American Individualism

Herbert Hoover, George H. Nash

• Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780817920166
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In late 1921, then secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover decided to distill from his experiences a coherent understanding of the American experiment he cherished. The result was the 1922 book American Individualism. In it, Hoover expounded and vigorously defended what has come to be called American exceptionalism: the set of beliefs and values that still makes America unique. He argued that America can make steady, sure progress if we preserve our individualism, preserve and stimulate the initiative of our people, insist on and maintain the safeguards to equality of opportunity, and honor service as a part of our national character. American Individualism asserts that equal opportunity for individuals to develop their abilities is "the sole source of progress" and the fundamental impulse behind American civilization for three—now four—centuries. More than ninety years have passed since this book was first published; it is clear, in retrospect, that the volume was partly motivated by the political controversies of the time. But American Individualism is not simply a product of a dim and receding past. To a considerable degree the ideological battles of Hoover's era are the battles of our own, and the interpretations we make of our past—particularly the years between 1921 and 1933—will mold our perspective on the crises of the present.

INTRODUCTION

I

On September 13, 1919, Herbert Hoover returned to the United States a troubled man. Ten months before, at the conclusion of the First World War, he had sailed to Europe at President Woodrow Wilson’s request to administer food relief on a continent careening toward catastrophe. The once mighty German and Austro-Hungarian empires—America’s enemies in the war—lay shattered. Across vast stretches of Europe, as 1919 began, famine, disease, and bloody revolution threatened to sunder a civilization already deeply wounded by “the war to end all war.”

As Wilson and the Allied leaders of Great Britain, France, and Italy struggled to draft a peace treaty in Paris, Hoover and his American Relief Administration delivered food to millions of people, reorganized the transportation and communications networks of nations prostrate from conflict, and helped check the advance of communist revolution from the East. Thanks in considerable measure to the Herculean efforts of Hoover and his associates, perhaps one-third of the population of postwar Europe was saved from starvation and death.

As Hoover journeyed home to America, his personal reputation was at its zenith. Five years earlier, as a respected American mining engineer living in London, he had organized a private relief agency that delivered and distributed food to the entire civilian population of Belgium (more than 7 million people) for the duration of the war. It was a voluntary, philanthropic effort without precedent in human history, and it made him an international hero. Now, from Finland to Armenia, from the streets of Vienna to the plains of eastern Poland, his name and that of the American Relief Administration were hailed for their humanitarian achievements. Tens of millions of people owed their lives to his exertions. In America he was lauded as “the Napoleon of Mercy.” In Great Britain, John Maynard Keynes called him “the only man who emerged from the ordeal of Paris with an enhanced reputation.”¹

Yet that autumn Hoover was not content. For several months he had pleaded with the Allied leaders in Paris to lift their blockade of the defeated German enemy and allow the healing currents of peaceful exchange to flow. Only after a long, wearisome struggle did he attain this objective. Every day at the peace conference he had witnessed a dispiriting display of national rivalry, vengefulness, and greed. He had observed, too, the sometimes violent attempts of reformers and radicals to construct a new social order on the principles of Marxist socialism. It was a time, he said, of “stupendous social ferment and revolution.”²

Hoover returned to his native land and (he soon told friends) with “two convictions … dominant in my mind.” The first was that the ideology of socialism, as tested before his eyes in Europe, was a catastrophic failure. Socialism’s fundamental premises—that the “impulse of altruism” could alone maintain productivity and that bureaucracy at the top could determine the most productive roles for each individual—said Hoover, were false. Only the “primary school of competition,” Hoover countered, could do that. Oblivious to this truth and to the fundamental human impulse of self-interest, socialism had “wrecked itself on the rock of production.” It was unable to motivate men and women to produce sufficient goods for the needs of society. Without increased productivity and the resultant plenty, neither social harmony nor an improved standard of living for the masses would occur. To Hoover the economic demoralization of Europe in 1919, with its attendant suffering, was the direct result of the bankruptcy of socialism.³

Hoover’s second conviction was also firmly held. More than ever before he sensed the “enormous distance” that America had traveled from Europe during 150 years of nationhood.⁴ To Hoover it now seemed that “irreconcilable conflicts” in ideals and experience separated the Old World from the New.⁵ The New World, he came to believe, was remote from the imperialism, fanatic ideologies, “age-old hates,” racial antipathies, dictatorships, power politics, and class stratifications of Europe. What the engineer-humanitarian had witnessed at the Paris peace conference, he came to believe, was something far more profound than “the intrigues of diplomacy or the foibles of European statesmen.” It was “the collision of civilizations that had grown three hundred years apart.”⁶

These sentiments of Hoover’s to some extent predated the trauma of 1919. Before the outbreak of the Great War, he had been an extraordinarily successful international mining engineer and financier. Born in Iowa in 1874 and orphaned before he was ten, by the time he was forty he had spent most of his adulthood outside the United States, in environments as various as the goldfields of the Australian outback, the coal mines of northern China, the rain forests of Burma, and the corporate boardrooms of London. He had traversed the Trans-Siberian Railway and journeyed around the world several times. This early and prolonged exposure to foreign civilizations led Hoover to notice and reflect on the remarkable contrasts in politics, economics, and philosophy of life between other societies and his own. Why, he wondered, was America so different? Why was America unique?

That America was different, he had no doubt. “Every homecoming” to his native shores, he later wrote, “was an inspiration.” In America he found “a greater kindliness, a greater neighborliness, a greater sense of individual responsibility, a lesser poverty, a greater comfort and security of our people, a wider spread of education, a wider diffusion of the finer arts and appreciation of them, a greater freedom of spirit, a wider opportunity for our children, and higher hopes of the future, than in any other country in the world.”⁷ This was how he had felt after his numerous engineering journeys before 1914. It was how he felt in September 1919 as he boarded a ship in Europe and headed home.

Yet Hoover was by no means complacent. The disorders and disorientation gripping Europe had cast a pall over the New World as well as the Old. During 1919 the United States experienced bitter and frightening upheavals: a massive strike in the steel industry, a police strike and mob violence in Boston, a general strike in Seattle, race riots in twenty towns and cities, the lynching of seventy-six African Americans, the founding of the Communist Party, and the attempted assassination by bombing of several leading public officials.

Coming back to America from Europe, Hoover sensed that his beloved homeland was vulnerable to the afflictions he had just witnessed abroad. To an assembly of American mining engineers he declared early in 1920: “We face a Europe still at war; still amid social revolutions; some of its peoples still slacking on production; millions starving; and therefore the safety of its civilization is still hanging by a slender thread. Every wind that blows carries to our shores an infection of social disease from this great ferment; every convulsion there has an economic reaction upon our own people.”⁸ Hoover implored his fellow citizens not to turn their country into “a laboratory for experiment in foreign social diseases.”⁹ Instead he contended that a “definite American substitute is needed for these disintegrating theories of Europe”—a substitute grounded in “our national instincts” and “the normal development of our national institutions.”¹⁰

In numerous speeches and articles in 1919–20 Hoover began to define this American “substitute.” The foundation of America’s distinctive social philosophy, he asserted, was the principle of equality of opportunity: the idea that no one should be “handicapped in securing that particular niche in the community to which his abilities and character entitle him.” Unlike Europe, where oppressive class barriers had generated misery and discontent, the American social system was based on “the negation of class.” A society, said Hoover, in which there is “a constant flux of individuals in the community, upon the basis of ability and character, is a moving virile mass.”¹¹ Such a society was the United States of America.

Hoover was neither a nativist nor a standpatter. Time and again in those turbulent months, he insisted that America’s ideals comported with neither radicalism nor reaction. To Hoover the convulsions in Europe were an understandable response to long-festering social injustice, and, although the socialist panacea was a ghastly error, the alternative was not the status quo antebellum. “We shall never remedy justifiable discontent,” he asserted, “until we eradicate the misery which the ruthlessness of individualism has imposed upon a minority.”¹² According to Hoover the solution to the problems of productivity and a “better division of the products of industry” lay not with the extremists of the Right or Left but with what he called “the liberal world of moderate men, working upon the safe foundations of experience.”¹³

This, in 1920, was where Hoover perceived himself to be. A Bull Moose supporter of Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, a member of Woodrow Wilson’s war cabinet during the recent conflict, and a self-styled “independent Progressive” as 1920 began, Hoover publicly identified himself with the Republican Party early in the year and unsuccessfully sought its presidential nomination. A few months later, President-elect Warren Harding appointed him secretary of commerce.

On March 4, 1921, the humanitarian-turned-technocrat entered Harding’s cabinet and plunged with zeal into the task of reconstructi...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• American Individualism
• Philosophic Grounds
• Spiritual Phases
• Economic Phases
• Political Phases
• The Future