Heroes: The Humanitarian

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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.