Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (2017) by Kenneth Whyte

Herbert Hoover is mainly remembered today for his disastrous single term as president at the start of the Great Depression. That is unfortunate, as he is undoubtedly one of the most talented men of his generation and led a life jam-packed with memorable feats and achievements. In “Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times” Kenneth Whyte presents a full portrait of the thirty-first president.

Orphaned at the age of nine and shipped from Iowa to Oregon to live with his Quaker relatives, Hoover had a trying childhood, full of disappointment and sadness. Whyte suggests that Hoover silently carried the sorrow of his childhood throughout life. And what a life it was!

Graduating in the inaugural class at Stanford University where he demonstrated “an unbroken record of academic mediocrity,” he burst onto the scene as a young mining engineer, emerging as one of the most tenacious and talented managers in the industry while still in his mid-twenties. From Western Australia to the Boxer Rebellion in China, Hoover traveled the world over for his work with the mining firm Bewick, Moreing and Company. By his mid-thirties, he was a self-made millionaire. But he wanted to be more than “just another rich man.”

The First World War intervened just in time to give his life meaning and purpose. First, he worked to coordinate the evacuation of American tourists stranded in London at the outbreak of the war. Next, and more pivotally, he led the ambitious effort to feed the neutral, but occupied country of Belgium through his chairmanship of the Belgian Relief Commission. When the United States joined the war, he returned home to head up the US Food Administration, essentially serving as “food czar” regulating prices and production in a war economy. In the words of US ambassador to London, Walter Page: “It’s an awful job you have; but you are a man made for awful jobs.”

Hoover performed spectacularly in every endeavor, reaping wide publicity and adulation for his self-less services. According to his future secretary of state, Henry Stimson, Hoover had “the greatest capacity for assimilating and organizing material of any man I ever knew.” By the end of the war his name was already being whispered as a potential candidate for president. Herbert Hoover very much liked how that sounded. “He had always considered himself the most capable man in any room,” Whyte writes, “and with rare exception he was right.”

One of Hoover’s greatest political assets was also one of his greatest liabilities. He was an outsider. He had no deep base of support in either party. He had spent the better part of twenty years working from London. Regulars in both parties viewed the wonder boy with a mix of awe and suspicion. Hoover decided to earn his way into the political establishment, accepting the lowly post of commerce secretary in the Harding administration. He was now part of the “official family,” as he liked to call it. He brought the same volcanic energy and desire for direct control to Commerce that he had exhibited during the war. Whyte argues that Hoover single-handedly transformed Commerce from a sleepy agency without much clout to the central organizing body of the American economy.

He emerged as one of president Harding’s closest advisors and remained a pivotal voice in the succeeding administration of Calvin Coolidge. During the disastrous Mississippi flood of 1927, Hoover again stepped into the breach and seemingly saved the day. He was once again the hero of the hour, and once again there was a “battle in Hoover’s breast between humility and the desire for recognition.” By the time Silent Cal had counted himself out of the 1928 election, Hoover was the overwhelming favorite for the Republican nomination. He walked to easy victory in 1928, the first election he ever stood for, defeating the wet, Catholic Al Smith.

The stock market crash of 1929 hit just seven months into Hoover’s presidency. The economy would thus dominate his administration from the very start. At first blush, it appeared that the man and moment had met. “When the markets blew out in 1929,” Whyte writes, “[Hoover] had genuinely believed that his mastery and hard work could keep the economy on its hinges.” After all, he had made his career on crisis management. Indeed, “few men alive could match for depth and breadth Hoover’s perspective on the global economy,” according to Whyte. And the new president jumped into action. Economists and journalists at the time praised Hoover for what was, according to the author, “easily the most sophisticated response to a major economic event by an administration.” The economic downturn, however, proved intractable. After several false dawns, the economy dipped lower and lower into depression. Hoover was driven mad by his failure to tame the economic beast. He looked everywhere for answers. He even read analyses of the causes and duration of every economic downturn dating back to the Napoleonic Wars.

Hoover’s views on the disaster were shared by most leading economists and policymakers. He believed it was rooted in World War I and thus was centered in central Europe. He also firmly believed that a balanced federal budget was necessary for recovery, leading him to cut government spending and raise taxes in the teeth of economic disaster. He also placed emphasis on a stable financial system. His novel Reconstruction Finance Corporation was the centerpiece of his depression-fighting scheme. “After three years of backbreaking work,” Whyte writes, “Hoover had in fact stopped the depression in its tracks and by most relevant measures had forced its retreat.” It would be too little, too late to save his presidency.

Trounced by FDR in 1932, Hoover instantly became the popular new president’s fiercest critic. To Hoover the New Deal was “a muddle of uncoordinated and reckless adventures in government … a radical departure from the foundations of 150 years which have made this the greatest nation in the world.” He desperately wanted to stay in public life, but his party did not want him. As one contemporary mused, “Hoover is poison…he is a sort of political typhoid carrier.” Consigned to the political margins, much of Hoover’s post-presidency years were frustrating and lonely, but not unproductive. He wrote as many as five books in retirement and made countless speeches as he sought to define conservatism in the twentieth century. He died at the age of 90, living longer than any US president except John Adams.