One Summer: America, 1927 Read online

  He would very probably have passed his life in wealthy anonymity but for a sudden change in circumstances that thrust him unexpectedly into the limelight. When war broke out in 1914, Hoover, as a prominent American, was called on to help evacuate other Americans stranded in Europe—there were, remarkably, over 120,000 of them—and he performed that duty with such efficiency and distinction that he was asked to take on the much greater challenge of heading the new Commission for Relief in Belgium.

  Belgium was overwhelmed by war, its farms destroyed, its factories shut, its foodstocks seized by the Germans. Eight million Belgians were in real peril of starving. Hoover managed to find and distribute $1.8 million worth of food a week, every week, for two and a half years—2.5 million tons of it altogether—and to deliver it to people who would otherwise have gone unfed. The achievement can hardly be overstated. It was the greatest relief effort ever undertaken on earth, and it made him, deservedly, an international hero. By 1917, it was reckoned that Hoover had saved more lives than any other person in history. One enthusiast called him “the greatest humanitarian since Jesus Christ,” which of course is about as generous as a compliment can get. The label stuck. He became to the world the Great Humanitarian.

  Two things accounted for Hoover’s glorious reputation: he executed his duties with tireless efficiency and dispatch, and he made sure that no one anywhere was ever unaware of his accomplishments. Myron Herrick, America’s avuncular ambassador in Paris, performed similar heroic feats in occupied France without receiving any thanks from posterity, but only because he didn’t seek them. Hoover by contrast was meticulous in ensuring that every positive act associated with him was inflated to maximum importance and covered with a press release.

  In fact, Hoover was almost totally lacking in feeling for those he saved. He refused to visit any relief sites or otherwise interact with the unfortunate victims he was helping. Once when an aide innocently took him to a field kitchen in Brussels, Hoover recoiled. “Don’t you ever let me see one of these again,” he seethed. To those who knew him he seemed to have no feelings at all. One acquaintance noted how Hoover talked of his relief work in Europe without emotion. “Not once did he show the slightest feeling or convey to me a picture of the tragedies that went on,” the friend related in wonder.

  Hoover was also extremely intolerant of anything that seemed likely to diminish his eminence. When a Saturday Evening Post article suggested, incorrectly, that the New York office of the Commission for Relief in Belgium was actually the most important and productive part of the operation and that the real leader of the organization was its American head, Lindon Bates, Hoover reacted with a certain wildness. He dashed off a long letter asserting that the article contained “46 absolute untruths and 36 half-truths,” and carefully addressed each contentious point in turn. He ordered the New York office to cease putting out press releases and to clear all announcements in advance through Hoover’s office in London, thus severely hampering its ability to generate donations.

  Belgium was just the beginning for Hoover. Solving crises became his role in life. When America joined the war, President Woodrow Wilson called Hoover home and asked him to become national food administrator, looking after every aspect of wartime American food production, to make sure that plenty was grown, every citizen amply fed, and profiteering rooted out. Hoover coined the slogan “Food will win the war” and promoted it so effectively that millions were left with the impression that it was Hoover more than anyone else who secured America’s triumph. At war’s end he was sent back to Europe to save millions from starvation again as head of the American Relief Administration (ARA). The challenge was bigger than ever. Hoover was responsible for the well-being of four hundred million people. He oversaw relief operations in more than thirty countries. In Germany alone, the ARA ran thirty-five thousand feeding centers, which collectively provided three hundred million meals to people who would not otherwise have eaten.

  Austria was in an especially parlous state when Hoover arrived. “The peacemakers had done their best to make Austria a foodless nation,” Hoover noted drily in his memoirs. (For a man who had no sense of humor in his personal life, his writing was often bitingly ironic.) Hoover estimated that Austria needed $100 million of food aid to hold out until the next harvest, but it couldn’t raise even a small portion of that. The United States was unable to assist because U.S. law prohibited lending to enemy states, even after they had ceased being enemies. To get around this, Hoover arranged for America to lend $45 million to Britain, France, and Italy, and for them to lend the money on to Austria with the understanding that it be used to buy American food. This cleverly averted starvation while helping American farmers dispose of surplus crops, but it caused understandable dismay among the three allied nations when Congress subsequently insisted that they repay the loan after Austria defaulted. The allies pointed out that they had only borrowed the money in a technical sense and hadn’t benefited from the arrangement, whereas American farmers had been enriched by $45 million. Congress, unmoved, insisted on payment. Such actions fed America’s prosperity but did nothing to enhance its popularity or prestige abroad.

  None of this rebounded on Hoover, who seemed to enjoy a permanent immunity from blame. In fact, closer investigation shows that Hoover was not as heroic or noble as most of his contemporaries thought him. An investigative reporter named John Hamill, in a book called The Strange Career of Mr. Hoover Under Two Flags, claimed that Hoover profited personally, and substantially, from the Belgian food relief program. That charge was never proved—possibly, it must be said, because it was baseless—but another, more serious charge was true. During the war, as part of his business operations, Hoover illegally bought chemicals from Germany. This was an exceedingly grave offense in wartime. Remarkably, he did so not because the chemicals were unavailable in Britain, but simply because the German ones were cheaper. He saw no moral inconsistency in supporting the German economy even as Germany was trying to kill the sons and brothers of the people with whom he worked and lived. It is extraordinary to think that only a little more than a decade before he became president of the United States, Herbert Hoover, the Great Humanitarian, was engaged in an act that could have led to his being taken outside, stood against a wall, and shot.

  In 1919, his work in Europe done, Hoover returned permanently to the United States. He had lived abroad for twenty years and was something of a stranger in his own land, yet he was so revered that he was courted as a potential presidential candidate by both political parties. It has often been written that Hoover had been away so long that he didn’t know whether he was a Republican or a Democrat. That is not actually true. He had joined the Republican Party in 1909. But it is true that he wasn’t terrifically political and had never voted in a presidential election. In March 1921, he joined Warren G. Harding’s cabinet as secretary of commerce. After Harding died suddenly in 1923, he continued in the same post under Calvin Coolidge.

  Hoover was a diligent and industrious presence in both administrations, but he was dazzlingly short on endearing qualities. His manner was cold, vain, prickly, and snappish. He never thanked subordinates or inquired about their health or happiness. He had no visible capacity for friendliness or warmth. He did not even like shaking hands. Although Coolidge’s sense of humor was that of a slightly backward schoolboy—one of his favorite japes was to ring all the White House servant bells at once, then hide behind the drapes to savor the confusion that followed—he did at least have one. Hoover had none. One of his closest associates remarked that in thirty years he had never heard Hoover laugh out loud.

  Coolidge kept an exceedingly light hand on the tiller of state. He presided over an administration that was, in the words of one observer, “dedicated to inactivity.” His treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, spent much of his working life overseeing tax cuts that conveniently enhanced his own wealth. According to the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., with a single piece of legislation Mellon gave himself a greater tax cut t
han that enjoyed by almost the entire populace of Nebraska put together. Mellon had the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) send its best men to prepare his tax returns for him with a view to keeping them as small as possible. The head of the IRS even helpfully provided a list of loopholes for Mellon to exploit. As Mellon’s biographer David Cannadine notes, Mellon also illegally used his position to promote his business interests—for instance, by asking the secretary of state to help one of his companies secure an engineering contract in China. Thanks to these maneuverings, Mellon’s personal net worth more than doubled, to over $150 million during his term of office, and the wealth of his family, which he oversaw, topped $2 billion.

  By 1927, Coolidge worked no more than about four and a half hours a day—“a far lighter schedule than most other presidents, indeed most other people, have followed,” as the political scientist Robert E. Gilbert once observed—and napped much of the rest of the time. “No other President in my time,” recalled the White House usher, “ever slept so much.” When not napping, he often sat with his feet in an open desk drawer (a lifelong habit) and counted cars passing on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  All this left Herbert Hoover in an ideal position to exert himself outside his areas of formal responsibility, and nothing pleased Herbert Hoover more than conquering new administrative territories. He took a hand in everything—labor disputes, the regulation of radio, the fixing of airline routes, the supervision of foreign loans, the relief of traffic congestion, the distribution of water rights along major rivers, the price of rubber, the implementation of child hygiene regulations, and much else that often seemed only tangentially related to matters of domestic commerce. He became known to his colleagues as the Secretary of Commerce and Undersecretary of Everything Else. When airplane licenses were introduced, it was Hoover’s department that issued them. When a cheesy Broadway impresario named Earl Carroll publicly invited high school girls to audition for his risqué stage shows, it was to Hoover that a group called Moms of America appealed (successfully) for help. When the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) wished to demonstrate a new invention called television, it was Herbert Hoover who was put in front of the camera. He even found time in the spring of 1927 to produce an article for the Atlantic Monthly on how to improve the nation’s fish hatcheries. (“I wish to state a fact, to observe a condition, to relate an experiment, to define a proposition, to offer a protest, and to give the reasons for all,” he wrote in the article’s opening passage, proving that there was no matter too small to escape his numbing pomposity.) When not sorting out the nation’s problems, he traveled widely to accept honors. In the course of his life, he received more than five hundred awards, including honorary degrees from eighty-five universities.

  Coolidge didn’t like most people, but he seemed especially not to like Hoover. “That man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad!” Coolidge once barked when the subject of Hoover came up. In April 1927, Coolidge puzzled the world by issuing a statement proclaiming that Hoover would never be appointed secretary of state. The headline on the front page of the New York Times for April 16, 1927, read:

  CAPITAL MYSTIFIED

  ON HOOVER’S STATUS

  WITH THE PRESIDENT

  WHITE HOUSE DECLARES HE WILL

  NOT BE SECRETARY OF STATE,

  EVEN IF KELLOGG QUITS

  Why Coolidge issued the statement at all, and why with such finality, was a matter that puzzled every political commentator in the country. As Hoover had indicated no desire for the role, and the incumbent, Frank B. Kellogg, no inclination to leave it, they were as bewildered as everyone else.

  With withering disdain Coolidge referred to his tireless commerce secretary as Wonder Boy, but though he sneered, he was glad to have someone to do so much of his work for him. And now when the Mississippi flooded as it never had before, it was to Herbert Hoover that President Coolidge turned. One week after making his enigmatic promise not to promote Hoover to the role of secretary of state, Coolidge appointed him to head the relief efforts to deal with the emergency. Apart from that one act, Coolidge did nothing. He declined to visit the flooded areas. He declined to make any federal funds available or to call a special session of Congress. He declined to make a national radio broadcast appealing for private donations. He declined to provide the humorist Will Rogers with a message of hope and goodwill that he could read out as part of a national broadcast. He declined to supply twelve signed photographs to be auctioned off for the relief of flood victims.

  Hoover made his headquarters nominally in Memphis, but over the next three months he was to be found everywhere—in Little Rock, Natchez, New Orleans, Baton Rouge. Wherever a man of dignity was needed, there stood Hoover. To give the commerce secretary his due, he presented an air of statesmanship that the president declined to provide. It was he who addressed the nation by radio. “It is difficult to picture in words the might of the Mississippi in flood,” Hoover reported to the nation from Memphis. “To say that two blocks from where I stand it is at this minute flowing at a rate ten times that of Niagara seems unimpressive. Perhaps it becomes more impressive to say that at Vicksburg the flood is 6,000 feet wide and 50 feet deep, rushing on at the rate of 6 miles an hour. Behind this crest lies the ruin of 200,000 people. Thousands still cling to their homes where the upper floors are yet dry.… This is the pitiable plight of a lost battle.”

  Much worse was to come. Over the next two weeks, the number of homeless would soar to half a million. Hoover, however, was in his element. He had a massive crisis to solve and the authority to instruct and deploy people from a multitude of departments and agencies—the Red Cross, U.S. Weather Bureau, Public Health Service, Coast Guard, Veterans Bureau, Interstate Commerce Commission, U.S. Lighthouse Service, and at least a dozen more—and to interfere directly in the running of four large government departments: Agriculture, Navy, War, and Treasury. No one short of the president had ever been in charge of so much at once. No aspect of the operations escaped Hoover’s concentrated attention. He authorized the setting up of 154 refugee camps and provided exacting instructions on how each should be laid out and operated: tents should be eighteen by eighteen feet and arrayed in ordered ranks along streets exactly twenty-five feet wide, with ten-foot-wide alleys between each two rows of tents. (In fact, for practical reasons mostly to do with terrain, such geometrical perfection was almost nowhere achieved.) Amounts of food, types of entertainment, extent of medical care, and all other details of camp life were similarly prescribed, if not often followed. Rather amazingly, Hoover saw the camps as happy places. For many of the inhabitants, he insisted, “this was the first real holiday they had ever known.” These were people, remember, who had just lost everything.

  As in Europe, Hoover was not comfortable with the people whose lives he had been sent to sort out. He particularly didn’t like the Cajuns of Louisiana, who he thought were “as much like French peasants as one dot is like another.” Hoover was particularly exasperated at the number of Cajuns who repeatedly ignored calls to move to higher ground. One farmer had to be “rescued” six times. In Melville, Louisiana, when a levee on the Atchafalaya River gave way in the night, ten people lost their lives because they hadn’t left when told to—nine from a single family: a woman and her eight children. To Hoover this was not so much a source of tragedy as irritation. “I concluded a Cajun would move only when the water came up under the bed,” he wrote.

  The Cajuns, in turn, weren’t crazy about him. Near Caernarvon, Louisiana, a man with a rifle fired on Hoover’s party as it passed in a boat, then vanished back into the woods before he could be caught. The man’s animosity was perhaps understandable. The party was inspecting a levee that was about to be blown up to divert floodwaters away from New Orleans—an action widely held to be unnecessary. Levee failures farther north had already lowered the river and removed any immediate or probable threat to the city, but it was decided to blow up the levee anyway. Two large parishes were sacrificed for the peace
of mind of New Orleans businessmen. The city of New Orleans promised those affected that they would be fully reimbursed. They never were.

  As always, Hoover was a tireless self-publicist. He traveled through the South in a private train, which included a car exclusively devoted to press operations. From this issued a stream of press releases mostly devoted to Hoover’s vision and hard work. He also made sure that every Republican senator received a copy of a magazine article praising him. To any newspaper, however small, that questioned or criticized his efforts, he wrote a personal letter of rebuke. Sometimes these ran on for several pages.

  Hoover boasted that no more than three people died in the flooding after he took control (“one of them an overcurious sightseer”), but in fact the number was at least 150, and possibly many more. In the end, his efforts were far from an unqualified success. Relief funds were often wasted or misdirected. Emergency supplies were usually entrusted to the largest landowners to distribute to their tenants, and some owners unscrupulously charged tenants for the supplies or kept them to themselves. Reports of abuses were frequently brought to Hoover’s attention, but he dismissed them all. The refugee camps themselves were not comfortable places, and the food was often so poor and unwholesome that many of the residents came down with dietary diseases like pellagra. These were not matters that featured in Hoover’s press releases.

  To the wider world, however, the Mississippi flood merely consolidated Herbert Hoover’s reputation as a colossus and made it almost a certainty that he would be the next Republican nominee for president. “It is nearly inevitable,” he told a friend simply.