Herbert Hoover
William E. Leuchtenburg
My Copies
Characters
- Herbert Hoover – mining engineer; humanitarian; 31st U.S. President
- Dr. Henry John Minthorn – Hoover's uncle, with whom he lived in Oregon
- Walter Hines Page – US ambassador to the UK during WWI
- Jesse Hoover – father of Herbert Hoover
- Hulda Minthorn Hoover – mother of Herbert Hoover
- Willis J. Abbot – onetime editor of the Christian Science Monitor
Notes
By far the shortest Hoover biography I've read; it only took me two sittings.
Also one of the most negatively-biased Hoover biographies I've read. (This makes sense, as the author is a self-described "insider" to the FDR administration and New Deal.) The negative tone is mostly maintained through editorialized portrayals of many of the apparent contrasts in Hoover's life and words, as well as the glaring omission (to a knowledgeable eye) of at least the following positive aspects of Hoover's life and career:
- how Hoover actively disliked having servants in his Chinese adventures
- asserts that the CRB was mostly initiated & funded by the government (which is accurate, but the level of Hoover's initiative is far underplayed— by this biography's telling he was more-or-less a recruit to run something that was going to happen anyways, which is far from the unanimous picture other accounts portray)
- doesn't mention his stringent and unpopular objections to the provably worst parts of the Treaty of Versailles (punitive reparations); says he was "unhappy with some parts" but still pressed for its adoption, and separately mentions that Wilson chilled towards him, but aggressively evades explaining any details
- doesn't mention how he accidentally won the 1920 Michigan Democratic presidential primary, which is an important factor in portraying his cross-partisan popularity at the time
- doesn't mention that he actively fought anti-Catholic anti-Smith sentiment in 1928
While far from a hit piece per se, I think this work in isolation would leave its readers with a quite mistaken impression of the man Hoover. It serves as a very useful contrast to the more normal hagiographies, though— especially in illuminating the positive points on which there is no dissent even from Hoover's enemies.
Descendent of a Swiss family that a century before still went by the name of Huber, Jesse...
- p. 1 (Times Books, 2009)
[Hoover] did not find it easy, however, to be the son of a woman who was an ordained minister.
- p. 3 (Times Books, 2009)
Bert found out just how coldhearted strangers can be when at an Oregon depot he first looked up into the flinty eyes of Uncle John Minthorn.
- p. 4 (Times Books, 2009)
Tact is not one of his many qualities.
- p. 27 (Times Books, 2009)
He was chronically bad tempered—quick to take offense, primed to scent conspirators leagued against him, unwilling to control outbursts of rage.
- p. 27 (Times Books, 2009)
Even someone who thought well of Hoover remarked, "He can express himself so accurately and so indignantly that his victim will go off nursing a grudge for the rest of his natural life."
- p. 27 (Times Books, 2009)
However icy Hoover was, no one questioned that he was prodigiously effective. Lord Eustace Percy in the British Foreign Office regarded the American as "the bluntest man in Europe," but acknowledged that he was "able, without apparent effort, to handle a situation involving more irreconcilable elements than any other situation in this war [WWI]." On one occasion, a high-placed British official told him, "Men have gone to the Tower for less than you have done," but then acceded to demands that shortly before he had said were "out of the question."
- p. 29 (Times Books, 2009)
Life is worth more, to, for knowing Hoover. But for him Belgium would now be starved... he's a simple, modest energetic little man who began his career in California and will end it in Heaven, and he doesn't want anybody's thanks
- p. 30 (Times Books, 2009)
The U.S. Ambassador to Belgium, Brand Whitlock, who had won renown as a reform mayor of Toledo, Ohio, started out with great goodwill toward Hoover but wound up loathing him. In the early days of the CRB, Whitlock wrote that Hoover "has a genius for organization and for getting things done, and beneath all, with his great intelligence, ... has a wonderful human heart." It did not take long, though, for the envoy to conclude that Hoover was a "fruste" (uncultivated) and "boorish," or to deplore his acting "in a brutal manner." After reading a domineering cable to the king of Belgium drafted by the CRB chairman, Whitlock commented that Hoover was "always trying to force, to blackmail, to frighten people into doing things his way ... What a bully! He would even bully a poor exiled King!"
- (Times Books, 2009)