Herbert Who-ver?

Who is Herbert Hoover?  Most people, if not showing outright ignorance by spouting off some remarks about vacuum cleaners, would likely share a few sentences about a failed presidency, a man callous towards the suffering of others, and the president responsible for the Great Depression.  Measured against his successor, as is his place often taught in classroom history lectures, he seems insignificant against the stature of his successor, FDR.  Perhaps I have given most people (at one point, myself included) too much credit.  A single sentence about ushering in the Great Depression and failing to do anything about it may be all that some people can confidently declare about one of the most villified, yet most accomplished, chief executives we have ever had as our president.

Self confessions should be offered right up front--I am not a Herbert Hoover expert, nor am I a Herbert Hoover apologist.  I am, however, an honest seeker of truth, and strive to understand historical figures within the context of their own times, viewed through contemporary rather than modern lenses, and to understand them by getting as close to their life and times as I can while avoiding strictly modern interpretations and analysis telling me what I should think about them.  And Herbert Hoover is a man whose history is dominated by the latter perspective and very rarely presented in the former.

My own efforts to understand Herbert Hoover began 6 years ago when my study of progressivism reached full throttle.  Hoover was a name I often heard thrown around as one of the progressive Republican presidents, and as such his name often produced an uncomfortable squirm.  After hearing him discussed and mentioned so many times in secondary sources, I decided it was time to dive in head first to gain my own understanding of this man, and it has now grown into an appreciation of him as well.  My efforts to do so quickly ballooned out of my initial expectations and my library now includes the complete 6 volume biography of Hoover begun in 1980 and finished only last year, his 3 volume memoirs, his newly discovered lost memoir of his fight against the New Deal, and his "magnum opus" called "Freedom Betrayed," his very prescient history of World War II.

One who truly studies the life of Herbert Hoover cannot help but come away from that study feeling like they had known a ghost all along, and have now been introduced to a new man.  This callous man who supposedly sat in the White House without a thought for the starving poor and destitute Americans during the Great Depression actually spearheaded the largest humanitarian efforts the world had ever seen to feed tens of millions of starting citizens in countries throughout the world after the ravages of both World Wars tore families and nations apart.  This man who left the White House in 1933 as a villified and defeated man had entered that residence 4 years earlier as one of the most popular men of the past 20 years, winning his presidency with an amazing landslide victory, securing 440 electoral votes but, even more tellingly, won the popular vote by nearly 20% (the same margin by which he would lose in 1932).  Here was a man that many wished forgotten after his presidency, yet he lived on for more than 30 years and became the most respected Elder Statesman of the 20th century, whose counsel was sought by even Democratic presidents following the end of FDR's presidency (who openly and publicly mocked Hoover and viciously derided and attacked him in private).  Often considered a progressive Republican (he claimed himself to be progressive), he relentlessly fought for conservative ideals in the face of growing government bureaucracy during the New Deal, and was credited for the massive resurgence of conservative sentiment that helped the Republicans resoundingly defeat the Roosevelt agenda in the 1938 mid-term elections.

To say that Herbert Hoover is a man of seeming contradictions is an understatement.  So who was he?  The answer to that question is one I will try to concisely address in coming days.