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.

A.

The Depression

Inaugurated in March 1929, Hoover enjoyed only half a year of the economic prosperity with which the country had become familiar during the 1920s. In the autumn, after the stock market had crashed on 29 October, 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 a moratorium in 1931 on inter-allied war debts. He was planning an international monetary conference in London when his election defeat intervened.

B.

Foreign Affairs

Hoover's foreign policy was also based on voluntary cooperation. His overtures to Latin America, in contrast to the traditional US imperialism in that area, foreshadowed the good neighbour policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his secretary of state, Cordell Hull. He opposed retaliation against Japan for its invasion of Dongbei (1931), rejecting the idea that the United States had a responsibility to police the world.

V.

Later Career

Nominated for re-election 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 vols., 1951-1952). He died October 20, 1964, in New York.