{"id":2115,"date":"2017-03-29T07:43:06","date_gmt":"2017-03-29T14:43:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=2115"},"modified":"2017-03-29T07:43:06","modified_gmt":"2017-03-29T14:43:06","slug":"a-most-misunderstood-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=2115","title":{"rendered":"A most misunderstood president"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Paul T. O\u2019Connor<\/p>\n

HERBERT HOOVER: A LIFE. By Glen Jeansonne. Berkley. 464 pages. $28. Also available from Penguin Audio, read by Mark Deakins. 16 hours, 28 minutes. $29.95.<\/p>\n

\"Hoover\"<\/a>Head west across Interstate 80 from Chicago, and you\u2019ll come across a National Park Service surprise in West Branch, Iowa: The Herbert Hoover National Historic Site.<\/p>\n

The surprise lies in aspects of the 31st<\/sup> president\u2019s life on display in his hometown but taught neither in our schools nor on the History Channel.<\/p>\n

To the extent that many of us know of Hoover, it is likely for one of these three things:<\/p>\n

He was president when the stock market crashed in 1929.<\/p>\n

He lends his name to the \u201cHooverville\u201d encampments of the Great Depression.<\/p>\n

He made a pretty good vacuum cleaner.<\/p>\n

That third item isn\u2019t true; he had nothing to do with the Hoover vacuum cleaners.<\/p>\n

As you tour the small museum, you will discover that, in the words of Glen Jeansonne in this 2016 biography, Hoover was the \u201cmost versatile American since Benjamin Franklin.\u201d<\/p>\n

A small town boy orphaned at 10, Hoover was sent to Oregon to live with an uncle. In one of those Horatio Alger stories that America once appreciated, he graduated from Stanford with an engineering degree, worked as a coal miner, started as a typist in an engineering consulting company and within two years was its owner\u2019s right hand engineer.<\/p>\n

A British mining company sent him to Australia, where he introduced new techniques to mine previously considered exhausted sites, reaping huge profits and sizable rewards for himself. Then the Chinese made him their chief mining engineer, and during that time he was caught in the Boxer siege of Beijing.<\/p>\n

By the time he was 30, Hoover was considered the foremost mining engineer in the world.<\/p>\n

By 1914, at the age of 40, he was ready to take on new challenges. A wealthy man, he led the international effort to feed the starving Belgians during World War I, and after America\u2019s entry into the war in 1917, to head food production efforts in the U.S.<\/p>\n

After the war, as probably the best-known U.S. commerce secretary in history, he led both his department\u2019s modernization and hunger-relief efforts in Russia. After World War II, President Harry Truman would ask him, as the world\u2019s most accomplished food relief administrator, to help feed starving Europeans.<\/p>\n

Jeansonne says that Hoover probably saved more lives through these relief efforts than any other person in human history.<\/p>\n

So, if all we knew about Hoover was related to the Depression, we obviously missed a lot. And maybe what we know about Hoover\u2019s presidency isn\u2019t totally accurate, either.<\/p>\n

Hoover was very conservative, but not in the vein of today\u2019s Tea Party reactionaries. He made many efforts to put people back to work, but most involved the private sector. He hoped business policies could do the job. Contrary to popular perception, Hoover did increase government infrastructure spending in hopes of increasing employment. But it wasn\u2019t enough, and Franklin D. Roosevelt crushed him in the 1932 elections.<\/p>\n

Jeansonne has written an engaging biography, one that reintroduces us to a man previous generations of Americans knew well and for a long time.<\/p>\n

The Hoover we think we know was cold, heartless and inflexible. The Hoover we meet in these pages, or in the West Branch complex, is just the opposite.<\/p>\n

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