hoover left the White House in disgrace, having incurred the public's wrath for failing to lift the nation out of the Great Depression. Hoover's reputation has risen over the years. He is no longer blamed for causing the Depression; instead, scholars note that Hoover's efforts to combat its effects were extraordinary when compared to federal anti-depression measures invoked during previous economic crises.
These efforts, moreover, flowed logically from the President's unique brand of social, economic, and political progressivism. Nonetheless, the nation's economy continued to sink during the Hoover presidency. With the public losing confidence in the President's abilities, leadership, and policies, Hoover paid the ultimate political price for these failures in November Grant Rutherford B.
Hayes James A. Garfield Chester A. Roosevelt Harry S. Truman Dwight D. Eisenhower John F. Hoover, who as Commerce Secretary made himself into the first federal official with power over new industries like aviation and broadcasting—Congress created the F. He also loved taking on projects like standardizing the sizes of bricks and wood screws. Whyte, however unsympathetic he finds Hoover personally, is almost entirely on his side as a policymaker—not least when it comes to his handling of the economic crisis that began a few months into his Presidency.
As early as , Hoover was warning publicly that, sooner or later, the booming economy of the nineteen-twenties was going to go bust. In the early months of his Presidency, he began selling his own stocks in anticipation of a crash. And when the crash came, on October 29, , Hoover immediately grasped its importance and began exploring what to most of Washington seemed like the outer acceptable limit of an aggressive government response to an economic crisis.
Hoover launched infrastructure-building projects unprecedented in scale. Convinced that the heavy reparations payments imposed on Germany after the First World War were making the Depression more severe in Europe, he organized a politically risky moratorium on them. The atmosphere surrounding these activities was typically Hooverian: he confronted the Depression the way he had the humanitarian crises that brought him to the Presidency, with sheer hard work.
Surrounded by a circle of loyal aides who had served him for decades and who were known collectively as the Firm, he apportioned his long days at the office he was the first President to keep a telephone on his desk into series of eight-minute appointments.
Progressivism did not rest firmly within either of the political parties; it produced Presidents who were Republican, like Theodore Roosevelt, and Democratic, like Wilson. The coming of the New Deal turned most Republican Progressives into conservatives, though, and none more than Hoover. Like many politicians, Hoover preferred to think of himself as someone who had reluctantly answered a call to public service, rather than as someone who craved power, but he took losing very hard.
As the rise of Adolf Hitler forced Roosevelt to become a foreign-policy President, Hoover began to disapprove of him diplomatically just as much as he did economically. He believed that, if left alone, Hitler, whom he had visited in , would direct his ambitions eastward and wage a mutually destructive war with the Soviet Union, leaving Britain and Western Europe alone.
He used this as an occasion to reprise his decades-past role as a one-man food-distribution tsar in postwar Europe.
The following year, a newly Republican Congress put him in charge of a vast efficiency study of the federal government. The Hoover Commission, run with typically obsessive thoroughness by its septuagenarian namesake, produced nineteen separate reports and two hundred and seventy-three recommendations. The magnitude of the economic disaster was just too great to be politically survivable. Even if Hoover had been able to devise a perfect plan for surmounting the disaster, his lack of political skills would have prevented him from enacting it.
Hoover set out to govern in the manner in which he had accomplished the spectacular feats that had brought him to the Presidency: as an administrator of genius.
He tried to defeat the Depression by grinding it down from behind his desk. He had been raised in a strict teetotalling environment. He occasionally fell under the influence of liquor; therefore in the opinion of our village he represented all the forces of evil. It concerned the size and the scope of the federal government. Roosevelt created the Works Projects Administration, Social Security, and other programs that conferred benefits directly on people in need.
Roosevelt had more than doubled that figure even before the Second World War began. By the time of his death, it was twenty per cent, where it would roughly hover for the next seven decades. Roosevelt increased the number of federal employees from about five hundred thousand to more than six million.
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