James Cash Penney

On January 22, 1929, Hoover left for a Florida vacation at the home of J. C. Penney. Before an open fire at the island house on Biscayne Bay, a pensive Hoover remarked to the editor of the Christian Science Monitor: "I have no dread of the ordinary work of the presidency. What I do fear is the result of the exaggerated idea the people have conceived of me. They have a conviction that I am a sort of superman, that no problem is beyond my capacity ... If some unprecedented calamity should come upon the nation ... I would be sacrificed to the unreasoning disappointment of a people who expected too much."

• Herbert Hoover
  • pp. 210-211 (Easton Press, 1996)
• Watching The World Go By (Willis J. Abbot)
  • p. 345 (Little, Brown, and Company, 1933)