Requiem for Herbert Hoover

We explore the life and legacy of Herbert Hoover.  Did history give him a raw deal?

Transcript

Requiem for Hoover

August 2025

“The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors. He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers.” 

“When we are sick, we want an uncommon doctor; when we have a construction job to do, we want an uncommon engineer, and when we are at war, we want an uncommon general. It is only when we get into politics that we are satisfied with the common man.”
 Herbert Hoover, an uncommon man

In 1948 the first of the presidential rankings was conducted by Arthur Schlessinger Sr.  Not surprising given Schlessinger’s political proclivities, and the sheen of WWII, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was 3rd right behind Washington and Lincoln, a place the 33rd president still holds in the lates American Political Scientists annual poll.  Harding and Grant were at the bottom along with, stunningly, Calvin Coolidge.  Agan polls are usually more about personal biases than actual records.  Yet ranked in the lower quartile but above presidents such as Pierce and Buchanan, is Herber Hoover.  

The latest 2024 poll actually has FDR ranked ahead of Washington (again, bias because no prizes for who is dead last, and Obama eight slots ahead of Reagan and even Biden one slot ahead?) but there is Hoover at number 36.  Not near the worst but certainly not even close to the halfway mark.  There are some presidents such as Lyndon B Johnson whose political life was a continuous upward trajectory until the Vietnam war.  Others like Teddy Roosevelt seemed an ever-triumphant march from win to win, even accounting for his defeat in 1912.  There have been accidental presidents such as John Tyler and Millard Fillmore, assuming the office upon the death of a president but never able to put together a winning bid on their own.  But few presidents have been matched in the Roller Coaster ride experienced during Hoover’s rise, his presidency, or how historians have treated him ever afterward.  

I was able to experience some of Hoover’s thoughts first hand visiting his presidential library and museum in West Branch Iowa.  There are other libraries, notably Eisenhower’s, that are set outside of populated areas.  But lately many others are large cities like Obama’s in Chicago, W Bush’s in Dallas, or his father’s in Houston.  Even Reagan’s is a bare hour from Los Angeles but Hoover’s?  The closest city notable city is Des Moine and though associated with the University of Iowa, Hoover’s library and museum is still 20 minutes away, not even on the campus.  And enjoyed my time there.  The archivist in charge of the library (archivists are part of the US State Department) could not have been more gracious and the museum brings Hoover’s life in greater color than the many books I have read about his life.  

And it is his life we will discuss here.  Hoover biographer William Leuchtenburg begins his book by noting, “Little wonder that David Copperfield was Hoover’s favorite tale.  Like Charles Dickens hero, Hoover was orphaned at an early age and suffered a harsh youth.” Hoover was born into a Quaker family in West Branch, Iowa in 1874.  Though perhaps not treated as poorly as Copperfield or Dickens other orphan creation, Oliver Twist, Hoover adapted a certain reticence and wariness of people that decades of success never fully dispelled.  Hoover’s contemporary, Franklin D Roosevelt grew up wealthy and pampered, and probably this instilled the type of confidence that gave him a gift with connecting with people.  Hoover, who grew up poor and made a very sizeable fortune, never acquired the common touch.  His experience with the Society of Friends also instilled a modesty and lack of flashiness.  Hoover’s father died when he was six and his distant mother when he was just nine.  His youth was one of being transferred from one indifferent relative to the next, first uprooting him from Iowa to South Dakota and finally to Oregon.

He was one of the first graduates of the new Stanford University in 1895. He later called Stanford, “the best place in the world.” It was also at Stanford that he became a geology major which later affected his career choice.  After graduating, Hoover took a position with a London-based mining company working in Australia and China. He was not just a hard worker but nearly incapable of conversing about other subjects. And as Leuchtenburg notes, “he was a wizard in assessing mines.” He rapidly became a wealthy mining engineer.  By the age of 27, he was full partner in a mining firm and reputed by one San Francisco reporter to have the highest salary of anyone his age in the world.  Forming his own consulting firm, by the time Hoover was 38 he was worth over $4 million or over $100 million in today’s dollars.  Of all our presidents, Hoover is arguably the greatest rags to riches example of all of them.  But by his thirties Hoover noted, “He had run through this profession” and “making money just wan not enough.”  It was World War I that gave Hoover the chance to make his mark in a public role partly due to the war’s destructive impacts on his business.  To put it bluntly, all his workers were drafted in the various combatant’s army.    

In 1914, the outbreak of World War I, he organized and headed the Commission for Relief in Belgium, an international relief organization that provided food to occupied Belgium.  Historian Kenneth Whyte in his own work of Hoover notes, “In thirty months the CRB (Hoover’s commission to feed Belgium) spend $200 million and shipped 2.5 million tons of food.”  George Curzon, Lord Privy Seal during WWI for Britain noted of Hoover’s efforts, “an absolute miracle of scientific efficiency.” The New York Times said of Hoover’s efforts, “the most splendid American achievement of the last two years.”  

When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Hoover to lead the Food Administration. He became famous as his country's "food dictator". 

After the war, Hoover led the American Relief Administration, which provided food to the starving millions in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Russia. 

Hoover's wartime service made him a favorite of many progressives, and he unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination in the 1920 U.S. presidential election. Keep in mind that since Hoover had managed to get himself admitted to Stanford, this was the first failure in his glittering career.  But he was not to be deterred.  

Hoover served as Secretary of Commerce under presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. The Commerce Department had just been formed 17 years earlier and none of its inhabitants achieved much distinction.  Prior to Hoover as today, it is considered a downstream office to be rewarded to political cronies and respected business people, but unlike say State, the AG or Department of Defense, not a hefty role.  Hoover intended to change that.  

Hoover was an unusually active and visible Cabinet member, becoming known as "Secretary of Commerce and Under-Secretary of all other departments." The even more reticent Calvin was not always impressed calling him “wonder boy.” He was influential in the development of air travel and radio.  And with this mania for efficiency, brought standardization to the nation.  Amity Shlaes in her work on the Great Depression entitled the Forgotten Man, writes, “Hoover had also created a Division of Simplified Practices, whose job it was to standardize and harmonize the distressingly fractious and unresponsible manufacturing and construction sectors. In those days roads were often still paved in brick, and brick was a typical example: sixty-six different sizes were being produced by manufacturers when Hoover ordered research on the topic. This was sheer waste, as far as the utilitarian Hoover was concerned. He therefore pulled the nation's paving-brick firms into a room and settled the matter; the range of sizes dropped from sixty-six to eleven. Emboldened, Hoover also looked into brick for homes; here he claimed victory outright, for the number of sizes went "from forty-four to one," the praiseful Irvin reported. Then there were beds. Seventy-four different sizes were available; as a result of encouragement from Hoover, the figure went down to four."

As Commerce Secretary, Hoover led the federal response to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, seen at the time as one of triumph.  It also contrasted his take charge attitude with the more passive Coolidge. All of these successes led to his winning the Republican nomination in the 1928 presidential election. 

From the period of 1860 through 1928, the Republican party only lost to two men: Grover Cleveland and due to a Republican split in 1912, Woodrow Wilson.  So it was not a surprise that Hoover defeated Democratic candidate Al Smith in a landslide. In fact, given the popularity of Calvin Coolidge, Hoover’s victory in 1928 was even more resounding that Coolidge’s in 1924.  Whether it be business, philanthropy or government, Hoover was the realization of the American dream made human.  A brilliant, can do, manager of who no problem was too big.  His presidency promised a golden age for America, until it didn’t.  

Political consultant James Carville often comes across as a loony bird, because he is, well, loony.  But his phrase attributable to his work on Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 bid, is not the stuff of lunacy, but of wisdom: “It’s the economy, stupid.”  From Martin van Buren in 1837, to the Cleveland Bourbon Democrats in 1893, to our modern age with HW Bush, when the economy tanks, the person in the White House will suffer.  And no one faced quite an economic calamity, or suffered as much as Herbert Hoover.  With the possible exception of the panic of 1893, the 1929 Stock Market crash and its effect on the economy were the most severe in US history.  

There is a false concept planted by progressive historians that Hoover was some acolyte to laissez-faire, Milton Friedman style economics.  That could have been said about Grover Cleveland or even Hoover’s former boss, Coolidge.  It could not be said about Hoover.  His entire life was spent seeing a problem and personally intervening to solving that problem and his response to the crash was no different.  “He was a private sector man who understood the power of the private sector, but his temperament trumped his philosophy and his temperament was he was a control freak.” Noted Shlaes.  

One of myths surrounding Hoover, and one hears this until the present day, was that he was a free market, rugged individualist, laissez-faire figure who abhorred government interventions.  Though not nearly such as progressive or Wilson, or later, Roosevelt, Hoover was far more open to government interventions than was Coolidge.  When commerce secretary, he announced that the U.S. had already abandoned this policy of rugged individualism, and he deemed private property a fetish. After his defeat in 1932, Hoover took pains to note that as president he had sought the opposite of austerity, as Robert P. Murphy at the Ludwig von Mises Institute has pointed out. Hoover, unlike Coolidge, was inclined to action. Indeed, Hoover’s very reputation as a rescuer was what had brought this nonpolitician, engineer, and investor to the Presidency. Whether it was World War I, by organizing and seeing through a program to feed starving Belgians or his work in flood zones in the South Hoover ached to mount the most glorious rescue of all, the rescue of the American economy. 

Even prior to the Crash of 1929, Hoover passed a farm bill generally referred to as the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929. This act established the Federal Farm Board to provide funding and support for farmers and agricultural cooperatives during a period of economic depression in the farm sector. The act aimed to stabilize agricultural prices and stimulate co-operative marketing by providing a half-billion-dollar revolving fund, though it was part of a broader, ongoing effort to address agricultural distress.  It was a variation of this bill, the McNary-Haugen Farm Relief Bill, that Coolidge vetoed.   The success of the farm bill was later shown by a letter from George Clark, head of the Butter, Eggs and Poultry farm concern in which he stated, “the best thing you could do would be to in front of congress and ask for a repeal of the Agricultural Marketing Act.”  

When faced with the economic crisis Hoover therefore turned to measures his “do less” predecessors would have eschewed. Rather than allowing the financial markets to bottom out, Hoover tried to stop their drop, personally, by railing against short sellers, whom he characterized pejoratively as those who conduct “raids on our markets with purpose to profit.” Hoover loaded burdens on business with a large tax hike, raising the top income tax rate to 63% from 25%. Even Hoover’s smaller interventions today look perverse: At a time when transactions were difficult, Hoover threw sand in the gears by introducing a tax on checks. As the President’s machinations proceeded, the banking crisis deepened, and the market plunged again.

Not content with meddling in markets, Hoover likewise tried to manage prices in another new area: labor. The economy wasn’t producing enough. Under a then-novel theory, higher wages would prompt recovery because they would invigorate workers and enable workers to spend more, stimulating the economy. Production, Hoover said, “depends upon a widening range of consumption only to be obtained from other purchasing power of high real wages.”  As Lee Ohanian of UCLA has noted, through a combination of suasion and brute pressure, Hoover drove employers to raise the average real manufacturing wage by 10 percent.

In 1931, Hoover and Congress codified their wage drive with passage of the Davis-Bacon Act. The official purpose of Davis-Bacon was to boost the economy through federal spending on construction projects in the states. But the law also mandated that builders pay “prevailing wages,” which translated to higher wages, for Washington and unions had a hand in setting levels.  Strapped firms had to comply if they wanted the contracts –-but could hardly afford the wages. So the firms cut worker hours — dramatically—hired fewer workers or rehired more slowly. Bank failures did their damage. So did scarce credit. Still, the pressure on wages matters more than the history books convey. By 1932 joblessness hit 25 percent. The same year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged further, dropping to 41.2 in July 1932, or almost 90 percent off its 1929 high. 

Arguably Hoover’s largest mistake had to do with a topic of discussion today, Tariffs.  Hoover did not appreciate the role of international trade and free trade and signed off on a bad tariff, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, even though economists from all over the country wrote him letters saying, 'You will hurt our economy if you sign this.' 

His party was more or less for tariffs. It was in their platform. He knew better, but again, the control freak and prevailed and he said, 'I'll sign the tariff if you give the executive certain special powers and create committees.' And, he signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, and that helped make the crash into a depression. Whyte argues that the actual impact of the Tariff economically was negligible and that the crash caused international trade to flounder, not the tariff. In Whyte’s estimation the real damage was to Hoover in that politically, Hoover, the business expert, seemed to be rolled by his GOP colleagues in signing a bill that other business experts seemed disastrous on what were already high tariffs.  The numbers tell otherwise. The law raised the tariff by approximately 20%, prompting other countries to impose high tariffs on U.S. exports as retaliation. It led to U.S. exports falling from $7 billion in 1929 to $2.5 billion in 1932. Farm exports were down by one-third from their 1929 levels by 1933. International trade plummeted 65%.  Now was this, as Whyte believes, chicken and egg with the depression being the chicken?  We certainly know the bill did not help with the depression.  So Hoover was left both economically and politically neutered less than 15 months into his presidency.  

In a 1973 book entitled Aggressive Introvert, author Craig Lloyd explores Hoover’s PR efforts and logically, the president came up short.  Described by Lloyd as “behind the scenes” public relations, Hoover tried to manage the perception of the Depression through committees and conferences.  For all of Hoover’s business acumen, he never was entirely comfortable and “would shrink in the public eye” when trying to directly address the economic issues.  Again in contrast not only was Roosevelt highly comfortable in these roles, his absolute mastery of the new medium of radio enabled him to address the entire nation at once.  When people are in the crisis they need to hear from their leaders even if, as I often argue, leaders cannot immediately address the issue, and in case of the New Deal, made some of the issue even worse.  Roosevelt instinctively understood this.  Hoover did not.  Nowhere was Hoover’s ineptitude seen as great as encounter with the Bonus army in 1932

That year some 25,000 veterans converged on Washington to demand the government advance their “bonus,” a pension package set to be paid in 1945. Congress deadlocked, and for months the vets camped off Capitol Hill in what came to be called Hoovervilles. Eventually, the President sent federal troops to clear the camps, torching their makeshift shelters.

Any president experiencing the 1929 crash would have been in trouble.  So in this regard Hoover was unlucky.  But he was also ill served by the time in which he dwelt.  In the 1800s his public reticence, work ethic and expertise would have not been negatively impacted by his lack of communication skills nearly as much as in the 1930s when a figure like Roosevelt could so easily command mass media.  It was not just Hoover.  Figures like Nixon vs. JFK or Carter and Mondale vs Reagan were simply not as effective on TV.  And for much of his silly bluster, Donald Trump is our first president highly effective at social media.  

And this brings us to the possible requiem part.  There is this odd tendency within America that when one achieves great things in one field, there is this odd desire to have them shift into politics. Now some people like FDR, or Bill Clinton, were born for this kind of thing.  But in just recent times we have seen business people like Lee Iacocca and F Ross Perot, entertainers like Oprah Winfrey, or even first ladies such as Michelle Obama bruited about as possible additions to the White House.  The reality is that for every Ronald Reagan there is a Rudy Guiliani.  During 9/11 Guiliani filled a very important role as America’s mayor.  But he was a terrible presidential candidate and even worse Trump lawyer.  Good in one thing but not for another.  In Mark W Dodge’s Hoover and the Historians, a series of essays on Hoover, Tom Walsh writes, “his having risen out of an orphanage, obscurity and poverty in the American West to international wealth, esteem and influence and ultimately onto the American Presidency was truly epic.”  Yet Walsh adds however “Hoover’s was a personality that cherished privacy and habitually sought concealment.”  

Which brings us to the fact that the highly ambitious Hoover wanted the most prestigious job in America, the only one with a number (31st).  But his personality was not suited to a major crisis.  Now one could argue the same about Coolidge (Silent Cal) but that brings us to the second part of the raw deal Hoover has received.  From an interventionist farm board to wage controls or fighting companies wishing to conduct layoffs, the difference between Hoover and FDR policy wise was the latter was also an interventionist but would go much further and unlike Hoover, in an unconstitutional direction.  Yet historians wanted to reward FDR so Hoover became their scapegoat.  A too close look at FDR’s New Deal record shows that it was ultimately ineffectual and never ended the depression, in fact, a good argument could be made that it made it worse.  In the panic of 1893, comparable to the 1929 Crash, Grover Cleveland did not intervene.  Nor would have Coolidge, in the manner of Hoover and FDR.  It was not just that FDR had the better personality, which he did, but he also had the better press.  

If it is right to denigrate Hoover’s policy shortcomings then it is open to question FDR’s as well and for many historians that cannot be borne.  Hoover was not a great president and made many mistakes, but he does not deserve the level of ignominy dumped on his head.  He deserved better than that.