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 Wilsonâs request to administer food relief on a continent careening toward catastrophe. The once mighty German and Austro-Hungarian empiresâAmericaâs enemies in the warâlay shattered. Across vast stretches of Europe, as 1919 began, famine, disease, and bloody revolution threatened to sunder a civilization already deeply wounded by âthe war to end all war.â
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 âthe Napoleon of Mercy.â In Great Britain, John Maynard Keynes called him âthe only man who emerged from the ordeal of Paris with an enhanced reputation.â1
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 âstupendous social ferment and revolution.â2
Hoover returned to his native land and (he soon told friends) with âtwo convictions ⌠dominant in my mind.â The first was that the ideology of socialism, as tested before his eyes in Europe, was a catastrophic failure. Socialismâs fundamental premisesâthat the âimpulse of altruismâ could alone maintain productivity and that bureaucracy at the top could determine the most productive roles for each individualâsaid Hoover, were false. Only the âprimary school of competition,â Hoover countered, could do that. Oblivious to this truth and to the fundamental human impulse of self-interest, socialism had âwrecked itself on the rock of production.â 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
Hooverâs second conviction was also firmly held. More than ever before he sensed the âenormous distanceâ that America had traveled from Europe during 150 years of nationhood.4 To Hoover it now seemed that âirreconcilable conflictsâ 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, âage-old hates,â 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 âthe intrigues of diplomacy or the foibles of European statesmen.â It was âthe collision of civilizations that had grown three hundred years apart.â6
These sentiments of Hooverâs 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. âEvery homecomingâ to his native shores, he later wrote, âwas an inspiration.â In America he found âa 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.â7 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: âWe 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.â8 Hoover implored his fellow citizens not to turn their country into âa laboratory for experiment in foreign social diseases.â9 Instead he contended that a âdefinite American substitute is needed for these disintegrating theories of Europeââa substitute grounded in âour national instinctsâ and âthe normal development of our national institutions.â10
In numerous speeches and articles in 1919â20 Hoover began to define this American âsubstitute.â The foundation of Americaâs distinctive social philosophy, he asserted, was the principle of equality of opportunity: the idea that no one should be âhandicapped in securing that particular niche in the community to which his abilities and character entitle him.â Unlike Europe, where oppressive class barriers had generated misery and discontent, the American social system was based on âthe negation of class.â A society, said Hoover, in which there is âa constant flux of individuals in the community, upon the basis of ability and character, is a moving virile mass.â11 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 Americaâs 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. âWe shall never remedy justifiable discontent,â he asserted, âuntil we eradicate the misery which the ruthlessness of individualism has imposed upon a minority.â12 According to Hoover the solution to the problems of productivity and a âbetter division of the products of industryâ lay not with the extremists of the Right or Left but with what he called âthe liberal world of moderate men, working upon the safe foundations of experience.â13
This, in 1920, was where Hoover perceived himself to be. A Bull Moose supporter of Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, a member of Woodrow Wilsonâs war cabinet during the recent conflict, and a self-styled âindependent Progressiveâ 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 Hardingâs cabinet and plunged with zeal into the task of reconstructi...