Fun With First Ladies: Lou Henry Hoover

[leia131]

Ok, this is my last post before I go on vacation, because the next First Lady after Lou is Eleanor Roosevelt, and I'm gonna need all my strength for that one. Also, there are roughly 1000 pictures under here, and I'm not sorry.

• As far as I can tell, Lou isn't short for anything, that was just her name.
• Lou grew up something of a tomboy in Iowa and California. Her father took her on camping trips, and she also became a fine horsewoman and hunter. Lou preserved specimens with the skill of a taxidermist, and also developed an enthusiasm for rocks, minerals, and mining.

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Possibly the most amazing picture I've seen of a First Lady yet, this is Lou in California at age 17, on a burro, with a gun.

• Lou attended Stanford University and graduated in 1898, as the school's first female geology major.
• Lou was an athletic young woman, and at the university she was a member of the Basketball Committee, Vice President of the Women's Athletic Association, and an active member of the Archery Club.

Lou as a student at Stanford

• Both Lou and Herbert Hoover were 24 when they married in 1899, and not related. They had met at college, which is so NORMAL. However, since there was neither a Quaker (his faith) nor Episcopalian (her faith) minister available to perform their marriage, the Hoovers were married in a civil ceremony by a Roman Catholic priest.
• The day after their marriage, the Hoovers sailed from San Francisco to Shanghai, China, where they lived until August, 1900. They went there because Herbert was chief engineer for the Chinese Bureau of Mines, and general manager for the Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation.
• While in China, Lou studied Mandarin Chinese. In the White House, at times, she would speak Mandarin to Herbert to foil eavesdroppers. To date, she is the only First Lady to speak an Asian language.
• Lou was actually fluent in five languages: Spanish, Italian, French, Chinese, and English.

Looking very unimpressed

• Lou was also well versed in Latin, and she collaborated with Herbert in translating De Re Metallica, a 16th-century encyclopedia of mining and metallurgy. The Hoover translation was published in 1912, and remains in print as the standard English translation.
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  In 1900 the Boxer Rebellion broke out in China. Throughout the crisis, Lou displayed level-headed bravery, helping to build up protective barricades, caring for those who were wounded by gunshots, and even assuming management of a small local herd of cows to provide fresh dairy products. She also worked guard duty, and learned to use a pistol as a means of self-protection.
• During World War I, when Belgium was occupied by Germany, there was widespread starvation of its refugee citizens. Lou was asked to organize a mobilization of immediate aid from neutral countries, and head up the Commission for Relief in Belgium. For this work, she was decorated in 1919 by King Albert I of Belgium.

Lou in traditional Belgian dress

• Also during the war, Lou was involved with the Red Cross, and the American Women's War Relief Fund, which funded two hospitals and provided economic opportunities for women during WWI.

Lou sewing something for the Red Cross

• Lou's most high profile activity during WWI, while Herbert served as chief of the U.S. Food Administration, was encouraging Americans to go one day a week without wheat, another without meat, and use as little sugar as possible. Lou offered recipes that adhered to these guidelines, and urged citizens to plant, grow, cultivate, and harvest their own produce. She also led lessons on how to do it all.

Lou teaching others about wartime gardening

• Lou played a substantive and important role in the founding years of the Girl Scouts. She saw a strong connection between mental and emotional clarity and spending time in physical exertion in a natural, outdoor setting, and believed that the benefit to the mind and body from scouting activities would manifest in the lives of maturing girls in both traditional roles in the home and in the community as activists and participants in civic-related projects. She founded two Girl Scout troops, which were racially integrated.
• Lou's primary contribution to the Girl Scouts was organizing and training its adult troop leaders. To this end, she proposed building "little houses" that could be utilized for both leadership and as a headquarters. Lou helped fund the construction of the first such Girl Scout house in Palo Alto, California. The oldest Girl Scout house in continuous use, it is now called Lou Henry Hoover Girl Scout House.

Lou in her Girl Scout finest, setting up a tent

• Traveling across the continental United States was a delight Lou indulged in many times. In 1921, for example, she drove her own car from northern California to DC. She continued to drive herself around even while she was First Lady.

Lou in her car

• Disliking the time-consuming and old-fashioned custom of having to leave calling cards on formal social visits, Lou prevailed upon her fellow Cabinet wives to agree to stop it, thereby single-handedly ending the custom she saw as a burden to civically active women of the early 20th century.
• In reaction to the Harding Administration scandals, Lou headed a national Women's Conference on Law Enforcement through the General Federation of Women's Clubs. Her fair-mindedness, as well as her extraordinary degree of public service, landed her on the cover of Time magazine.

Lou's Time Magazine cover

• As a Cabinet wife, Lou also worked to promote equality for women in sports, voiced her support for the freer but more revealing clothing of young women of the era, considering the style to be "sensible", and regularly visited the Washington Children's Hospital.

Lou visiting the Children's Hospital

• Immediately before the swearing-in ceremony of Herbert as President in the Capitol Building, Lou and Grace Coolidge were not escorted and lost their way in the labyrinth of hallways that led to the West Front, where the ceremony was to take place; this inadvertently delayed the swearing-in. (LOL, I can relate to this TOO MUCH. I legit got lost once inside Duke Hospital and could not find a door back to the outside).
• Lou became the first First Lady to be broadcast on the radio on a regular and nationwide basis. Although she did not have her own radio program, Lou often participated as a guest speaker advocating for volunteerism, or discussing the work of the Girl Scouts. She took this very seriously, and had a recording system set up in the White House enabling her to replay her recordings and test the pitch, tone, and pacing of her voice.

In her Girl Scout uniform, speechifying on the radio

• In 1929, Lou and Herbert gathered furniture known to have existed or been used by Abraham Lincoln in a guest room that was used as a "Lincoln Study." This was the genesis for President Truman's later creation of the legendary "Lincoln Bedroom".
• Lou also paired the full-length portraits of George and Martha Washington together in the East Room, a placement which has remained since then. Additionally, she and one of her aides collaborated on the first comprehensive inventory and cataloguing of the White House collection of historic objects.
• Recognizing the need for the President to escape for regular breaks from the oppressive heat and work atmosphere of the city, Lou found and purchased 164 acres of wooded property in Virginia. Lou then played a critical role in designing and overseeing the construction of a rustic presidential retreat there, which was a precursor of the current presidential retreat, Camp David.
• In her 1929 remarks to the 4-H Club, Lou emphasized that housework was for men too, and that boys should learn to clean the house and wash dishes along with girls.
• Lou was known to wear pants occasionally (usually in private) and also broke the unwritten code that pregnant women who were beginning to physically appear so should cease to be seen in public. Instead, she encouraged expectant mothers to attend her White House events.

Lou in her riding pants

• Some historians have suggested that Lou may have influenced Herbert's 1932 Executive Order 5984. This order enlarged the Civil Service Rule VII to permit job nominations "without regard to sex," unless the type of work required specific tasks that only one of the genders could perform (such as guard of a federal women's prison).
• Vigorous in her belief that education was the key to long-term and permanent success for women, Lou paid for the higher education of a number of women, and also received eight honorary degrees. In addition, several schools were named for her, including Lou Henry Hoover Elementary School in California and Lou Henry Elementary School in Iowa. One of the San Jose State University dormitories is named "Hoover Hall" in her honor.

Lou receiving one of her many honorary degrees

• Ok, everyone gird your loins for some fuckery. One of the First Lady's duties was to host a series of teas for congressional spouses. This was complicated for Lou, because one of congressmen that year, Oscar DePriest, was African-American, as was his wife, Jessie. Lou, rightly, knew that inviting this woman was going to cause all the racists to get their knickers in a bunch and might have political repercussions for her husband. She did it anyway. Not only that, but Lou made sure that the women who were at the same tea as Jessie had been vetted as supporting 'social integration'. Lou herself made it a point to be seen shaking Jessie's hand.
• This whole event, of course, put all the segregationists into a tizzy, and they all made speeches and wrote articles, letters, and telegrams, saying how wrong and horrible Lou was. Lou made no public apology for, or clarification of, her decision to invite Jessie, and the very next week, Herbert welcomed the African-American president of the Tuskegee Institute to lunch in the White House. This was a mute but decisive symbolic gesture indicating support of his wife. (The political fallout, by the way, is too nuanced and complicated to get into here, but it doesn't seem to have been a watershed moment for either side.)

Jessie DePriest, looking pretty damn good

• During the Great Depression, Lou attempted to put Herbert and her philosophy of meeting the crisis not through federal government intervention but rather small and large scale volunteer drives to alleviate suffering, into practice. She received thousands of letters from citizens appealing for particular types of help - money, food, employment, clothing - and took it upon herself to respond personally. She would refer the request for support to a wealthy friend or organization, or send a personal loan to the stranger. It was only after her death that Herbert, in clearing out her files and drawers, discovered the extent to which she had provided financial help to hundreds of anonymous Americans. In many instances, she never cashed the checks she received from those who had repaid her.
• The greatest effort Lou made to forge a response to the overwhelming needs generated by the Great Depression was to organize and inspire a volunteer network among the quarter of a million Girl Scouts. She sought to inspire Girl Scouts to go into their communities and discover which families were struggling, and then help to "plan that the excess in your community may be systematically gathered together and through the aid of the many channels of relief may be sent where it is needed."
• Lou had served as the national president of the Girl Scouts from 1922 to 1925, and did so again after leaving the White House, from 1935 to 1937. She was also active in national organizations such as the League of Women Voters and the Visiting Nurses' Association.
• During this second stint as Girl Scout President, Lou was instrumental in forging one of the group's most successful fundraising tools: the Girl Scout cookie. Thin-mints and shortbread were first sold by Girl Scouts in 1936, and soon became an annual event for troops across the country. Lou even donned her Girl Scout uniform to pose for publicity pictures promoting the first cookie sales.

Promoting cookies. That girl in the middle looks extremely dubious.

• In a 1935 speech to the California Federation of Women's Clubs, Lou delivered her most pointedly political speech, on the threats posed to the United States and all democracies by the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, and what she believed were unresolved issues of World War I that had led to the climate permitting the rise of the Third Reich in Germany.
• When WWII broke out in 1939, the Hoovers resumed their relief work for European refugees. On the American home front, it was again through the Girl Scouts that Lou worked. She implored the young members to do their part by collecting scrap metal that could be used in munitions production, growing produce for themselves, their families, and their communities in Victory Gardens, and selling defense bonds door-to-door much as they sold cookies.
• The Hoovers built a house, which Lou designed, in 1920. In designing it, Lou did not want a home that could be described or identified by any known architectural style, but rather which fused the many divergent types she had seen around the world. After Lou's death in 1944, Herbert deeded the house to Stanford University to serve as a home for university professors. It now serves as the official residence of the university president and was designated a National Historic Landmark.
• Lou and Herbert are interred at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa

A really fine lady



Lou with her two sons, Herbert and Allan. Allan is the younger one.



All the First Ladies have such cool hats



A young Lou, on ice skates

Bonus:


I'm not 100% sure that Lou is in this picture, but I thought you all might want to see this early version of a wheelchair. This is at some kind of WWI veterans event.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Henry_Hoover; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Henry_Hoover_House; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Hoover; http://www.firstladies.org/biographies/firstladies.aspx?biography=32