Road to the Presidency: Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover was the son of a blacksmith and farm implement store owner, and a Canadian mother. Both of his parents were Quakers. His father died in 1880 when Herbert Hoover was 6 and his mother died four years later. Fellow Quaker Lawrie Tatum was appointed as Hoover's guardian. Hoover stayed briefly with one of his grandmothers in Kingsley, Iowa, before being sent to live with his uncle Allen Hoover in West Branch, Iowa. In November 1885, he went to Newberg, Oregon, to live with his uncle Dr. John Minthorn, a physician and businessman whose own son had died the year before. For two-and-a-half years, Hoover attended Friends Pacific Academy (now George Fox University), and then worked as an office assistant in his uncle's real estate office, the Oregon Land Company, in Salem, Oregon. He did not attend high school, but in lieu of that he attended night school and learned bookkeeping, typing and mathematics.
Hoover began attendance at Stanford University in 1891, the university's inaugural year. First-year students were not required to pay tuition. Hoover would later claim that he was the very first student at Stanford, because he was the first person in the first class to sleep in the dormitory. While at Stanford, he was the student manager of both the baseball and football teams. He graduated in 1895 with a degree in geology. Hoover was able to pay his way through four years of college by working at various jobs.
Hoover went to Western Australia in 1897 while employed with Bewick, Moreing & Co., a London-based gold mining company. He worked at gold mines in Big Bell, Cue, Leonora, Menzies, and Coolgardie. Conditions were harsh in these goldfields, but the job paid well. Hoover was paid a $5,000 salary (equivalent to $100,000 today). He served as a geologist and mining engineer and was appointed as mine manager at the age of 23. He brought in many Italian immigrants to work in the mines to counter the union militancy of the Australian miners. A conflict developed between Hoover and his boss Ernest Williams. To settle the dispute, the firm's principals offered Hoover a promotion which would relocate him to China and end the feud.
Hoover promptly sent a cable proposing marriage to his college sweetheart, Lou Henry. The two were married in 1899 and she converted from the Episcopal Church to the Quaker Church. The Hoovers had two sons, Herbert Charles Hoover, born in 1903, and Allan Henry Hoover, born in 1907.
The newly-wedded Hoovers went to China where Herbert Hoover worked as chief engineer for the Chinese Bureau of Mines, and as general manager for the Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation. He later worked for Bewick, Moreing & Co. as the company's lead engineer. Hoover and his wife learned to speak Mandarin Chinese while he worked in China. Later, as President, he and his wife would speak the language to foil eavesdroppers. When the Boxer Rebellion broke out, the Hoovers were trapped in Tianjin in June 1900 for almost a month, as the settlement was under fire. Herbert Hoover guided U.S. Marines around Tianjin during the battle, using his knowledge of the local terrain, while his wife worked at the various hospitals, during which time she packed a .38-caliber pistol for protection.
Hoover became a partner in Bewick, Moreing & Co. on December 18, 1901 and assumed responsibility for various Australian operations and investments. Besides getting a substantial raise to $12,500 per annum, he also received a 20% share of corporate profits. The company eventually controlled around 50% of all gold production in Western Australia. Although Hoover no longer lived in Australia, he visited the country in 1902, 1903, 1905, and 1907 as an overseas investor.
Hoover was also a director of Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation (CEMC) when it became a supplier of immigrant labor from Southeast Asia for South African mines. But the living and working conditions of the laborers were difficult and soon public opposition to the scheme grew. The enterprise was abandoned in 1911.
In August of 1905, Hoover also founded the Zinc Corporation. The company came up with a new way to extract zinc.
In 1908, Hoover became an independent mining consultant. He traveled extensively throughout the world until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He left Bewick, Moreing & Co and, opening his own firm, which had investments on every continent and offices in San Francisco, London, New York City, St. Petersburg, Paris and Mandalay, Burma. He successful partnered on a business venture with the British firm Burma Corporation, producing silver, lead, and zinc in large quantities at the Namtu Bawdwin Mine. While there, he contracted malaria in 1907. The Bawdwin mine ultimately became the chief source of Hoover's fortune.In his spare time, Hoover wrote and lectured at Columbia and Stanford universities on the Principles of Mining. By 1914, Hoover was a wealthy man, with an estimated personal fortune of $4 million. He was quoted as saying "If a man has not made a million dollars by the time he is forty, he is not worth much".
When World War I began in August 1914, Hoover helped organize the return of around 120,000 Americans from Europe. He led 500 volunteers in distributing food, clothing, steamship tickets and cash among these refugees. When Belgium faced a food crisis after being invaded by Germany in 1914, Hoover undertook an unprecedented relief effort as part of the Commission for Relief in Belgium (or CRB). As chairman of the CRB, Hoover worked to feed the entire nation for the duration of the war. The CRB obtained and imported millions of tons of food to distribute. The CRB had its own flag, its own ships, factories, mills, and railroads. Private donations and government grants supplied an $11-million-a-month budget. For the next two years, Hoover worked 14-hour days from London, administering the distribution of over two million tons of food to nine million war victims. He crossed the North Sea forty times to meet with German authorities and persuade them to allow food shipments.
After the United States entered the war in April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Hoover to head the U.S. Food Administration. Hoover established set days for people to avoid eating specified foods in order to save them for soldiers' rations. He called for meatless Mondays, wheatless Wednesdays, and had the rule of "when in doubt, eat potatoes". This program reduced consumption of foods needed overseas and avoided rationing. After the war, as head of the American Relief Administration, Hoover organized shipments of food for millions of starving people in Central Europe. He also provided aid to the defeated German nation after the war, as well as relief to famine-stricken areas of Russia in 1921. Opponents to the programs such as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge argued that this was helping Bolshevism, to which Hoover responded, "Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!"
The New York Times named Hoover one of the "Ten Most Important Living Americans" and Hoover was a sought after political commodity when he returned home in 1919. Democratic Party leaders courted him as a potential Presidential candidate, including President Woodrow Wilson and future President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Hoover briefly considered becoming a Democrat, but he believed that 1920 would be a Republican year.
Hoover rejected the Democratic Party's overtures in 1920. He declared himself a Republican and a candidate for the Presidency. He placed his name on the ballot in the California state primary election, where he came close to beating popular Senator Hiram Johnson. But having lost in his home state, Hoover was not considered a serious contender at the convention. When Warren G. Harding was elected President, he appointed Hoover as his Secretary of Commerce.
Hoover planned to raise the profile of the Commerce Department. He created a number of sections and committees that regulated such things as manufacturing statistics, the census, radio, and air travel. He had jurisdiction transferred from other Cabinet departments when he felt that they were not carrying out their responsibilities. Hoover became one of the most visible men in the nation. Rather than viewing big business as something in need of government supervision, he sought to forge cooperative voluntary partnerships between government and business. Many of Hoover's programs centered on eliminating waste and increasing efficiency. He also sought to promote product standardization. He also promoted international trade by opening trade offices overseas that gave advice and practical help to businessmen. He also began the "Own Your Own Home" campaign in which he worked with bankers and the savings and loan industry to promote the new long-term home mortgage, which dramatically stimulated home construction.Hoover was the last President to have held a full cabinet position.
With help in the senate, Hoover fought to control the licensing of radio stations (which in 1927, stood at 732 stations). The Radio Act of 1927 was passed, which allowed the government to intervene and close radio stations that were deemed "non-useful" to the public.
Hoover accompanied President Warren G. Harding on his final trip out West in 1923. Hoover who called for a specialist to tend to his ailing boss and he was the one who contacted the White House to inform them of the President's death. Hoover accompanied Harding's body back to the capital.
Hoover continued on as Secretary of Commerce under President Calvin Coolidge. When the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 broke the banks and levees of the lower Mississippi River in early 1927, resulting in flooding of millions of acres, 1.5 million people were displaced from their homes. The governors of six of the states affected by the flood specifically asked for Hoover to become involved in helping with the emergency. President Coolidge sent Hoover to mobilize state and local authorities, militia, army engineers, the Coast Guard, and the American Red Cross. With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, he set up health units to work in the flooded regions. A controversy which emerged from the disaster was the treatment of African-Americans. Local officials prevented African-American sharecroppers from leaving relief camps, and aid intended for them was often intercepted and given to white landowners. African-American men were conscripted by local officials into forced labor against their will. Hoover met with Robert Russa Moton, a prominent African-American leader who was president of the Tuskegee Institute. In exchange for limiting negative publicity about the wrongs done to African-Americans, Hoover promised unprecedented influence for African-Americans should he become president.
In the 1928 presidential election, Hoover was the leading Republican candidate, despite the fact Coolidge was not overly fond of Hoover. Coolidge once said of Hoover, "for six years that man has given me unsolicited advice-all of it bad." But Coolidge did nothing to impair Hoover's nomination because he did not wish to split the Republican Party. Hoover's only real challenger for the nomination was Governor Frank Orren Lowden of Illinois. Lowden's campaign manager complained that newspapers were full of "nothing but advertisements for Herbert Hoover". Hoover won his party's nomination on the first ballot, with Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas being selected as his running mate.
Hoover's opponent was Democrat Alfred E. Smith, the Governor of New York. Both candidates were pro-business, and each promised to improve conditions for farmers, reform immigration laws, and maintain America's isolationist foreign policy. One issue on which they differed was on the Volstead Act which outlawed the sale of liquor and beer. Smith was a "wet" who called for its repeal, whereas Hoover gave lukewarm support for prohibition. Smith, a practicing Catholic, was the target of intense anti-Catholicism from some Protestant communities, especially among Southern Baptists and German Lutherans. Hoover did not directly participate in the religious bigotry against Smith, but did nothing to discourage it either. Hoover's national reputation as a "wonder boy" and the booming economy combined with deep splits in the Democratic Party over religion and prohibition to give Hoover a landslide victory. He received 58% of the popular vote. He made inroads into the "Solid South", winning in the Democratic strongholds of Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Texas and Tennessee. This was the first election in which a Republican candidate for president had carried Texas. His electoral college majority was a whopping 444 to 87.
When the Wall Street Crash of 1929 struck less than eight months after Hoover took office, Hoover tried to combat the ensuing Great Depression with government public works projects such as the Hoover Dam. But high tariffs, increases in the top tax bracket from 25% to 63%, and increases in corporate taxes hindered economic recovery. The economy plummeted and unemployment rates rose to put one in four Americans out of work. This downward spiral set the stage for Hoover's defeat in 1932.
Hoover began attendance at Stanford University in 1891, the university's inaugural year. First-year students were not required to pay tuition. Hoover would later claim that he was the very first student at Stanford, because he was the first person in the first class to sleep in the dormitory. While at Stanford, he was the student manager of both the baseball and football teams. He graduated in 1895 with a degree in geology. Hoover was able to pay his way through four years of college by working at various jobs.
Hoover went to Western Australia in 1897 while employed with Bewick, Moreing & Co., a London-based gold mining company. He worked at gold mines in Big Bell, Cue, Leonora, Menzies, and Coolgardie. Conditions were harsh in these goldfields, but the job paid well. Hoover was paid a $5,000 salary (equivalent to $100,000 today). He served as a geologist and mining engineer and was appointed as mine manager at the age of 23. He brought in many Italian immigrants to work in the mines to counter the union militancy of the Australian miners. A conflict developed between Hoover and his boss Ernest Williams. To settle the dispute, the firm's principals offered Hoover a promotion which would relocate him to China and end the feud.
Hoover promptly sent a cable proposing marriage to his college sweetheart, Lou Henry. The two were married in 1899 and she converted from the Episcopal Church to the Quaker Church. The Hoovers had two sons, Herbert Charles Hoover, born in 1903, and Allan Henry Hoover, born in 1907.
The newly-wedded Hoovers went to China where Herbert Hoover worked as chief engineer for the Chinese Bureau of Mines, and as general manager for the Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation. He later worked for Bewick, Moreing & Co. as the company's lead engineer. Hoover and his wife learned to speak Mandarin Chinese while he worked in China. Later, as President, he and his wife would speak the language to foil eavesdroppers. When the Boxer Rebellion broke out, the Hoovers were trapped in Tianjin in June 1900 for almost a month, as the settlement was under fire. Herbert Hoover guided U.S. Marines around Tianjin during the battle, using his knowledge of the local terrain, while his wife worked at the various hospitals, during which time she packed a .38-caliber pistol for protection.
Hoover became a partner in Bewick, Moreing & Co. on December 18, 1901 and assumed responsibility for various Australian operations and investments. Besides getting a substantial raise to $12,500 per annum, he also received a 20% share of corporate profits. The company eventually controlled around 50% of all gold production in Western Australia. Although Hoover no longer lived in Australia, he visited the country in 1902, 1903, 1905, and 1907 as an overseas investor.
Hoover was also a director of Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation (CEMC) when it became a supplier of immigrant labor from Southeast Asia for South African mines. But the living and working conditions of the laborers were difficult and soon public opposition to the scheme grew. The enterprise was abandoned in 1911.
In August of 1905, Hoover also founded the Zinc Corporation. The company came up with a new way to extract zinc.
In 1908, Hoover became an independent mining consultant. He traveled extensively throughout the world until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He left Bewick, Moreing & Co and, opening his own firm, which had investments on every continent and offices in San Francisco, London, New York City, St. Petersburg, Paris and Mandalay, Burma. He successful partnered on a business venture with the British firm Burma Corporation, producing silver, lead, and zinc in large quantities at the Namtu Bawdwin Mine. While there, he contracted malaria in 1907. The Bawdwin mine ultimately became the chief source of Hoover's fortune.In his spare time, Hoover wrote and lectured at Columbia and Stanford universities on the Principles of Mining. By 1914, Hoover was a wealthy man, with an estimated personal fortune of $4 million. He was quoted as saying "If a man has not made a million dollars by the time he is forty, he is not worth much".
When World War I began in August 1914, Hoover helped organize the return of around 120,000 Americans from Europe. He led 500 volunteers in distributing food, clothing, steamship tickets and cash among these refugees. When Belgium faced a food crisis after being invaded by Germany in 1914, Hoover undertook an unprecedented relief effort as part of the Commission for Relief in Belgium (or CRB). As chairman of the CRB, Hoover worked to feed the entire nation for the duration of the war. The CRB obtained and imported millions of tons of food to distribute. The CRB had its own flag, its own ships, factories, mills, and railroads. Private donations and government grants supplied an $11-million-a-month budget. For the next two years, Hoover worked 14-hour days from London, administering the distribution of over two million tons of food to nine million war victims. He crossed the North Sea forty times to meet with German authorities and persuade them to allow food shipments.
After the United States entered the war in April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Hoover to head the U.S. Food Administration. Hoover established set days for people to avoid eating specified foods in order to save them for soldiers' rations. He called for meatless Mondays, wheatless Wednesdays, and had the rule of "when in doubt, eat potatoes". This program reduced consumption of foods needed overseas and avoided rationing. After the war, as head of the American Relief Administration, Hoover organized shipments of food for millions of starving people in Central Europe. He also provided aid to the defeated German nation after the war, as well as relief to famine-stricken areas of Russia in 1921. Opponents to the programs such as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge argued that this was helping Bolshevism, to which Hoover responded, "Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!"
The New York Times named Hoover one of the "Ten Most Important Living Americans" and Hoover was a sought after political commodity when he returned home in 1919. Democratic Party leaders courted him as a potential Presidential candidate, including President Woodrow Wilson and future President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Hoover briefly considered becoming a Democrat, but he believed that 1920 would be a Republican year.
Hoover rejected the Democratic Party's overtures in 1920. He declared himself a Republican and a candidate for the Presidency. He placed his name on the ballot in the California state primary election, where he came close to beating popular Senator Hiram Johnson. But having lost in his home state, Hoover was not considered a serious contender at the convention. When Warren G. Harding was elected President, he appointed Hoover as his Secretary of Commerce.
Hoover planned to raise the profile of the Commerce Department. He created a number of sections and committees that regulated such things as manufacturing statistics, the census, radio, and air travel. He had jurisdiction transferred from other Cabinet departments when he felt that they were not carrying out their responsibilities. Hoover became one of the most visible men in the nation. Rather than viewing big business as something in need of government supervision, he sought to forge cooperative voluntary partnerships between government and business. Many of Hoover's programs centered on eliminating waste and increasing efficiency. He also sought to promote product standardization. He also promoted international trade by opening trade offices overseas that gave advice and practical help to businessmen. He also began the "Own Your Own Home" campaign in which he worked with bankers and the savings and loan industry to promote the new long-term home mortgage, which dramatically stimulated home construction.Hoover was the last President to have held a full cabinet position.
With help in the senate, Hoover fought to control the licensing of radio stations (which in 1927, stood at 732 stations). The Radio Act of 1927 was passed, which allowed the government to intervene and close radio stations that were deemed "non-useful" to the public.
Hoover accompanied President Warren G. Harding on his final trip out West in 1923. Hoover who called for a specialist to tend to his ailing boss and he was the one who contacted the White House to inform them of the President's death. Hoover accompanied Harding's body back to the capital.
Hoover continued on as Secretary of Commerce under President Calvin Coolidge. When the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 broke the banks and levees of the lower Mississippi River in early 1927, resulting in flooding of millions of acres, 1.5 million people were displaced from their homes. The governors of six of the states affected by the flood specifically asked for Hoover to become involved in helping with the emergency. President Coolidge sent Hoover to mobilize state and local authorities, militia, army engineers, the Coast Guard, and the American Red Cross. With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, he set up health units to work in the flooded regions. A controversy which emerged from the disaster was the treatment of African-Americans. Local officials prevented African-American sharecroppers from leaving relief camps, and aid intended for them was often intercepted and given to white landowners. African-American men were conscripted by local officials into forced labor against their will. Hoover met with Robert Russa Moton, a prominent African-American leader who was president of the Tuskegee Institute. In exchange for limiting negative publicity about the wrongs done to African-Americans, Hoover promised unprecedented influence for African-Americans should he become president.
In the 1928 presidential election, Hoover was the leading Republican candidate, despite the fact Coolidge was not overly fond of Hoover. Coolidge once said of Hoover, "for six years that man has given me unsolicited advice-all of it bad." But Coolidge did nothing to impair Hoover's nomination because he did not wish to split the Republican Party. Hoover's only real challenger for the nomination was Governor Frank Orren Lowden of Illinois. Lowden's campaign manager complained that newspapers were full of "nothing but advertisements for Herbert Hoover". Hoover won his party's nomination on the first ballot, with Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas being selected as his running mate.
Hoover's opponent was Democrat Alfred E. Smith, the Governor of New York. Both candidates were pro-business, and each promised to improve conditions for farmers, reform immigration laws, and maintain America's isolationist foreign policy. One issue on which they differed was on the Volstead Act which outlawed the sale of liquor and beer. Smith was a "wet" who called for its repeal, whereas Hoover gave lukewarm support for prohibition. Smith, a practicing Catholic, was the target of intense anti-Catholicism from some Protestant communities, especially among Southern Baptists and German Lutherans. Hoover did not directly participate in the religious bigotry against Smith, but did nothing to discourage it either. Hoover's national reputation as a "wonder boy" and the booming economy combined with deep splits in the Democratic Party over religion and prohibition to give Hoover a landslide victory. He received 58% of the popular vote. He made inroads into the "Solid South", winning in the Democratic strongholds of Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Texas and Tennessee. This was the first election in which a Republican candidate for president had carried Texas. His electoral college majority was a whopping 444 to 87.
When the Wall Street Crash of 1929 struck less than eight months after Hoover took office, Hoover tried to combat the ensuing Great Depression with government public works projects such as the Hoover Dam. But high tariffs, increases in the top tax bracket from 25% to 63%, and increases in corporate taxes hindered economic recovery. The economy plummeted and unemployment rates rose to put one in four Americans out of work. This downward spiral set the stage for Hoover's defeat in 1932.