The Humanitarian

Of all the moments of Herbert Clark Hoover's long and illustrious life, the one best remembered was the worst.

There he was, a stolid figure in the rear of an open car, his eyes downcast, a study in dejection. He rode in dour silence to the Capitol while Presidentelect Franklin Roosevelt, sitting beside him, smiled that famous smile and waved to the cheering throngs.

This was Saturday, March 4, 1933, F.D.R.'s Inauguration Day-and the day after Hoover had stubbornly rejected urgent demands that he close all of the nation's banks. Only four years before, Hoover had been elected as the 31st President of the U.S., with 58.1% of the popular vote (still the third highest in history), over Democrat Al Smith. When he took office, he had well earned his position as the most respected man in America. Now, after having been overwhelmed for reelection, he was perhaps the most reviled; the phrase "Hoover's Depression" was current, and the nation's landscape was defaced by those tarpaper-shack communities known as "Hoovervilles."

Yet even while enduring such violent swings in public esteem, Hoover himself remained constant in character and principles. And by .the time he died last week at 90 in his Waldorf Towers apartment in Manhattan, he ranked once again as a U.S. citizen who could truly be called revered.

"The Orgy of Speculation." History's hindsight has absolved Hoover of much of the blame for the Great Depression. Indeed, he saw it coming long before he made, as one admiring biographer put it, the "most serious error of his amazing career"-that of running successfully for President.

In eight productive years as Secretary of Commerce under Presidents Harding and Coolidge (he promoted arbitration rather than litigation in trade disputes, achieved standardization of some 3,000 industrial products, championed modernization of railroads and such huge river-control projects as Hoover Dam), Hoover repeatedly warned against "the rising boom and orgy of speculation." He complained that loose monetary policies of the Federal Reserve Board would lead to an "inevitable collapse which will bring the greatest calamities upon our farmers, our workers and legitimate business." But amid Coolidge prosperity, Hoover was denounced as "a crapehanger."

As President, Hoover utilized federal power as an instrument to support the private economy far more than any President before him. At his urging, Congress created a Federal Farm Board, backed by $500 million in federal funds, which came to the aid of farm marketing cooperatives after the market crash. He sought $663 million to push public works-a figure that critics decried as excessive. He proposed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the National Credit Corporation. He secured an early agreement in which labor promised to forgo strikes and new wage demands, Big Business agreed to maintain wages and spread work to avoid layoffs. He negotiated an international moratorium on the payment of intergovernmental debts.

The Bitter Years. Yet Hoover resisted what he termed "the lure of the rosy path to every panacea." He continually preached "the part of self-reliance, independence, and steadfastness in time of trial and stress." His philosophy of limited government prevented the bold innovations that the multiple crises demanded-and in his last two years in office a Democratic House and a splintered Senate hamstrung him on even milder measures.

Hoover also had a naive and unpolitical sense of public relations. He dreaded each speech he had to make -and each speech showed it. He had the notion that everything would be all right if everyone would just grin and bear it. "What the country needs," he said, "is a good big laugh."

Yet the most ironic failure of Hoover's presidency was that the man whom General Pershing once praised as "the food regulator of the world" proved unable to prevent hunger at home. To his critics, it almost seemed that he did not care. He did, of course, and deeply. But his own fabulous success in voluntary relief work had led him to the lifelong conviction that private and local agencies could handle the job. "I am opposed to any direct or indirect Government dole," Hoover said in 1931. "The moment responsibilities of any community are shifted from any part of the nation to Washington, then that community has subjected itself to a remote bureaucracy."

Many economists saw signs of an economic upturn in Hoover's last year, but such optimism dissolved in the bitterness of the 1932 election campaign. After F.D.R.'s victory-won partly on the claim that Hoover had spent too much-Hoover remained resentful of Roosevelt's failure to speak out in the four months before his inauguration. If he had just assured desperate businessmen what his policies would be, Hoover argued, the banks could have stayed open.

Whatever the final judgment of history on Hoover's presidency may be, it is certain that he will also be remembered for his accomplishments before and after what he later called the years of "compound hell" in the White House.

The Mandarin. Hoover's early career seemed living proof of his belief that selfdiscipline, 18-hour workdays and cold logic could accomplish any sort of wonder. Born in a three-room cottage in West Branch, Iowa (pop. 250), within 40 years he was a world-renowned mining engineer worth some $4,000,000.

Orphaned at eight, Hoover was reared in Iowa and Oregon by Quaker uncles, who stressed Bible reading and, recalled Hoover, "those great novels where the hero overcomes the demon rum." Hoover graduated with the first class at newly founded Stanford University, wound up working ten-hour shifts in a Nevada City mine at $2 a night. Laid off, he experienced, in his words, "the ceaseless tramping and ceaseless refusal" of job hunting.

Hoover landed a menial job as a typist for San Francisco Mining Engineer Louis Janin, quickly won engineering assignments, impressed Janin with his ability to absorb detail and select the essentials for action. At the age of 23, he grew a beard in a vain effort to hide his youth, went to Australia to run ten gold mines for a British firm. He advised his employers to sink $500,-000 into the Gwalia gold diggings-and these mines were to turn out $55 million worth of ore.

Hoover traveled the world as a doctor of sick mines. At 24, he was chief engineer of China's Bureau of Mines, and a living legend; he was known as "the foreign mandarin" with "green eyes" that could pierce the earth. He advised the Russian Czar on the development of his huge mine holdings, made a fortune of his own, mainly on fabulous lead, silver and zinc mines in the jungles of Burma.

But at the outbreak of World War I, Hoover declared, "Let fortune go to hell," abandoned business interests that were about to skyrocket in value, plunged into a selfless life of public service. Working in London, he helped some 120,000 Americans who were stranded in Europe without convertible currency, accepted their lOUs, and raised enough cash for the Americans to return home.

"Stunted Bodies." When Belgium was overrun by German troops, Hoover traveled to Berlin and to secret German field headquarters, let top officers believe that the U.S. might enter the war unless they permitted him to bring in food for starving Belgians. In London and Paris, he warned the French and English of likely U.S. indignation unless they eased their blockade to facilitate such shipments. After such tactics succeeded, Hoover supervised the shipment of a billion dollars worth of food and clothing to Belgium, directed a fleet of 60 cargo ships and 400 barges, crossed the mine-filled North Sea 40 times himself.

When the U.S. did enter the war, Hoover came home to head the U.S. Food Administration. Without resorting to either price controls or rationing, he met the domestic and military food demands of the U.S., increased the export of foodstuffs to hungry allies by 35%. At the height of wartime passions, he urged that German and Austrian women and children be fed by the U.S. too. "I did not believe that stunted bodies and deformed minds in the next generation were the foundation upon which to rebuild civilization," he later explained. At war's end, Hoover headed a massive American relief effort in Europe, directed the delivery of 20 million tons of food and supplies to 300 million people in 22 countries.

Hoover's humanitarian work lasted a lifetime. As Secretary of Commerce, he directed the evacuation of 1,500,000 people from the floodlands of the lower Mississippi in 1927, saw that they were housed and fed. Years later, in 1946, Democratic President Harry Truman asked Hoover to examine the relief needs of Asia and Europe in the post-World War II famine. Then 71, Hoover tirelessly trekked 35,000 miles through 25 countries to make his report.

With his remarkable grasp of detail and his organizational genius, Hoover also completed two monumental studies of the federal bureaucracy for Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. His commissions recommended some 645 specific changes in governmental organization and procedure, designed to save some $10 billion annually. About 70% of them were put into effect.

"Final Farewells." Each four years, Hoover appeared at Republican National Conventions as his party's beloved elder statesman to declare his undying enmity toward Big Government and unbalanced budgets-and at the last three conventions through 1960 in Chicago, to deliver his "final farewell." Once he was out of office, the warmth and wit that had long delighted his personal friends finally broke through his public reserve. "When I comb over these accounts of the New Deal," he ad-libbed in one speech, "my sympathy arises for the humble decimal point. His is a pathetic and heroic life, wandering around among regimented ciphers, trying to find some of the old places he used to know."

At 62, Hoover assumed the chairmanship of the Boys' Clubs of America. At 84, he published his sympathetic account of The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson. Throughout his own last ordeal, a 26-month struggle against a variety of major illnesses, he worked on a history of modern Communism.

Hoover survived surgery for abdominal cancer in 1962. After a massive gastrointestinal hemorrhage in June of 1963, his doctors considered death imminent. Yet Hoover sat up in bed one morning, ordered scrambled eggs and his pipe, told his startled nurse: "Now I am back in business again." Stricken again last February, this time by a kidney ailment and pneumonia, he recovered, remained alert and productive right up until still another gastrointestinal hemorrhage sent him last week into a painless and final coma.

The passions of the 1964 presidential campaign were temporarily stilled as all four national candidates joined in mourning at a simple funeral service at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in Manhattan. There thousands filed past Hoover's bier, and even more paid last respects as his body lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington. He was buried on Sunday on a peaceful knoll overlooking the West Branch cottage of his birth.

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