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Herbert Hoover
1874–1964 · 90 years Tier II
Orphaned Quaker, mining millionaire, the man who fed Belgium
His father, a blacksmith in West Branch, Iowa, died of a heart attack in 1880. His mother died of typhoid in 1884. Hoover was nine, and the Quaker relatives divided the three children among themselves. He went to an uncle in Oregon and worked in the man's land office. In 1891 he talked his way into Stanford's first class after failing every entrance examination but mathematics, and came out a geologist in 1895. Western Australia hired him at 5,000 dollars a year. China hired him next, and he and Lou Henry — Stanford's first woman geology graduate, whom he married in February 1899 — were caught in the siege at Tianjin. By 1914 he was worth roughly four million dollars.
Four years, March 1929 to March 1933, and the crash arrived seven months in. He signed a tariff a thousand economists begged him not to sign, built the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, funded more public works than any peacetime president before him, and refused on principle to send federal money directly to hungry people. In 1932 he had the Army clear a veterans' camp out of Washington. The collapse, the shantytowns named after him and the 18-point defeat are all on BriefHistory. The odd thing is that this was the middle of the career, not the end.
He had already fed nine million people. Between 1914 and 1919 the Commission for Relief in Belgium moved more than two million tons of food into occupied territory using its own flag, its own ships and its own understanding with the German army, and Hoover crossed the North Sea 40 times to keep it running. Then his own surname became American slang for a cardboard shack. His Labor Department also ran deportation raids that expelled some 34,000 people between 1930 and 1933 and drove a far larger exodus of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, many of them United States citizens. And Franklin Roosevelt, who in 1920 had said he wished the country could make Hoover president, gave him nothing to do for 12 years.
Truman ended the exile. In March 1946, at 71, Hoover left New York on a food survey that carried him 50,000 miles through 38 countries of postwar wreckage, and the report he brought back fed the argument that produced UNICEF the following year. Truman then handed him the reorganization of the executive branch — 273 recommendations, roughly three quarters of them adopted — and Eisenhower gave him a second commission in 1953. He died in New York on October 20, 1964, at 90, of bleeding from a colorectal cancer, and was buried on a knoll above the two-room cottage in West Branch. His post-presidency ran 31 years. Only Carter's has been longer.
Lifespan
Herbert Hoover's life against the full span of the corpus.
Notable works
-
Principles of Mining
book
The standard English textbook for a generation of engineers 1909 -
De Re Metallica
book
Agricola's 1556 mining treatise, translated from the Latin with Lou Henry Hoover 1912 -
Commission for Relief in Belgium
company
Two million tons of food to nine million people, run like a small state 1914 -
Hoover Institution
company
Founded at Stanford as a collection of war documents 1919 -
Reconstruction Finance Corporation
company
The federal lending agency the New Deal inherited and enlarged 1932 -
The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson
book
Published at 84, on the peace conference he had watched from inside 1958
Life in brief
with age at each point- August 10, 1874 aged 0 Born in West Branch, Iowa, to a Quaker blacksmith
- 1884 aged ~10 Orphaned at nine and sent to an uncle in Oregon His father died in 1880 and his mother of typhoid in 1884. The three children were split up.
- 1895 aged ~21 Graduates in Stanford's first class with a degree in geology He had failed every entrance examination but mathematics four years earlier.
- February 10, 1899 aged 24 Marries Lou Henry in Monterey, California They sailed for China almost immediately.
- 1900 aged ~26 Trapped in the siege of Tianjin during the Boxer Rebellion Lou Hoover ran supplies by bicycle. A bullet went through her tire.
- October 22, 1914 aged 40 The Commission for Relief in Belgium begins work It ran its own shipping and negotiated directly with the German occupation.
- March 4, 1929 aged 54 Takes the oath as the 31st president
- March 17, 1946 aged 71 Leaves New York on Truman's famine survey at 71 50,000 miles through 38 countries. The findings helped produce UNICEF the next year.
- October 20, 1964 aged 90 Dies in New York at 90 Buried on a knoll overlooking the cottage where he was born.
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