Yet this hugely compassionate person was also a high-handed authoritarian, morbidly sensitive to criticism. He invented the idea that these things could be done at all, or at least done on any large scale. It wasn’t just that Hoover did these things well. Then, as commerce secretary, he took charge of the response to the devastating flooding of the Mississippi Valley in 1927: floods that drove hundreds of thousands from their homes to temporary camps and left the region in economic shambles. He undertook an even more ambitious task of rescue in Russia and Ukraine during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik seizure of power.

As a private citizen, he organized food relief for German-occupied Belgium during the First World War. A wealthy man by age 40, he turned his back on opportunities to earn more-and dissipated much of what he had gained-to devote himself to humanitarian work. The greatest problem-solver ever to enter the presidency miserably failed to solve the greatest problem ever presented to a president.įew if any Americans have dedicated more of their lives to the service of others than Hoover. But his efforts largely failed, and often made things worse. He worked tirelessly and creatively to mitigate its pain and reignite economic growth. Counter to later partisan mythmaking, Hoover did not passively submit to the crisis. economy slipped into reverse in August 1929, not even five months after Hoover took office. Here’s the first:Īlmost as soon as he entered office, Hoover was presented with the severest economic crisis of modern times, the Great Depression. Or perhaps I should say paradoxes, for there is more than one. The central question in assessing a new contribution to Hoover studies is to ask, “What new contribution does it offer to resolving the Hoover paradox?”

(I should mention here that Whyte was the founding editor of a newspaper to which I contributed a column between 19.) The paradox again energizes the latest of the biographies, by Kenneth Whyte, released last month. That paradox has energized every biographer of Hoover, from William Leuchtenberg’s brilliant brief study to the massive six-volume collective effort headed by George Nash (which I must confess from the start to having “read in,” but never to have actually “read”). Never has the ensuing presidency been marked by worse disasters.

Never has the United States elected a more accomplished man to the presidency than Herbert Clark Hoover, whose organizational genius saved millions of lives from famine and destitution.

Kenneth whyte hoover