"His failure to dramatize himself was his greatest strength as a humanitarian and his greatest flaw as a politician." — the National Archives, on Hoover
"Your help will enter history as a unique, gigantic achievement, worthy of the greatest glory, which will long remain in the memory of millions of Russians whom you have saved from death." — Maxim Gorky
"No, but I do expect to see contented cows." — Hoover, to Coolidge's remark that one cannot expect calves the day after putting the bull to the cows
"I am the only person of distinction who's ever had a depression named after him."
No American ever arrived at the presidency with a resume like Herbert Hoover's, but today he's usually ranked among the worst US presidents. Hoover (1874-1964) was an LSE, showing what that configuration does at full power, and of precisely where it is blind.
The orphaned Quaker blacksmith's son worked his way through Stanford, took his geology degree into the Australian outback, and was managing a gold mine at twenty-three. He became the world's "Doctor of Sick Mines," the consultant summoned from continent to continent — Australia, China, Burma, Siberia, Peru — to take a broken, wasteful operation and make it produce. By all testimonies, he did this with remarkable efficiency and speed. Then came the also brilliant second career: when the Great War trapped Belgium between armies, Hoover organized its feeding — a private citizen running the supply chain of an entire nation's survival. Wikipedia notes, "Hoover worked 14-hour days from London, administering the distribution of over two million tons of food to nine million war victims. In an early form of shuttle diplomacy, he crossed the North Sea forty times to meet with German authorities and persuade them to allow food shipments" — very type-characteristic workaholism in a situation that demanded quick, on-the-spot judgements without an already existing prepared Ti algorithm to compare it to. He followed it by running America's wartime food administration, the Mississippi flood relief, the feeding of postwar Europe, and the organization of Russian 1921-22 famine relief, for which he was so profusedly thanked by the writer Gorky. As Commerce Secretary through the Roaring Twenties he did to the American economy what he had done to sick mines: the backwater department became a standardization engine — brick sizes, bolts and nuts, traffic signals, radio frequencies rationalized — "Secretary of Commerce and Under-Secretary of Everything Else."
His presidency was, well, far less shining than his previous career. Biographer Glen Jeansonne refers to this period of Hoover's life, writing "he led a life that was a prototypical Horatio Alger story, except that Horatio Alger stories stop at the pinnacle of success." Hoover firmly believed in private hard work and individual initiative and disliked government interventionism — not exactly a suitable philosophy for the age. While supporting the black Tuskegee Institute, he didn't do much against racial discrimination, and he met the crash of 1929 with the full energetic toolkit that had never failed him — conferences, coordination, data, voluntary cooperation, more federal action than any predecessor had ever attempted — with a forecast, perpetually renewed, that recovery stood just around the corner. He was not idle in the face of problems, but every instrument he reached for presupposed that this was a normal operation in a bad patch. Unable to comprehend the shape of the unroaching crisis, Hoover resisted larger federal relief efforts, believing that these programs were the responsibility of state governments. Despite him being a capable one-to-one diplomat, his fairly weak Fe worsened the situation, allowing, as Wikipedia says, "his opponents in the Democratic Party to define him as cold, incompetent, reactionary, and out-of-touch." His loss to Roosevelt was one of the most predictable in US politics, and his further 1930'ies political activities show the same lack of Ni-style foresight, as he, while lacking any pro-Nazi sympathies, opposed American involvement in WWII even after September 1939. Still, after the war Truman — a Democrat with no reason to be kind — called him back to feed Europe again in 1946, and the old logistician delivered, while the two Hoover Commissions reorganized the machinery of the federal government itself.
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