BY CHRISTIAN OWEN

When I studied twentieth century American history at secondary school in Britain, the presidency of Herbert Hoover was nothing but a short, bleak prelude to the tragedy of the Great Depression and the advent of Roosevelt as America’s redemption from chaos, privation, and suffering. Hoover himself was a nonentity, lumped in with the laissez-faire, “do-nothing” presidents Harding and Coolidge, whose neglect of America’s systemic economic problems meant that they sleepwalked the nation into recession. 

And yet, the same President who is so reviled for messing up the response to the Great Depression—the President whose name has become synonymous with homeless encampments and wholly avoidable suffering—was, prior to 1929, the greatest progressive icon of his day. More than that, he was one of the most significant philanthropists ever to have lived. One biographer, Kenneth Whyte, estimates that the number of people who owed their lives directly to Herbert Hoover’s philanthropic efforts quite probably exceeded 100 million—“a record of benevolence unlike anything in human history.”

In exploring the story of this much-maligned President I discovered a very modern tragedy – a captain of industry who rose from nothing to the highest office in the land, while remaining utterly unable to connect with human beings and enjoy the fruits of his unprecedented success. His career typifies the extraordinary highs and spectacular lows of an age of capitalist excess, and he was frequently conniving, self-serving, and unscrupulous. But just as often, he stood up for a clear set of principles when others were too keen to ignore them. The story of this still-derided man is, above all else, a very American story, and deserves to be more widely known in all its wonderfully frustrating ambiguity. 

Born in a tiny Quaker village in rural Iowa, Herbert Hoover was a born entrepreneur. Orphaned at the age of ten, he was a distant and lonely child with few friends, who never seemed to excel at anything… until the opportunity for profit was placed into his lap. Hoover was an idealist and a believer in progress, and if he personally benefited from that progress, so much the better. This was the age of steam, and Hoover was captivated by the idea of an elite caste of ambitious engineers driving forth human progress. He graduated from Stanford—a member of the first graduating class—with a geology degree, and, when his job working for the US Geological Survey was cancelled, he took a job as an ordinary miner, working ten-hour shifts seven days a week in the hope of working his way up. 

A year later, he’d managed to talk his way into a job as a senior mining engineer; but he wanted to speed things along. The London mining company Bewick Moreing was looking for someone to supervise their gold mines in Western Australia. They advertised for an experienced engineer with an engineering degree, at least 35 years of age. Hoover was 22, and met none of these requirements; but through sheer confidence and a certain economy with the truth, he talked his way into the job. He drove himself with relentless determination in the harsh Outback climate, sleeping as little as four hours a night. He rapidly made vast tranches of enemies, firing hundreds of employees for indolence and incompetence, lengthening shifts by four hours, and hiring immigrant labour to replace workers who were striking because of his policies. Within a year, he was quite possibly the most hated man in Australia, including by his own boss, who considered him devious and arrogant. The mines, however, were turning over profits on a scale no one had seen before. Conscious that they couldn’t lose a man of his talent, Bewick Moreing transferred him to a lucrative new post in China. 

Travelling to China with his new wife, Lou Henry—the only woman in his graduating class at Stanford—Hoover almost immediately became caught up in the Boxer Rebellion. A group of young revolutionaries calling themselves the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists resented Western imperialism in China and received plenty of support within the government, encouraging violent mob politics and attacks on Westerners. Thousands of European expatriates barricaded themselves in the Western quarter of the city of Tianjin. Herbert and Lou personally ran errands, fought fires, and delivered food and medical supplies in the chaos of the besieged city.

But meanwhile, Hoover was busy negotiating property deals with his fellow captives. He reasoned that on the slim chance that any of them managed to get rescued, it would probably be because the Western powers had invaded China to save them. Anyone who’d already sold their mining deals to Western companies would hence be ahead of the curve when Western military law was imposed, and would avoid any possibility of having their property confiscated. Hoover was right—the US Marines liberated the city, and he rode with them as their local guide. Unfortunately for him, it turned out that word-of-mouth deals made by those expecting imminently to be murdered by Chines rebels were not legally enforceable. Hoover, enraged by watching the deals slip away, reached new heights of sheer unscrupulousness to bribe, blackmail, or threaten people into keeping their end of the bargain, in one memorable instance quite literally holding up a property office with a gun. These acts of shameless and immoral chutzpah paid off. He returned to London with the deeds to most of the lucrative minefields in China, and a promotion to managing director. 

Hoover was a truly fearsome corporate director—fiercely intelligent, with an instinctive way of stripping away nonessentials and getting to the root of the matter. He was extremely persuasive, and possessed of a photographic memory that provided him with his one and only party trick. He liked receiving telegrams from his properties and, without opening the envelope, looking only at the date and address, predicting the exact production quantities and cost per tonne of ore produced from the mine. He was almost always correct. Within a few years, Bewick Moreing was too small for him, and he signed a dismissal with a noncompetition agreement, which he almost immediately broke and founded a rival corporation. But in other ways, his experience of corporate life had mellowed him a little. He started a family, hosted dinner parties in London high society, and wrote a highly-regarded textbook on metallurgy, which remained the gold standard for a generation of students. Then again, one attendee of these dinner parties regarded him as the “rudest man in London.” so perhaps he hadn’t changed that much. 

Finally, having won respect in business, society, and academia, Hoover decided to pivot to philanthropy and public service. His opportunity was provided by the outbreak of the First World War, which left American tourists in Europe stranded as borders were rapidly closed and ships were requisitioned for the war effort. Hoover convinced his wealthy contacts to stump up the cash for a Committee for The Assistance of American Travelers, then set to work co-ordinating all the relief efforts. Within two months, his committee had repatriated all 120,000 stranded tourists, supporting them in considerable luxury in hotels until they could find them boat tickets. All its loans had been paid back by the grateful tourists, and the Committee had made a tidy profit. Testimonies were highly positive—in part because Hoover had threatened to ruin the career of anyone who criticised the Committee’s efforts.  

Flush off this success, Hoover set to work solving a far larger wartime crisis and one with hugely significant humanitarian implications. The Germans had imposed a naval blockade around occupied Belgium and prevented any food reaching the country. The Belgian government had ordered a thousand  tonnes of British grain to alleviate the problem but Britain refused to allow them to transport it into enemy-occupied territory. Belgium had seven million people and virtually no food. Starvation was inevitable within weeks. 

During the negotiations it was suggested that America acted as a neutral go-between, and Hoover volunteered to do the job. Together with Emile Francqui, a Belgian engineer and personal associate, Hoover started the Committee for the Relief of Belgium, intending not only to transport the grain at issue, but to plan a long-term solution to the Belgian famine. He launched probably the largest public relations campaign the world had ever seen at that time, hiring reporters and film crews to film footage and play up the personal tragedy of the famine, and gaining support from authors and public intellectuals such as George Bernard Shaw and Thomas Hardy to lobby the press and the public. He convinced the British to allow the shipments on the basis that allowing the Belgians to starve would make them more compliant with the German occupation, and he browbeat shipping companies and railways to carry his food for free.

By 1915, Hoover’s committee was feeding the whole of Belgium, using exclusively private funding—from corporate financiers pledging a percentage of their fortune, down to ordinary Brits and Americans donating their wages. He was also almost bankrupt. The donations were immense, but they were not enough to continue covering the costs of feeding seven million people. In an act of spectacular altruism, Hoover pledged his entire personal fortune as collateral for the Committee’s loans in order to keep the grain shipments coming while he did the rounds of the great European powers begging for funding. Finally, he met with success. The British government got news that Hoover had met with the German military high command to discuss funding his shipments. In reality, Hoover’s meeting with the Germans had been a total failure, but he fed the British barefaced lies and claimed that the Germans had agreed to fund everything he’d asked. Thus he inveigled the British government into pledging even more than his—completely imaginary—German partners.

Not only had Hoover saved millions of lives, the Committee for the Relief of Belgium was suddenly turning an immense profit. And the powers he enjoyed at its head were immense. One British official remarked that Herbert Hoover was now running “a piratical state organised entirely for benevolence.” His shipping fleet flew its own flag; he possessed a personal diplomatic immunity that ensured none of the warring powers could impede his movements for any purposes; and he was personally managing an income of around $150 million per year, taking no cut of the profits beyond covering his own expenses. 

When America entered the First World War in 1917, Hoover was no longer a representative of a neutral country, and had to return to America, though his committee carried on the good work. He returned acclaimed by the newspapers as a war hero, and was immediately pressed into action by Woodrow Wilson as “food commissioner”—responsible for ensuring there was enough food to support the American troops at the Western Front. His PR campaign persuading families on the home front to ration food was so successful that the word “Hooverize” entered the language as a word for acting frugally or efficiently; but in the end, he was so successful at improving the efficiency of food production that no rationing was even necessary. America had a vast surplus of food to export to Europe, and Hoover’s rationing agency turned an eight-digit profit.

By Armistice Day in 1918, with Europe devastated by war and winter coming on fast, Hoover was the natural choice to take on the responsibility of feeding a war-ravaged continent and allowing them time to rehabilitate. He made it look easy—rapidly repairing railways, ports, canals, and telegraph services, and redeploying demobbed American soldiers as officers of his relief efforts. He also deftly navigated the political minefields. While Britain and France planned to let Germany starve in order to increase their bargaining power and exact harsh terms, and banned Hoover from exporting any food to the defeated Central Powers, Hoover constructed an elaborate bureaucratic chain of transactions that resulted in 40% of the food getting to Germany and Austria-Hungary anyway in ways that were untraceable to anyone auditing his books. The New York Times regarded Hoover’s political powers in these few months as “the nearest Europe has had to a dictator since Napoleon.” He returned to America acclaimed as a logistical genius and a philanthropist par excellence, credited with saving tens of millions of lives and preventing the fall of most of Europe to communism. The economist John Maynard Keynes described how, “often acting in the teeth of European obstruction, [Hoover had] not only saved an immense amount of human suffering, but averted a widespread breakdown of the European system.”

Warren Harding, who became President in 1920, appointed Hoover his Secretary for Commerce, widely considered a powerless sinecure. Hoover revolutionised the nature of this office, hoping to use the expanded central government after the First World War to rationalise the American economy—instituting clear standards for housing, industrial safety, and countless other areas—while mediating an end to strikes, spearheading the economy’s recovery from the recession of 1921, and rescuing the American South from the effects of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. But his real passion remained humanitarian aid. Alongside his day job, he raised $20 million to spend on food aid for the Soviet Union, now starving after years of civil war and the disastrous effects of a communist planned economy. In the face of right-wing critics who accused him of propping up the Soviet regime when its failures were becoming obvious, and left-wing critics who believed he was trying to undermine communism by making the USSR dependent on aid from capitalist countries, Hoover always gave the same answer: “Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed.”

It’s unsurprising, given his record of immense success in virtually every arena of politics, that when Hoover finally stood for President in 1928, he won a vast landslide of 444 electoral votes to 87, one of the largest in American history. Anna McCormick of the New York Times summed up the expectations for his presidency:

“We were in a mood for magic… and the whole country was a vast, expectant gallery, its eyes focused on Washington. We had summoned a great engineer to solve our problems for us; now we sat back comfortable and confidently to watch our problems being solved… Almost with the air of giving genius its chance, we waited for the performance to begin.” 

Of course, we all know it didn’t work out like this. Even before the Great Depression hit, Hoover’s presidency was a misery. Hoover lacked the personal skills to deal with Congress and achieve compromises, and when faced with a politically corrupt tariff bill filled with pork-barrel spending and massive uncosted expenditures, he had no clue how to solve the problem except ask Congress to perform mathematical calculations to find the optimal tariffs—which they found utterly laughable. As his special session of Congress dissolved into recriminations and failure, there were crime waves, prison riots, and a heat wave that made the White House virtually uninhabitable… and then, the Depression hit and proved the nail in the coffin. 

But, even then, Hoover’s presidency could have been redeemed. Floundering for solutions, he did make some dreadful choices for which he has been fairly blamed, such as turning a blind eye to the scapegoating of Mexican citizens for unemployment in the border states and acquiescing to their expulsion from the country. But many of his agendas were also praised. His sweeping tax cuts and rate cuts in 1929 and his successful mediation of an agreement with major unions to prevent strikes were widely praised at the time as firm and steadfast leadership. Six months after the Depression hit, the stock market was approaching its pre-crisis levels and the Democratic Party believed Hoover’s growing popularity would make him unbeatable in the upcoming midterms. In some cases, Hoover’s agendas to stymie the Depression were actively frustrated by political interests—for example, the so-called “Hoover Holiday,” a plan to grant American debt relief to Germany in order to stabilise the European economy, was deliberately sabotaged by the French, determined to squeeze every penny from their broken and defeated rival. Much of this cannot fairly be regarded as Hoover’s fault, but it happened on his watch, and invariably he has been apportioned with most of the blame. 

There are two other reasons why Hoover has gone down in history as the President who failed to prevent a Depression. First, in the 1932 election Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic national machine dedicated itself to a massive public relations campaign, co-ordinating messaging amongst Democratic politicians and ensuring that friendly newspapers were all taking the same narrative. No political party had invested in such a sophisticated machinery, and the Republican National Committee simply did not have the infrastructure to fight it; while Hoover himself, who had hoped to be a kind of grand ‘national engineer’ above the sway of party politics, thought it beneath him to get down in the mud and confront specific threats to his reputation. When homeless encampments were dubbed Hoovervilles by a hostile press, Hoover had nothing to fight back. 

And second, however much Hoover tried to fight the Depression by stabilising banking, cutting taxes, stimulating manufacturing and trade, he remained for his entire career dead-set against any sort of national social welfare. He suspected – rightly – that instituting national, universal unemployment benefits for the victims of the Depression would lead to a massive expansion in the size of the government, an increasingly intrusive federal bureaucracy, and the abandonment of the constitutional vision of a small federal government presiding over relatively autonomous individual states. Unwilling to go down that route, the man who had fed the starving masses of Europe went down in history as the man who chose not to feed the starving masses of America. It was a reputation he’d never be able to shake. 

Most striking of all is the sheer mystery of Herbert Hoover’s unique psychology. The popular rationalist blogger Scott Alexander compared him to the fictional Inspector Javert from Les Miserables, who refuses to bend the law for any reason. When Hoover was inspecting the gold mines in Australia, he fired the worst-performing 10% of workers. One worker with a large family begged him to reconsider. Hoover raised $300, more than his own monthly salary, for the man’s family, but sacked him anyway. 

Despite being quite possibly the greatest philanthropist of the century, Hoover combined this with a vast personal callousness. “He told of the work in Belgium as coldly as if he were giving statistics of production,” remarked one American official who saw his work in Belgium—“from his words and his manner he seemed to regard human beings as so many numbers. Not once did he show the slightest feeling.” When he saw ragged and hungry children on the streets of Brussels on a field trip to see how bad the situation was, he would coldly avert his eyes and show not the slightest emotion… while inaugurating a programme of daily hot meals of bread and warm hot chocolate in Belgian schools, largely out of his own pocket, and seeking no plaudits. Was Hoover, then, an honourable man who sympathised intensely with others but whose reserved and cold personality made it impossible for him to share his sympathies? But how do we reconcile this with his consistent willingness to lie, cheat, and steal for his own self-interest, such as his Chinese mining scams? 

Perhaps the best that can be said is that Hoover’s weak and inconsistent moral compass frequently outdid everyone else. As was remarked of him in Belgium, he did regard human beings as so many numbers on a spreadsheet. But this huge character flaw, which made him a cold, lonely, and isolated person for so much of his life, also came with a corresponding talent. He could always remember that numbers on a spreadsheet represented human beings, even when it was all too convenient for others to forget. When it was in everyone’s strategic interest to stand by and watch the people of Belgium or the Soviet Union starve, only Hoover, for all his faults, could keep focussed on the realities of what this meant, and only Hoover was willing to absorb the personal cost of doing the right thing. 

In any case, Herbert Hoover’s story is a very American story—a rags-to-riches tale of an orphaned son of a blacksmith who worked his way up to the White House through his own effort and talent. His was an extraordinary life, lived at a time when a dying frontier America was giving way to the vast opportunities and huge challenges of the industrial age. Hoover’s presidency may, in the final reckoning, be adjudged a failure. But in his lifetime he was universally credited with saving many millions of lives, and even in his failures he sought to defend the best of the America he grew up in—the world’s great meritocracy.