Misunderestimating Herbert Hoover

June 11, 2012

The Scrapbook will go to great lengths to avoid being pedantic, but sometimes we are so astonished by the ignorance—the sheer bricks-for-brains philistinism—of certain journalistic celebrities that we feel constrained to set the historical record straight.

We are thinking, among other instances, of the Washington Post’s resident boy genius Ezra Klein, who once explained that many Americans misunderstand the U.S. Constitution since “the text is confusing because it was written more than a hundred years ago.” (That is, before 1912!) And of a similarly eye-popping observation we ran across last week by
Margaret Carlson, who these days writes for Bloomberg.com.

Carlson customarily tends to substitute a certain snarkiness of tone for actual knowledge—which, we suppose, entertains her readers. But in a tortured attempt to make the case that Mitt Romney, as a onetime businessman, is disqualified by experience for the presidency, she said the following:

The only successful candidate to run as a businessman—it was all he had—was Herbert Hoover. Look where that got us.

Now, The Scrapbook does not wish to enter into an extended discussion of the qualities and defects of the Hoover administration, or the virtues of Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corp. versus New Deal pump-priming, and so on. And of course, as a loyal Democrat, Carlson is entitled to express her opinion—“Look where that got us”—about Herbert Hoover’s place in history. But to suggest that Hoover ran “as a businessman” for the White House in 1928, and that his (spectacularly successful) commercial background “was all he had,” is not only unfair but profoundly and self-evidently wrong.

Herbert Hoover was, indeed, a businessman: He parlayed his training as a mining engineer (and member of Stanford’s first graduating class) into a storied career as a geologist, miner, and investor in the American West, in Australia, in China—where he was a hero of the resistance to the Boxer Rebellion—and in Europe before the outbreak of World War I.

As a wealthy American resident in London at the time, Hoover organized the (private, voluntary) Commission for Relief in Belgium, which successfully tackled the monumental problem of feeding and caring for the millions of refugees displaced by fighting across the continent; and after American entry into the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Hoover to the newly created U.S. Food Administration.

Hoover continued his work after the Armistice, founding the American Relief Commission to assist in the recovery and reconstruction of war-ravaged nations from Poland to Armenia, and as a consequence became (with the possible exception of Wilson) the most famous and beloved American in Europe.

So famous and beloved, indeed, that many of his friends and admirers (including his future rival Franklin D. Roosevelt) urged “the Great
Humanitarian” to run for president in 1920. Instead, Hoover opted to serve as secretary of commerce in the Harding and Coolidge administrations, where he influenced economic policy, reorganized domestic agencies, deployed the resources of the federal government to encourage growing industries (such as radio), and became the federal government’s point man for disaster relief, most notably in the devastating Mississippi River floods of 1927.

Which, of course, is only a partial description of Hoover’s private and public career before his election to the White House. So did he “run as a businessman” for president? Well, only in the sense that Jimmy Carter ran as a peanut farmer, and Barack Obama as a community organizer.