Herbert Hoover

“ This great demonstration of character has had no other impetus than the simple declaration of the facts by Herbert Hoover, the man who fed Belgium. Hoover has told his countrymen how things stand. That is all. The Winter of 1918, he declared to them, will prove to mankind whether or not the American Nation "is capable of individual self-sacrifice to save the world." His propaganda has never descended to unworthy levels. He has appealed always to the conscience of his countrymen. ”

“ But Herbert Hoover ran away for keeps. He did not run away to ship before the mast or to kill Indians. Nor did he run very far, only to Portland and to Salem, which his geography had already taught him were the principal city and capital, respectively, of the state of Oregon. And he ran away with the full knowledge and even tolerance of his relatives. But he went away to be independent, and to fit himself for the special kind of college to which he had already decided to go. ”

“ And it was the university of which he was to become, in later successful years, a patron and trustee. Stanford did much for Herbert Hoover; but so has he done much for Stanford.
Any university means many things, for all their lives, to those who have come timidly and wonderingly to its doors as boys and girls, and have gone out on that final day of happy reward and tearful good-byes as men and women eager to try themselves against the world outside of sheltered school-rooms. And most of these things are to most persons who have known them, things of pleasant and loving memory. ”

“ Hoover was now twenty-four, and a man of large reputation in mining circles in Australia and London, with a salary to correspond. He had spent about twenty-four months in West Australia, although they ran over all of one and parts of two other years, so that he is generally credited with having remained there three years. And he could have gone on among the Australian mines for as many years as he liked, for the big men in London now fully realized that they had in this young American [Pg 78] engineer the unusual man, and that his only limit in Australia would be the limit of the possible. ”

“ Just what led him to the decision about the [Pg 27] modern university and science is not easy for the grown-up Herbert Hoover of today to tell. But he is pretty sure that a large part of this determination came from the casual visit of a man whom he had never seen before and has never seen or heard of since, but who was an old friend of his father.
This man, on his way through the town to look at a mine he owned somewhere in eastern Oregon, dropped off at Newberg so that he might see the little son of his Iowa friend. He was a "mining man," and, from the impression that Mr. ”

“ Whenever Hoover came, he tried to keep his presence unknown except to us and Minister Whitlock and the heads of the Belgian organization and the German Government with whom he had to deal. He would not go, if he could help it, to the soup lines and children's canteens. Like many another man of great strength, he is a man of great sensitiveness. He cannot see suffering without suffering himself. ”

“ The history of mining is more a history of how mines with mineral in them have not succeeded in becoming mines where the mineral could be profitably got out of them, than of how such mines have succeeded. A successful mine is infinitely more than a hole in the ground with mineral at its bottom. It is railroads and steamers, mills, housing for men, men themselves, organization, system, skill, brains, all-around human capacity. Herbert Hoover is a great miner because he is—I say it bluntly and not from any blind hero-worship—a great man. ”

“ That is what he is today. He is still carrying on two great charities in Eastern Europe: the daily feeding of millions of under-nourished children, and the making possible, through his American Relief Warehouses, for anyone in America to help any relatives or friends anywhere in Eastern Europe by direct food gifts. But he is doing it as private citizen. The story of Hoover—as far as I can write it today—is that of an American who saw a particular kind of service he could render his country and Eu [Pg 280] rope and humanity in a great crisis. ”

“ The story of Herbert Hoover's college life reveals no startling features to distinguish it from the college careers of other thousands of boys, endowed with intelligence, energy, and ambition, but not with money, and hence forced to earn their living as they went along. ”

“ The Belgian relief and the American food administration and the later and still continuing American relief of Eastern Europe have been called, sometimes, in an apparently critical attitude, "one man" organizations. If by that is meant that there was one man in each of them who was looked up to with limitless admiration, relied on with absolute confidence, and served with entire devotion by all the other men in them, the attribution is correct. No man in any of these organizations—and Hoover gathered about him the best he could get—but recognized him as the natural leader. ”

“ He had sent in advance for two or three men he had worked with in America and for some of his most able and dependable associates in West Australia, including Agnew, a mill expert, and Newbery, a metallurgist, son of a famous geologist, both of them devoted to "the Chief." That was Hoover's sobriquet among his early mining associates; just as it was later among the members of his successive great war-time organizations. He has just naturally—not artificially—always been "the Chief" among his co-workers and associates. ”

“ No man can have reached the position in the public eye, can have had such influence in the councils of our own government and in the fate of other governments, can have been so conspicuously effective in public service as has Herbert Hoover, without exciting a wide public interest in his personality, his fundamental attitude toward his great problems and his methods of solving them. ”

“ Hoover's sympathetic interest in the child sufferers from the Great War, and of his active and effective work on their behalf, makes one wonder about his own childhood. He is not so old that his childhood days could have been darkened by the one war which did mean suffering to many American children, especially those of the South. ”

“ It did not take a prophet or seer to see in Herbert Clark Hoover, that master of vast engineering projects who had given himself so generously to helping his fellow-Americans in distress, a man fitted to meet the needs of the time. And Mr. Walter H. Page, American Ambassador to England, appealed to Mr. Hoover, American in London, citizen of the world and lover of humanity, to act as chairman of the Commission for Relief in Belgium.
“Who is this Mr. Hoover, and will he be really able to man and manage the relief-ship?” was demanded on every side, in America as well as in Europe. ”

“ Hoover could have gotten out with his wife and few Caucasian assistants at the beginning of the trouble, but he would not desert his few hundred Chinese helpers and their families—and his wife would not desert him. So they staid on together through all the rifle and shell fire and conflagrations [Pg 96] of the Tientsin siege, building and defending barricades of rice and sugar sacks, organizing food and water supplies, and cheerfully "carrying on" in the face of certain death, and worse, if the outnumbering fanatic Boxers happened to win. ”

“ So Hoover appeared before the head of the great London house—perhaps the greatest mining firm in the world at that time—without en [Pg 68] cumbering wife and with the highest of recommendations, but with a singularly youthful appearance for an experienced mining engineer of thirty-five. In fact, the great man after staring hard at his new acquisition burst out with English directness, "How remarkable you Americans are. You have not yet learned to grow old, either individually or as a nation. ”

“ The London firm had stipulated, too, that their new man should be unmarried. Hoover was still that, although he had begun to get impatient about what seemed to him an unnecessary delay in carrying out his decision already made in college. As a matter of fact, there was still no definite engagement between him and the girl of the geology department, but there was an informal understanding that some day there might be a formal one. ”

“ Crime and the man. SEE Hooton,
Earnest Albert.
HOOVER, HERBERT, JR. Addresses upon the American road, 1933-1938. SEE Hoover, Herbert, Pres. U.S.
HOOVER, HERBERT, PRES. U.S. Addresses upon the American road, 1933-1938. NM: all except first address. © 10Sep38; A121885. Herbert Hoover, Jr. (C) ; 3Mar66; R381343.
HOPE, LAURA LEE, pseud.
The Bobbsey Twins at Windmill Cottage, by Laura Lee Hope, pseud. of Harriet S. Adams & Edna C. Squier. Illustrated by Marie Schubert. (The Bobbsey Twins series) © 22Apr38; A117130. Harriet S. Adams & Edna C. Squier (A) ”

“ In the larger view the major forces of the depression now lie outside of the United States, and our recuperation has been retarded by the unwarranted degree of fear and apprehension created by these outside forces. ”

“ With the Armistice there was an immediate change of attitude on the part of the Allies who had been trying to build up reserves of pork products to use in times of possible increased difficulty of transportation. They now moved promptly toward a reduction of purchases. This made serious difficulties in maintaining the price to the producers during the months of December, January, and February. But Hoover's original assurance to the [Pg 247] growers covered these months. It required most vigorous pressure on his part to compel the Allies to live up to their purchasing agreements. ”

“ Herbert C. Hoover. He was chairman of an American benevolent society, of the woman's committee of which Mrs. Hoover was at the head. As the members of our relief committee returned home, the work was by degrees turned over to Mr. and Mrs. Hoover and their associates, until by August 27th we put all of the remaining work and funds into the hands of their society.
One day Earl Grey paid me a visit at our headquarters, and with him was Mrs. Waldorf Astor, now Viscountess Astor, who reminded me that "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," and insisted that Mrs. ”

“ This exchange of needed goods by barter solved in some degree the impossible financial situation, gave the people an incentive to work, and helped reduce political inflammation. It was practical statesmanship meeting things as they were and not as they might more desirably be, but were not. I say again, and many men in the governments of [Pg 279] Eastern Europe, and even in the councils in Paris [1] have said, that Hoover saved Eastern Europe from anarchy, and held active Bolshevism to its original frontiers. That meant saving Western Europe, too. ”

“ I do not believe that drastic force need be applied to maintain economic distribution and sane use of supplies by the great majority of American people, and I have learned a deep and abiding faith in the intelligence of the average American business man whose aid we anticipate and depend on to remedy the evils developed by the war which he admits and deplores as deeply as ourselves. ”

“ No one knows better than I that the American people, regardless of national and individual sacrifice, have so far refused nothing that is needed for the war, but it now lies with America to decide whether or not the Allies in Europe shall have enough bread to hold out until the United States is able to throw its force into the field.... ”

“ These are but some of the problems with which we must deal. I have no fear that our people will not find solutions. But progress is sometimes like the old-fashioned rail fence—some rails are perhaps misshapen and all look to point the wrong way ”

“ My wife, who was inside with us, has tried to tell the story of the women of Belgium in another book, but as she rightly says: "The story of Belgium will never be told. That is the word that passes oftenest between us. No one will ever by word of mouth or in writing give it to others in its entirety, or even tell what he himself has seen and felt." ”

“ He was then just forty years old, known to mining engineers everywhere and to the alumni and faculty and friends of Stanford University and to a limited group of business acquaintances and personal friends, but with a name then unknown to the world at large. Today no name is more widely known. Today millions of Europeans call him blessed; millions of Americans call him great. ”

“ Yet this is what President Wilson asked Hoover to do and to face.
Hoover realized the full possibilities of the situation. He had seen the rapid succession of the food dictators in each of the European countries; their average duration of life—as food dictators—was a little less than six months. "I don't want to be food dictator for the American people," he said, plaintively, a few days after the President had announced what he wanted him to do. "The man who accepts such a job will lie on the barbed wire of the first line of intrenchments." ”

“ If one country had some coal to spare but was starving for lack of the wheat which could be spared by its neighbor, which was freezing, there was no way of making the needed exchange. The money of each country became valueless in the others—and of less and less value in its own land. Everything was going to pieces, including the relief. ”

“ To me, the upbuilding of the sense of responsibility and of intelligence in each individual unit in the United States with the intervention of government only to promote the development of these relations, the suppression of domination by any one group over another, is the basis upon which democracy must progress.
Upon the solution of industrial peace and good will does the gradual lift of the standard of life of our whole people rest by increase in the material and intellectual output and its proper distribution among all of us. ”