Eminentoes/The Hidden Hoover
Brookhiser, Richard
EMINENTOES THE HIDDEN HOOVER by Richard Brookhiser He lived longer than any other President, except John Adams, and he still lives a ghostly existence today in the rhetoric of the Democratic...
...Alas, Nash concludes, the lover is apocryphal and the poem a hoax: "the style is quite unlike anything else that Hoover ever wrote...
...Their profession was thus superior to law, theology, or war, whose practitioners Hoover judged "parasitic" (also intellectuals: all he found in The Education of Henry Adams was "the puerilities of a parasite...
...He looks at us, over his high collars, from pictures fifty and seventy years old and two political generations removed, ambitious, confident, self-contained...
...Hoover Institution Press, $75.00 (set...
...Together, they bracket the period in their subject's *W.W...
...Engineering became his paradigm for useful busy-ness...
...Perhaps as a consequence, he had little use for foreign politics...
...Workers struck his Australian mines, rebels in China besieged him...
...Few of the many foreign countries he lived and worked in pleased him...
...Hoover's companies brought silver out of upper Burma, oil from the Black Sea, copper from a property in the Ural Mountains half the size of Connecticut...
...He never shone in school, but he struck teachers and employers alike as industrious and tenacious, and when Bewick, Moreing and Company, one of the largest mining firms in the world, went looking in the American west for a mining engineer to send to the Australian goldfields, Hoover, age 22, was recommended...
...We cannot become the world's policeman," he warned in 1939, "unless we are prepared to sacrifice millions of American lives- and probably some day see all the world against us.'' True enough...
...He was also said to have had a fling with an Australian barmaid, whom he memorialized in verse: Then you raised your tender glances darkly, dreamily to mine And my pulses clashed like cymbals in a rhapsody divine And I spent my soul in kisses, crushed upon your scarlet mouth, Oh...
...The offshore islands of Eurasia-Britain, Japan, Taiwanseemed to him to mark the limits of our defensible postwar interests...
...The Post-Presidential Years is mara-thoner's history, loping painfully from month to month and fact to fact...
...His youthful devotion to his line of work colored his mature politics...
...But we can always see the longeurs coming, while the compact episodes do convey what Chesterton called "the romance of the division of labor...
...Someone once asked his grandmother about the family tree...
...The big game of politics and public service engrossed him for the rest of his life, up to Black Friday, and beyond...
...Hoover persisted, sustained by a belief in the dignity of his profession, and lured by the prospect of gain: "if a man has not made a fortune by forty," he told a friend, "he is not worth much...
...The cool professional was no match for the demagogic squire...
...But it begs the question whether the world in fact needs policing...
...He includes everything, and for the years covered in The Engineer, everything includes large doses of corporate intrigue, sometimes technical, always complicated (one particularly involved maneuver goes on for 98 pages...
...Hoover thought not...
...When Walter Mondale, stumping through the hills of New Hampshire, or groveling before feminists, needs some Bureau of Weights and Measures-certified unit of failure by which to gauge Ronald Reagan, he reaches even now for the man who left the White House when Mondale was all of four years old...
...But as forty approached and his fortune got made, he began to yearn for something more-to "get into the big game somewhere...
...career which branded him on the public mind...
...and Gary Dean Best's two-volume Herbert Hoover: The Post-Presidential Years, which picks him up again in 1933...
...My red-lipped, sunbrowned sweetheart, dark-eyed daughter of the south...
...William Sloan Coffin would oppose troops in Texas if the Sandinistas asked for it...
...He abhorred Communism...
...George Nash has his sights on the definitive biography...
...A partner in London embezzled, ambitious mining projects failed...
...He thought Chamberlain's Foreign Office the only group of skillful diplomats in the world...
...Best aimed to survey Hoover's role in American politics...
...We do not see the Hoover everyone knows...
...Once embarked on that path, America would only end by hurting itself...
...What matter if we descended from the highest unless we are something ourselves...
...He was willing to help suffering and starving- people, but not their embroiled governments...
...Two Presidents asked for his advice on streamlining the federal government...
...while still campaigning...
...intelligent, conscientious, upright.elligent, conscientious, upright...
...He came out of West Branch, Iowa (pop.: 365), a town with no saloons and one Democrat, who was a drunk...
...When America ventured beyond, however, he rallied...
...Herbert Hoover's afterlife has been a long purgatory imposed for having coincided with the Great Depression...
...America turned left, away from him, and in turning right, it has not quite turned back...
...Get busy...
...He believed, as the thirties passed and darkened, that Hitler had no intention of attacking Britain and France...
...It was not all accomplished without trouble...
...Yet he had already had a twenty-year career in the mining business, with experience at every level from ore-cart pusher to chairman of the board...
...Reading it for long stretches is about as exciting as watching a cash register...
...Most lose their portion in it long before they die biologically...
...Begone with thee," she answered...
...Bewick, Moreing was Hoover's ladder to the top...
...On the fourth try and the verge of bankruptcy, the company hit on a successful method, and flourished...
...He missed...
...None of these books is easy going...
...Nash's The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Engineer,* which takes him as far as 1914...
...So long as there was a consensus that what he knew for sure was so, the introverted engineer could manage politics as well as he fed millions, or ran mines on six continents...
...This is all the immortality that politics gives: not life in the history books, which everyone enters and nobody reads, but life on the hustings -as a hero, a bogey, a byword...
...at the center lurked corporate sharks...
...I have opposed many of our foreign policies,'' he said on the outbreak of the Korean War, "but now is not the time to argue...
...Later acquaintances testified that he had no small talk...
...He put together the Zinc Corporation in the hope of extracting useful ore from mine waste...
...He supported Taft publicly in the battle for the 1952 nomination, and drafted a letter-never sent- endorsing Goldwater in the California primary...
...Yet he was skeptical of committing American troops to NATO or American cash to the Marshall Plan...
...When economic and international upheavals shook that consensus, he was unable to crystallize it anew...
...Engineers made the world work, and work efficiently...
...Norton & Co., $25.00...
...He was raised a Quaker, which seems never to have had much of a formal hold on him, but the real message of midwestern Protestantism-hard work and heavy lifting- stuck with him all his days...
...He was shy from childhood (Nash cites Quaker reticence, an early orphaning, a hard-handed uncle...
...At the margins of civilization, there was brigandage, disorder, corruption...
...EMINENTOES THE HIDDEN HOOVER by Richard Brookhiser He lived longer than any other President, except John Adams, and he still lives a ghostly existence today in the rhetoric of the Democratic party...
...Few politicians achieve it...
...or that, if he did, Britain would be able to fend him off...
...He avoided eye contact, fidgeted with coins in his pocket...
...Mr...
...Along the way, he produced a scholarly translation of a sixteenth-century Latin mining treatise...
...He left Bewick, Moreing half a million dollars richer, and set up on his own as an engineer-financier in London...
...Hoover first came to public attention in 1914 with his relief work in war-wracked Belgium...
...He ran gold mines in western Australia, and coal mines in northern China...
...It isn't what he doesn't know that worries me," he quotes Will Rogers, "it's what he knows for sure that isn't so...
...He coveted a second shot at Roosevelt in 1936, and tried to stampede the Republican convention of 1940 (his stemwinding oration went unheard when Willkie operatives cut the mike...
...Maybe instead we get the Hoover that actually was...
...China was sunk in superstition and graft, England's class system disgusted him (one Englishwoman, on learning what he did for a living- that he did anything for a living?- exclaimed, "I thought you were a gentleman...
...Though he was a lifelong critic of managed economies and the welfare state, he defended capitalism not as a consequence of any theory of natural right, but because it made men get up and go...
...two Congresses gelded his recommendations, to our cost...
...So much for the relative patriotism of yesterday's Right and today's Left...
...some lose it (Mondale...
...When the United States draws the sword, there is only one course for our people: that is to win...
...Two recent works about Hoover skirt the disaster: George H. Richard Brookhiser is Senior Editor at National Review...
Vol. 16 • November 1983 • No. 11
