The making of Herbert Hoover

Preface

This is a story stranger than fiction and as real as America. In Herbert Hoover's own experience, from his strange boyhood to his myth-like success, he has lived through all the phases of development that have created America itself. The forces that made the country made the man and behind the growth of his soul there is shown the growth of the nation.

From the prologue, with its generations of pioneers facing ever west, to the epilogue, with its record of continuing service, at home and abroad, this story proves that, in the most subtle sense, Herbert Hoover represents America.

The method used in handling this biographical material is so unusual that a word of explanation is necessary. The facts on which the story is based I do not believe to be open to dispute. Every detail of them has been collected with meticulous care from sources of unquestionable authority. The interpretation of them is my own. I have endeavored to present as a living human being the man whose life has been made by these facts, to show the influences of heredity and envi PREFACE

vironment that went toward the making of his character as I believe it to be. For the purely interpretative portions of the work, therefore, I claim no authority save my own opinion and that of many collaborators intimately acquainted with Mr. Hoover since his infancy.

The greater share of any praise this book may earn belongs to Charles Kellogg Field, editor of Sunset magazine and good friend of all California writers. It was he who inspired the work, collected a large part of the material, assisted day by day in the writing, and edited the whole. If, when the curtain descends upon these scenes in which we have tried to show the drama and the meaning of one great American life, there are any cries of ^'Author!" from the audience, I can appear upon the stage only long enough to say, ''Spot-light, please, for Charles Kellogg Field, classmate and friend of Herbert Hoover.^'

E. W. L.

THE MAKING OF HEEBERT HOOVER

PEOLOaUE

THE BLOOD IN HIS VEINS

IN the latter half of the sixteenth century a Roman Catholic King of France persecuted with religious fervor the Protestants in his realm. At that time there lived in the environs of Paris a man named Huber. He was thrifty, sagacious, and prosperous in a small way; his family was growing up around him; his life appeared destined to ripen into old age as serenely as that of the fruit-tree in his garden. He possessed all things to make a man contented, save one.

^^The need of a man's soul,'' he said, ^4s to be free." For the sake of that freedom which he valued more than all his possessions he tore up the roots of his life. He and his family, hunted fugitives, escaped into Holland with nothing except the contents of the bundle he carried on his back.

No more is known of him. The years buried him with the multitudes of the forgotten dead ; the language of the alien people among whom he died engulfed even his name. His sons were called

Hoover. But his spirit lived in them. It was one of the seeds from which, in the unknown future, a nation was to grow.

Four centuries marched over his grave, burying beside him kingdoms and faiths and generations of men, swinging the world's center of gravity westward across an ocean to a new continent, and out of that nation rose a man who was to make and unmake kingdoms, to feed whole peoples, and to sway the fortunes of a world war.

This man sat at a desk in a business office, a quiet place in the midst of chaos. A structure reared by centuries was rocking on its foundations, twenty-six nations were struggling in a death-grapple, Europe faced starvation, America was shaken as by an earthquake. The cry was for strong men, for men who could rule. Free peoples gave up their freedom; men and opinions were conscripted ; old, dearly bought liberties were abandoned in the panic of the world.

Herbert Hoover, descendant through four centuries from Huber the Frenchman, was Food Dictator to one hundred million persons. The Allied cause depended upon food, the food could come only from America, and Herbert Hoover was responsible for America's action. Greater power than that of an emperor was in his hands, and men expected him to use it.

*^No,'' he said. ** Freedom is a force too precious to be destroyed. Men do not need rulers; they need education. I shall tell the American people the facts; they will act upon them. I shall organize their efforts, but the power that will make them successful must come from a free people.''

The authentic voice of America spoke those words, heard through a babel of hysterical shouts about Americanism. It was the voice of men and women who broke the resistance of an untamed continent, who destroyed a wilderness to build a republic. Herbert Hoover spoke for them because their spirit had made his. Behind him were five generations of men whose laborious, inconspicuous lives had served a great ideal. Their struggle to create America had created Herbert Hoover.

The need of the human soul for freedom had driven Huber from France. Nearly two hundred years later, in 1740, the hope of finding freedom in a new world brought his three descendants, Christian, Jonas, and Andrew Hoover, across the perilous seas. On the frontier in Maryland Andrew built a log house and established a home.

He was a strong, hard-fisted man, with a quiet manner and a merry eye. He became a good woodsman and a clever hunter. His cabin was comfortable, and the small farm thrived. But, alone in the woods with his ax or his gun, he thought deeply, and it came to him that his soul had not found freedom. There was still the church, ruling the small community with the fierce bigotry into which the American pioneers had turned their hard-won freedom from Catholicism. There were certain forms, such as baptism, that must be observed, certain tithes that must be paid, an iron creed that must be professed. At night before the fire he discussed these things with his wife Margaret.

*^A free man obeys nothing but his own conscience,'' Andrew decided at last. And when a traveler, staying overnight, told of the Friends' community on Huwarra Creek, Andrew and Margaret left the place they had built and set out into the wilderness of North Carolina.

The early groups of Friends in America were perhaps the best compromise between individualism and commmiity needs that man has ever reached. Men and women were equal members of the Society; personal conscience was the only lawgiver, and the worship of God had been freed of all creed and ritual. In this environment Andrew Hoover and his wife found peace, and in it they reared their thirteen children.

In the prime of his manhood their son John became restless. Beyond the forests, toward the west, an unpeopled continent called to the pioneer spirit. Word came that the central government of the United States had thro^Ti open to settlement the lands of the Western Reserve, beyond the Ohio River.

John and his seven brothers sold their houses and lands, loaded goods and food on wagons, said good-by to all they had known, and set out toward the wild West. Two of the brothers, on horses, herded the cattle that followed the wagons ; John rode ahead, a rifle across the saddle pommel, and Jesse, his eleven-year-old son, proudly drove one of the teams. Thus they journeyed through the forests, crossed the mountains of Virginia, and came down to the plains of the Ohio Valley.

They made their last camp in Miami County, Ohio, not far from a log cabin on Stillwater Creek, where a little girl named Rebecca Yount lay awake at night, hearing the snuffling and snarling of panthers that scratched at the log walls of the pig-pen. Nine years later, when she was eighteen, this girl married Jesse Hoover, and it was she who was destined one day to hold her great-grandson Herbert Hoover in her lap and console him with cookies because the big boys had gone hunting without him.

Rebecca, girl and woman, was remarkable for an indomitable strength of purpose, a great capacity for work, and an extraordinary executive ability. She bore and reared to manhood and womanhood nine children, and she adopted and mothered nineteen more.

She was a noted housekeeper of Miami County ; her cured meats, homespun linens, and patchwork quilts were famous in the country-side. Nothing was wasted in her hands. In the autumn she tried out the year's supply of lard; she made sausages, head-cheese and pickled pig's-feet; she made her soap by leaching wood-ashes and boiling the lye with waste scraps of fat. When her carefully turned and made-over gowns were past use they were cut down and made dainty with fresh kerchiefs for the girls ; when no one could longer wear them the larger pieces were used for patchwork quilts, the rest was cut into strips, sewed together, and wound into balls during the winter evenings. Her loom transformed them into serviceable rugs.

Nor did her duties end with her own household and the care of her twenty-eight children. She was a Friend, a member of the Society, and she felt the responsibility of that citizenship. Her opinions were a force not only in the community but in the state. For many years she was an elder; at Yearly Meeting she addressed the Assembly, and the entire ministry of the West was profoundly influenced by her.

At the age of ninety-four she still kept herself informed in national politics, saying: ^^As long as I live under the government of our country I tliink it right that I should know what that government is doing, and that I should form my opinions upon it, with Grod's help, and be ready to express them. ' ^

This was the woman who at the age of fifty-three counseled her husband to leave their lifelong home and go farther west, in order to provide for the future of their children and grandchildren in a new country. Free land in Ohio was becoming hard to find. The original homesteads were not large enough for the whole family, and Mary Davis Hoover, the wife of Rebecca's son Eli, wished her children to have farms of their own. Mary was not strong ; she feared she had not much longer to live, and her flushed cheeks grew redder with excitement while she urged her husband to make haste in finding land for the three boys.

So Eli and two of his brothers set out for the West. When they returned, reporting that in Iowa there were thousands of acres of good land open to homesteading, and that it was bare prairie, unencumbered with the heart-breaking heavy forests whose destruction cost so much labor and time, Rebecca and her husband were persuaded that it was best to move.

The next spring they left Miami County, the only home they remembered, and went out to the prairies. Eli and his brothers went with them, but Rebecca took Mary's ^ve children as her own. Mary had died in the winter; she was not to see the land she had wanted for her boys. Had she lived, Herbert Hoover's father might have been a farmer, instead of a blacksmith who later left his forge and became a dealer in farm machinery.

For Jesse, the middle one of Marj^'s sons, was more interested in farm tools than in using them. His grandfather and uncles staked out their homesteads on the plains of central Iowa, midway between the Iowa and Cedar rivers, and their houses, clustered around the meeting-house, made the little town of West Branch, named in memory of the home town left behind in Ohio. Jesse's brothers ranged far over the rolling miles of wild grass, where deer browsed and whirring multitudes of prairie-chickens fed, but Jesse liked best to play in the farm tool-shed.

On rainy Seventh-Day afternaons he watched Uncle Benajah heating a plowshare in glowing coals, sharpening it with shrewd blows, and plunging it, hissing, into the tempering water. Unperceived by Grandmother Eebecca, he carried to the meeting-house on First-Day morning a few nails or a home-made hinge, hidden in his pocket, and touched them now and then during the long, reverent silences in which a small boy's dangling legs grew weary.

On the porch of the meeting-house he tirst met the brown-haired, gray-eyed little girl Huldah Randall Minthorn. Her mother had brought her by stage from Detroit, with her six brothers and i sisters ; the father was following more slowly, with two beautiful Percheron horses. Huldah told Jesse at once about the horses ; they had come with the family all the way from Toronto, Canada, and every one on the boat had admired them. Their legs were as huge as trees, she said, and their skins were soft and shiny like silk.

Even then there was a beauty and a grace about the little Huldah Minthom. They were a legacy from that William Minthorn who had sailed from England in 1725, and who, with his wife, had died on the long, stormy voyage, leaving his four small sons to land alone on the coast of America. Amid the forests of Connecticut, through the hardships of pioneer times and the Indian wars, these boys and their son's sons had never lost a love of beauty and of learning. The third William Minthorn had been a college student in Hartford. His grandson, Huldah 's father, carried in his saddle-bags across Canada, the Great Lakes, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois, down into Iowa, his few cherished books.

Mary Wesley Minthorn, Huldah 's mother, was a tiny, bright-eyed woman whose quick smile warred with her smoothly banded hair and Quaker bonnet. In her soul she secretly fought with a passion for color, especially purple. Her gowns were gray or sober brown, with a white kerchief neatly folded across the breast ; her bonnets were gray, tied with strings of white lawn, and she turned her thoughts away from ribbons. But woven coverlets were a snare to her. Her skill with the loom was a housewifely talent, not blameworthy, but in her own conscience she sometimes felt that she took too great delight in it, and in the making of designs for the weaving. She devised them herself, drawing them accurately to scale; she colored them, feeling pleasure in each brushstroke, and she never wove two coverlets alike. All her love of beauty went into those drawings, into the dyeing of bright-colored hanks of thread, and into the hours when she sat before her loom, watching the small patterns grow large beneath her flying fingers. She sometimes feared that these coverlets were a sinful indulgence, but she never quite felt that she must give them up.

There was a fine, strong spirit in her that rose to meet and conquer life. Her husband had hardly arrived with the Percheron horses, staked out his homestead, and built a shelter for his family, when he died. She was left with seven young children, a hundred and sixty acres of unbroken prairie, and the team. On the morning when her husband lay in his coffin she stood beside it ill her Quaker bonnet and shawl, her hands folded on her breast, and made a vow.

< ' I will take care of the children, ' ' she said. ' ' I will feed them and clothe them and bring them up to be God-fearing men and women. And every one of them shall have a "university education." She did these things, alone. Such ' neighborly help as she was forced to accept in the heavy field work she scrupulously repaid. For seventeen years she managed the farm and the household; she and her children hoed, cooked, scrubbed, saved, and prayed. At the end of that time each of her children had received the best of schooling, her two sons had graduated with honors from Iowa State University, and her daughter Huldah, after two years in a private school and one term in the university, was happily married to Jesse Hoover.^ The village remembered that autumn because it was the one in which the first threshing-machine appeared in that part of Iowa. It was a crude, stationary affair, whose wheels were driven by two horses walking slowly in an endless circle. But it was a marvel to the farmers, who had never seen anything like it. It had been shipped in sections from the East and no one was able to put it together until Jesse Hoover saw it. He studied its parts and, carefully assembled then., and the machine worked.

There was significance in the incident of the threshing-machine; it marked the passing of a period in American history. The frontier had gone ; agriculture was established ; the era of the machine had come. The Civil War was lately

1 Iowa City, March 12, 1870.

ended; manufacturing was securely enthroned in the North, and modern industry was well started on that course destined inevitably to lead to the growth of great cities and corporations, and tremendous concentration of wealth and power.

Four years later, in a small brown cottage near Jesse Hoover's blacksmith shop, Herbert Clark Hoover was bom.^ His life began at the end of one pioneer age and the beginning of another.

The spirit of five generations of American pioneers was his spirit; the blood of Andrew Hoover, of John Hoover, of Rebecca Yount, of William Minthorn and Mary Wesley was in his veins. Their lives had gone to the making of America; his life was to be part of the future.

A Letter from Herbert Hoover's Aunt

January 21, 1920.

Dear Daughter :

Thy letter received, and I will tell the things I know, for as thee says the story should be the truth. I well remember the day Herbert was born. I had spent a day with Huldah, visiting and sewing. Thee was with me, Jesse and Huldah always made much of thee, because thee represented the little girl they hoped soon to have.

Next morning early, Jesse came and tapped on my window and said, "Well, we have another General Grant at our house.- Huldah would like to see thee." So we went, thee and I.

2 U. S. Grant was then President of the United States.

They then lived in a little house by the blacksmith\ shop. It was a tiny house, but always so clean and neat, ^ for Huldah was a nice housekeeper and kept house nice, \ whether it was small or large. It was, however, the 1 kind of good housekeeping that does not destroy the family. Children always had a good time there. There was a hobby horse, and balls and tops, but there was a place for them when they were not in use. With Huldah, | things were always finished. I can see that bureau J drawer now, with ever^^hing ready for the coming event, all made by hand, for none of us had a sewing machine in those days.

Herbert was a sweet baby that first day, round and plump, and looked about very cordial at everybody. /

THE MAKING OF HERBERT HOOVER

Chapter I

HIS earliest impression was of sunshine, green leaves, and his mother's voice talking to God. This was in the sitting-room, after breakfast. He and his brother Tad climbed into chairs and sat with dangling legs while his father read in a solemn voice from the large black Bible. His mother held Sister May on her lap. Then they all knelt down on the rag carpet with their elbows on the chair seats, and after a little silence his mother began to speak.

He did not clearly understand what she said, but the sound of her voice was beautiful. He looked between his fingers and saw the morning sunshine on the row of plants in the window. It lay in a black-barred oblong on the floor. A corner of it reached across the folds of his mother's gray dress and touched her hair, and her hair shone. The room was very still. This stillness, the sunshine on the green leaves, and the low humming of the tea-kettle on the kitchen stove, seemed part of the

Presence to which his mother spoke. The Presence itself filled the room with a strange quiet friendliness.

He wriggled a little, but noiselessly, and looked severely to see if Sister May was keeping still. Then, with a little bustle of moving chairs, they all rose. His father put on his hat and coat to go to the store, and his mother began gathering up the breakfast dishes.

' ' Run and play, Bertie, ' ' she said. ' ' But do not get thy feet wet.'' She wrapped a muffler around his throat and buttoned his coat. Then she kissed him. Her hands were swift and firm, but gentle, and there was a smile in her eyes. He squirmed away quickly, because he was in a hurry to get outdoors with his sled.

The house stood in a big yard. In front of it was a row of six large maple-trees whose trunks made gray shadows on the snow. On the other side of the road not far away was the little brown house where he had lived when a baby, and beyond it smoke was curling up from the blacksmith shop that once had been his father's.

There was a sudden jangle of sleigh-bells, and Uncle John Minthom's sleigh flashed past, drawn by two plunging, steaming horses. The boy had an instant's vision of Dr. John, half standing, his weight on the taut reins in one hand, a whip m the other, his teeth showing in a smile. Then he was gone, in a flurry of snow. Dr. John^s horses were wild, half -broken things; he drove like the wind, and the sleigh was not one to which small boys could fasten their sleds.

Bertie dragged his sled along the path by the kitchen door, under the eaves fringed with icicles. A long one hung close to his mittened hand, but Mother had forbidden him to eat icicles. Behind the house was the garden, where the snow humped over buried potato-vines and lay in a drift beside the grape-arbor. The bare brown vines were coated with ice, and made a crackling sound when he kicked a post. The house was at the foot of Chamber *s Hill; tugging the sled, he trudged up the slope, his short legs plunging through the drifts.

The hill was alive with swooping sleds, with shouts, laughter, hoys rolling in the snow, little girls squealing with excitement. He was now in his own world, surrounded by innumerable cross currents of likes and dislikes, fears and admirations. George and Mamie Coombs were there; Ettie and Willie and Eddie Smith; Harriette, Blanche, and Theodore Miles, and many others. Among them he saw enemies and allies — the big boy who had rubbed his face with snow, Tad ^ his own big brother, who had valiantly defended him,

1 Theodore Jesse Hoover, three and a half years older than Herbert Hoover, now head of the mining department of Stanford University.

and the tattle-tale who had rushed home to tell about the fight. They shouted to him, he shouted back, and continued his way up the hill, imperturbable, self-contained, and serious. His purpose was to reach the top and slide do^\m without delay. He stopped, panting, at the summit. The long, hard-packed track wound below him, past Joseph Cook's leafless orchard, down the breathless drop by the Cottonwood trees, across the dangerous lane where teams might be met, and out on the curve that ended at the bridge. He drew up his sled to make the plunge, and paused. Willie Smith stood before him, holding the rope of a slim new sled, a sled striped with red paint, shining with varnish, elegantly formed and shod Avith steel runners.

-I got a new sled," said Willie. Bertie approached and looked at it thoughtfully.

*^My father made mine,'' he announced at last with satisfaction.

'^Mine 's got steel runners," said Willie.

'^It 's a good sled," said Bertie, and prepared

to slide.

'^You haven't got steel runners," Willie continued. .

^^No," said Bertie. ^^Mine are iron. My father used to be a blacksmith when I was little."

''Mine 's the best sled," Willie insisted. ''I 'U trade a ride."

**No/' said Bertie. ^^I like my sled.''

* ^ I would 11 't trade mine for two of it, ' ' said Willie.

' ^ There are n 't two of it, ' ' Bertie remarked. ^ ^ I got the only one like it in the world."

There was a pause. ^'What '11 you give me if I '11 trade!" asked Willie.

^^What does thee want to trade for! Thee has a good sled," said Bertie.

His mother, coming to the doorway at dinnertime, saw her small son in the distance, pulling a smaller cousin homeward on a bright new sled. She waited under the maples till the boy reached her.

^* Where did thee get the new sled, Bertie?"

'^I traded for it," said Bertie, smiling back at her. ^'Willie wanted to trade. Willie likes my old sled better. Oh, Mother, look, it 's got real steel runners!"

They went up the path together, and the friendliness of the house shut them all in once more. The house was like a small circle of security and warmth, to which one would always return. The beginning and end of all adventuring was there, in that sensation of serene well-being that one felt without thinking of it.

There was no place in that house where a child was not free to go and to be happy. On stormy afternoons what romps there were! Then the cousins would come to play, and there was racing up and down the stairs, and noise, and laughter, hide- 'n '-go-seek in the closets and behind Mother's skirts where she sat demurely sewing; rummaging in the cooky jar, and bringing up of whole pans of apples from the cellar, and popping of corn in the kitchen.

V The heart of it all was his mother. She was pthere as the sunshine was there, or the air, a part of his solid, unalterable world. He did not imagine any place or situation where she would not be. She was more than the mother who bathed and dressed and soothed him; she was the order, the serenity, and the goodness upon which life was built. And with her, like a radiance, like an emanation from her smile, from her slim hands, from the sheen on her brown hair and the freshness of her gowns, was Christ. v^^ (she told him of the Child in Bethlehem) she told hin(^of the Good Shepherd who maketh one to lie down in green pastures) who leadeth beside still waters; she told hinCof the Healer at whose touch the sick were made whole and the blind were given sight ; and she told him of the Sacrifice on Calvary^j These remained in his mind as characters moving ill that dim realm of the past, of the future, of all that existed beyond the circle of his life. With them were Elijah and the bears, Elisha and the ficrv chariot, Solomon, and David, and Noah. But there was another Christ, the One to whom his mother talked, the One who was part of her gentleness and of her service for every one. It was He who deepened her smile and made a light in her eyes. This, too, was a fact like the sunshine ; one did not think about it, one simply lived in it.

On First Days, bathed and immaculately dressed, he and Tad walked sedately to the meeting-house, where God was. They did not like to go there ; they would have preferred wearing their everyday clothes and playing in Uncle Laban's hay-scented barn, or out on the hillsides with their cousins. But that was the way the world was made ; on First Days one went with all the village to God's house.

The meeting-house stood by itself in large grounds. Beside it was the graveyard where Great-grandfather Jesse Hoover and Grandfather Theodore Minthorn lay; it was shivery and yet fascinating to think of that. Down the long tree-shaded street teams came slowly ; there was a quiet little eddy of people where the buggies stopped; uncles and aunts and cousins climbed out and waited while the horses were tied in the long sheds behind the meeting-house. There was Grandfather Eli, with Great-Uncle William and Uncle Benjamin Miles; there was Grandmother Minthorn, a figure like a sparrow in the gray bonnet and shawl, beside Uncle Penn. jAll the

"^ cousins from the country were there. What news there was to tell and to hear ! (But this was First Day; children should be seen and not heard. Silence must be kept like a lock on eager lips. Even grown-ups spoke little, in subdued tonesN

^'I am glad to see thee, Huldah.^' ^

^^How is thee, Mother!"

''God's goodness is about me always.''

His mother, holding Sister May by the hand, went with Grandmother through the women's door. But he was a man, and entered the dim stillness of the meeting-house through the men's door with Tad and their father. Quickly he climbed on a bench, and looking over the high partition he saw the rows of women's bonnets, bent forward a little, hiding their faces. He saw his mother quietly taking her place with the others, and before she should observe his head above the partition he slid down beside Tad, and could see her no longer.