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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.