He 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.
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, then the only woman geology major
attending Stanford, who later became 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.
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 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.
Secretary of Commerce
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.
Hoover as President
Nominated for president by the Republicans in 1928, Hoover defeated
Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York, USA, 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.
The Depression
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.
Foreign Affairs
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.
Later Career
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).
