Hoover At 150

Bill Whalen: It's Monday, July 29, 2024, and welcome back to matters to policy and politics, a Hoover Institution podcast devoted to governance and balance of power here in America and around the world. I'm Bill Whalen, I'm the Hoover Institution's Virginia hubs carpenter distinguished policy fellow in journalism. I'm not the only Hoover fellow who's podcasting these days.

If you don't believe me, go to the Hoover website, which is hoover.org click on the tab at the top of the homepage it says commentary. Head over to where it says multimedia, and under audio podcast you will find a dozen plus plus this one at the very top of the list.

That's because I endeavor to get very interesting people on this podcast, today being no exception. Now we're doing something different with today's show. Rather than delve into current events, we're going to focus on one historical figure. And that would be Herbert Hoover, 31st president of the United States, geologist, engineer, and public servant, institution builder, political philosopher, crusader against collectivism.

And, of course, the founder of the Hoover Institution here on the campus of his alma mater, Stanford University. Herbert Hoover and his wife, Lou Henry Hoover, members of Stanford's classes of 1895 and 1898. Saturday, August 10th, is Herbert Hoover's 150th birthday. He was born on that day in 1874 in a two room cottage in West Branch, Iowa.

That town also the locale for the Hoover Presidential library, museum, as well as president misses Hoover's resting place. A lot of ground to cover when one discusses Herbert Hoover. And joining us to do so is George Nash, historian, lecturer, and authority on the life of President Hoover. His publications include three volumes of scholarly biography on Hoover, including the monography Herbert Hoover and Stanford University.

George, welcome to the podcast.

George Nash: Thank you, it's good to be with you.

Bill Whalen: So August 10th, the day of the sesquicentennial, I better get that pass me right now. The sesquicentennial, that is a very fancy term for turning 150. You'll be in West Branch, Iowa, George, how is the day gonna be celebrated there?

George Nash: It will be celebrated with two conferences, one with descendants of Herbert Hoover, Margaret Hoover, who has the show firing line, and her cousin Alan, and another cousin Leslie. And the first hour or so of the proceedings will be devoted to their understanding and appreciation for their great grandfather.

The second session will be with myself and Kenneth White, the author of a single volume biography of Herbert Hoover about seven or eight years ago. And with Tom Schwartz, the director of the Hoover Library, presiding over that panel, and I imagine the other one as well. There will be a luncheon.

There may be other celebratory aspects that I'm not yet aware of, but the academic part of it, so to speak, will be a conference that we have just learned will be recorded by C Spaniel. So that will be available in due course after the event occurs.

Bill Whalen: And what do you plan to discuss in your part of the conference George?

George Nash: Well, initially I thought I would be asked to give a lecture, but it is going to be a format involving Tom Schwartz and Kenneth White and myself conversing about Herbert Hoover, his life story, why he is historically significant? What we learned about him as biographers, what we perceive to be his strengths and weaknesses, and evaluate them all around?

And in particular, I think, point out the extraordinary significance of his life and the propriety of celebrating it as they will be doing at his birthplace in West Branch, Iowa.

Bill Whalen: What is it about Herbert Hoover, George, that piqued your curiosity? Biographers tend to gravitate toward the more glamorous presidents.

They want to write about Reagan and Kennedy and FDR and Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, but here you are writing about Herbert Hoover.

George Nash: Well, that's a question I'll be asked in a couple of weeks by the folks in West Branch, but I will be happy to share with you.

The very short answer is that I was invited to write a biography of Herbert Hoover, but I need to elaborate on that. In 1975, I was recently out of Harvard Graduate School with a PhD in history, I was on the academic job market. I was about to publish my first book, my doctoral Dissertation, which became my first book called the Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945.

And I was approached by someone in behalf of the Hoover Presidential Library foundation, as it is called today. The foundation, as it turns out, was looking for someone who was not already locked into perhaps an academic career and an academic calendar to undertake a scholarly biography of Herbert Hoover in the wake of the centennial of Hoover's birth.

Which was celebrated the year before, when I think everyone became aware at that time out there that there was no really a substantial amount of scholarship on Hoover's life. So it was not that I had been a boyhood fan of Herbert Hoover and longed for years to write a biography of him.

I knew something about him through my historical studies as a graduate student and so forth. But it occurred to me, as I looked into the possibility, I was asked to explore it with this foundation. And it occurred to me that Herbert Hoover would be a logical next stage of my career to focus on.

In this sense, he was a friend of many of the people about whom I had written in the book about to be published. He was a friend of William F Buckley. He met Friedrich Hayek, he knew Russell Kirk. In other words, he was a kind of grandfather figure in the 1950s and early 60s before his death in 1964, a kind of a patron of and a patron saint of the emerging conservative movement in the United States.

So I thought, well, I just looked at the intellectuals. It would be appropriate to look at Herbert Hoover. And then I needed to ascertain that what I was being asked to consider was a scholarly piece of work. I had just gotten my PhD, and I wanted to be sure that the foundation, which I did not know about, and they had not yet met me.

I wanted to be sure that they were indeed searching for an appropriate level of scholarly investigation of Hoover. And to make this longer story short, I went out to West Branch. I was living in Massachusetts, as I am today, as we recorded this, living again in Massachusetts. I went out to Iowa, was interviewed.

I went to the Hoover institution, and spent some days there, met Glenn Campbell, the director of the Hoover institution at the time. Because it was going to be obvious that any proper biography of Hoover would have to draw upon the resources of both places, the Hoover Institution and the Hoover library in Iowa.

So we worked out a contract which provided me freedom of interpretation. I was not being instructed to interpret Hoover in a certain way. I was assured, and they indeed followed up on that, that I would be commissioned really to be a biographer in a scholarly way of Hoover.

So the more I learned about him in the course of being interviewed and exploring and meeting people with whom I would have many contacts in the years ahead. The more I realized that he was an understudied and underappreciated president with a far more diverse set of life experiences than simply the four years that he occupied in the White House.

So, like most people, I think, when mentions the word Herbert, words, Herbert Hoover, the first thing that people would think about. And which I probably did at that time, was he was president when the stock market crashed and he was president during the ensuing Great Depression. But when I became a little more aware of him, I realized that here was a man who lived 90 years, including 50 in the public eye and public service in one form or another, from World War 119 14 until his death in 1964.

And in that sense, in sheer scope and duration, it was a career without precedent, parallel, really, in American history. You can find other people who had long lives and did things, but not in the sheer. Diversity of ways that Hoover did, so he became a truly interesting figure.

So to sum up, I realized that he was a figure not only of historical importance but of considerable interest. And it was a very broadening experience to me as a young scholar to undertake a biography of someone of that nature. So that is as brief an answer as I guess I can give to that question because it's an unusual answer.

It was not something I had longed to do, it was something I was asked to do and then decided that I wanted to do.

Bill Whalen: You are introduced to Herbert Hoover in 1974, as you mentioned, that's 10 years after its passing. By the way, George, interesting historical twist, Herbert Hoover died the day that Kamala Harris was born.

George Nash: Is that so?

Bill Whalen: October 20th, 1964.

George Nash: October 20th, 64, yes.

Bill Whalen: Go figure, but why would it take a decade to turn to Hoover? Is this simply a fact that the period from 64 to 74 is kind of tumultuous and maybe conservatives are occupied with the Goldwater campaign, the rise of Reagan in California and just the whole social drift of America?

Or I'm just curious as to why Hoover doesn't get any treatment for at least 10 years.

George Nash: Well, he did get some journalistic biography treatment and he had his defenders. But the scholarly approach to Hoover did not really take hold, and there was one practical reason for that.

His papers did not become available until about 1966, two years after his death. He dedicated his presidential library with Harry Truman present at his side in West Branch in 1962. And he, of course, gave a substantial part of his papers, including relief work files, to the Hoover institution.

So it was really only after Hoover's death that it became possible, for those practical reasons, for historians to delve into the archives, as it were. And I think that was one reason that interest in him did not take off until that point.

Bill Whalen: Okay, George, let's cover some of the basics of Herbert Hoover, if you will.

Let's start with West Branch, Iowa, and I found a quote of Hoover's here. He said, quote, my grandparents and my parents came here in a covered wagon, in this community, they toiled and worshiped God. The most formative years of my boyhood were spent here, my roots are in the soil.

George Nash: Yes, he was the son of the village blacksmith, very modest circumstances in life. This is a little village of a few hundred people at that time, about 50 or 60 miles west of the Mississippi river. It was not too far from the frontier side, it was essentially a Quaker settlement, his parents were Quakers.

He was one of three children, the middle one an older brother, a younger sister. But before he was ten, both of his parents had died, and Hoover went to live with a paternal uncle for a time in Iowa. And then when he was about 11 years old, he was sent by train by himself all the way to Oregon to be brought up by his mother's brother.

Who was a Quaker doctor and also superintendent, just becoming superintendent of a Quaker academy in Newburgh, Oregon. So it was thought in the family circles that this would be a good place for the boy to have a substantial upbringing with his uncle John Minthorn and all of that.

And so Hoover went from Iowa and from there, at the age of not quite 17, he took exams and got some tutoring and entered the first four year class at Stanford University, the pioneer class, class of 1895. He became a geology major, decided upon a career as a mining engineer, spent a little time doing that in California.

After his graduation, was recommended for a job in Australia for a British mining engineering firm. So before he was 23, he was out in Australia, did very well for himself, quite quickly finding a mining proposition that was clearly going to be substantial, recommended its purchase. It went on to become one of the greatest mines in Australian gold mining history.

And there was Hoover rewarded for that by being made superintendent of the mine when he was about 23, 24 years old. Then, in 1898, he was offered a job with the same firm, going to work for a leader of two Chinese provinces who was interested in mining exploration and wanted a western as a technical advisor.

So Hoover came back first to California briefly to marry his college sweetheart, Lou Henry. And together they got married in February of 1899 and went on their honeymoon all the way to China, where they then lived for the next two years. Survived the Boxer rebellion, I mean, really survived it, they were under fire in the foreign settlement of the city of Tianjin, as we would now call it, about 60 miles from Beijing.

In 1901, Hoover left there, becoming a partner of the firm that had hired him, sight unseen, just four years earlier, and was based thereafter in London, primarily first with that firm and then on his own until World War I. He came back and forth to the United States many times, considered himself always an American, but he had to live in London as the base of mining finance in the world at that time.

So that sets him up in his, what I would call his first career, actually the subject of the first volume of my series, Hoover the engineer. So by the time he was 40, he, this impecunious lad who had to work his way through Stanford, was a millionaire. And he said once that someone who hasn't made a fortune by the time he's 40 isn't worth much.

Well, by the time he is 40, he was worth a million dollars. In 1914, money wasn't a fabulous fortune, but certainly a substantial one, if he had cashed in all his shares in companies, all that sort of thing. But he also felt by 1914 that just making money isn't enough, and that's a quote from him.

And he looked around for a way to, having done well for himself, he could do good. And partly, as the Stanford ethos that he grew up in at Stanford, that one should serve humanity, if you will, that brought him to this midlife change of direction. And it might interest your listeners that he was contemplating in 1914 buying a newspaper in California, the Sacramento Union.

That did not happen because World War I broke out and Hoover was in London, and that would lead to the next phase, and I'll stop in a second at this point. But he wanted to become a kind of public figure with public influence in a benevolent way. I think he thought he could be a better version of William Randolph Hearst, who had a whole string of California based newspapers and elsewhere.

And Hoover saw his Entrez into public life as being a kind of an owner of newspapers, well, his life trajectory took a very different turn at about that time.

Bill Whalen: George, back in the 1980s, when the ARA presidential caucuses were in their full throttle, there was a group called STAR Pac.

I don't know if you've heard of them or not, but STAR Pac, STAR stood for stop the arms race. And STAR Pac had a red fire engine, George, and they would drive around to rallies and basically try to encourage democratic presidential candidates to call for a nuclear freeze and the arms race.

And I was a journalist at the time, George, and I went up and I talked to one of the people driving this fire truck on Iowa, and I said, what are you doing? And he said, words the effect of, look, Iowans wanna feed the world, they don't wanna blow it up.

Now, as we look at Herbert Hoover, this strikes me, I wonder if you see this parallel in Hoover, because so much of his life is devoted to humanitarian terms. He's not trying to start wars, he is trying to clean up in the aftermath of wars.

George Nash: Yes, well, that was really the second career that he undertook.

Took in 1914, he was in London when the war broke out. As a leading American resident of London, he quickly helped to set up an organization that helped about 100,000 Americans fleeing the continent, getting out of the way of the war that began the guns of August and so forth.

The German invasion of Belgium and the like. And he did so well at that that the American ambassador to Great Britain turned to Hoover for assistance in what became his first great humanitarian mission. And that was to bring in food through the British blockade and behind the German lines, into the German-occupied land of Belgium and eventually also German-occupied territory in northern France.

That was thought to be a rather temporary emergency undertaking, but as we know, the war quickly bogged down in the trenches. And that commission for relief in Belgium, which Hoover founded with several associates, went on to provide assistance, food assistance, to over 9 million people in Belgium and northern France during the rest of the war.

By the time it was all over, they had spent nearly a billion dollars, much of it coming from public funds, really, the British and the French and then ultimately the United States after we entered the war. But also from private philanthropic support, especially in the early phases. It was something without precedent in the history of the world, this feeding of an entire nation under enemy occupation in the middle of a great war.

Well, that gave Hoover an international reputation as a humanitarian, and that really was the launching pad for much else that came. And he devoted himself, he was a Quaker, nominally, I don't know that Quakerism was the central motivator in all of this, historians disagree about how to balance out the influences on him somewhat.

But he certainly saw himself as doing a wonderful work for peace. He became known around the end of the war, in some circles, as the Napoleon of mercy, the master of emergencies. And about ten years later, someone coined the term for him, the great humanitarian. Well, after he did Belgium, he came back to the United States, actually, while the war was still on, ran the Food Administration, a federal agency, temporary agency under President Wilson.

Who then sent Hoover back to Europe after the armistice to organize food relief operations in more than 20 countries, in Europe, which was descending into chaos, possible starvation, communist revolution and the like. And he ran something called the American Relief Administration, which fed again tens of millions of people.

So his great career as a humanitarian brought him eventually, after the war was over and the post war cleanup was over, brought him back to the United States, where he became secretary of commerce under President Harding and then Coolidge. And then Hoover went for the presidency successfully, without ever having held an elective public office.

So the presidency then, in effect is about his third or fourth career. You had the engineer, the humanitarian, then the secretary of commerce, where it was said he was under secretary of every other department, such was his energy and influence. And then finally the presidency, and then after that, the post presidency, which was quite a period of significance in its own way.

So that's one reason that Hoover has held my attention. To get back to your earlier question, one career after another, each one of which was quite striking.

Bill Whalen: How did Hoover Square famine relief with the Soviet Union? Because here you have a genuine humanitarian crisis, but a bad regime.

George Nash: Yes, there was an attempt made in 1919, when the war was just over, to try to stop the Russian Civil War in progress and bring about food relief that was already then needed. But Lenin and the communists were happy enough to think about getting the relief, but they didn't wanna stop fighting.

And that enterprise never really transpired. But in 1921, when Hoover was secretary of commerce, Maxim Gorky, famous Russian writer, appealed to the world for outside assistance for what was turning into the greatest famine in Europe since the Middle Ages. Mostly in the Volga river region and somewhat in Ukraine as well, in Russia.

And Hoover responded because he had just fed millions of people in many countries, he had a worldwide reputation as a humanitarian administrator and so on. And he still had in place the private successor organization to the relief organization that he had had in 1919 and 1920, the ARA, American Relief Administration.

So Hoover insisted, if this were to be done as a humanitarian project, that the communists must not seize the food or try to harm the Russians, who would be distributing it in food kitchens all over the place in Russia. And he also insisted that any many Americans being held illegally in Soviet prisons must be released.

And more of them were released than, I guess, our government knew were there. Hoover saw this as a matter of transcendent humanitarian goodness to do, but I think he had certain hopes for it that transcended or moved beyond the strictly humanitarian aspect. And Lenin hated Hooper, and yet he was dependent on outside assistance because the fear that Lenin and the communists had was, if the workers in the city don't get the food that they need, they'll rebel.

They didn't care so much about the peasants who are starving in the countryside, but they wanted to be sure that they could hang on to power. Hoover, I think, hoped that the demonstration of American goodwill would be so overpowering that it would lead the Russians to, in a sense, demand reforms.

And at the time this happened, there was this image of revolution that many people in the West had, that you go through an initial violent phase, and then the regime kind of settles down and moderates. So there was some hope that the Soviets would do the same and maybe this kind of demonstration project would not arm anybody, Hoover wasn't smuggling in arms.

The communists later claimed it was all bourgeois spies, but that was nonsense. And therefore he saw this as a way of helping the people who needed help. And by the way, it was 10 million people a day who were being fed by the Hoover relief. It was a massive undertaking from 1921 to 1923.

But he also thought that it would be a way of demonstrating the sheer folly of socialism or what was called war communism at the time. So he thought there might be some benefits for it over time. So in that sense, there's a political motive in the back of his head.

But I must emphasize here that like Wilson, Woodrow Wilson and many others, there was no conflict between saying you're anti communist and you're also humanitarian. To them, the humanitarian work was an appropriate outgrowth of anti-communism. And they saw that this was doing good for an oppressed population. Now, some people have suggested later on, George Kennan, the famous historian and diplomat among them, that this operation might have helped to stabilize the Soviet Union.

Ironically and inadvertently, there certainly was not Hoover's intent. We'll never know for sure, but I tend to think that starving peasants in the Volga would not have been Able to stage a successful revolution very well, that this was not likely to dislodge the regime or solidify the regime either way.

But Hugh Hoover did it, I don't think he regretted it, and he certainly did not tone down his fervent anti communism then and later. But it's interesting, as you allude, that he has both the anti-communist drive in him and the humanitarian drive. But in his case, he thought there was no necessary contradiction, and that there might be some ultimate gain by doing what was done.

Bill Whalen: Mister Hoover is busy at this time of his life, George, he has his eye on matters in Europe. But two years before 1921 and 1919, he turns his attention back to Palo Alto and his alma mater at Stanford. And he creates the Hoover Institution, formerly the Hoover institution, on war, revolution and peace.

Explain why Hoover did it.

George Nash: Hoover was an engineer, and we don't usually think of engineers as reading history a lot or being historically conscious. But one of the things that happened to Hoover in this career that was considerably outside the United States as a mining engineer was that he saw other countries and as he put it, history became a reality and America a contrast.

And he said he read thousands of books in the period that he was circling the globe five times before World War I as a mining engineer, and that's when there were no airplanes, of course, it was all on ships at sea. And in my research, by the way, I discovered, I found a document in which he had calculated how many weeks he had spent on ships at sea.

It was something like 102 weeks or effectively two years of his life on ships at sea. During that time, he did a lot of reading, he called it a re-education of himself. He had a rather technically oriented geology undergraduate degree, but he was fascinated by other cultures and other social structures.

And he saw America as so much more dynamic and an open society, a fluid society, more driven by the ideal of equality, of opportunity than he could have seen in Europe. So he had that historical consciousness to an unusual degree. And then, the anecdote is perhaps familiar to you and some of your listeners.

Hoover was on a ship going across the English Channel to Belgium early in the relief work in 1914 or early 15, and he read the autobiography of Andrew D, White, a historian who had become president of Cornell in the 19th century. And White had said that in working on the French Revolution, he had found very helpful, what he called fugitive documents that are not the kinds you necessarily find in archives.

And Hoover says, that gave him the idea that he was in a position crossing borders, going into Germany, France, Belgium, and so on. That he was in a position perhaps to collect, or at least prepare to collect documents on the great revolution, if you will, the great war that was occurring all around him.

Well, in 1919, in the month of April, he's ensconced in Paris handling this utterly massive relief operation, bringing in literally, I think, about 4 million tons of food in about a year to countries across Europe. He's thinking about all of that, but he sends a telegram to his wife and says, well, if you can arrange it to send over Prof. Adams of the history department or somebody who's a friend of his.

And I can find $50,000 for collection of materials on war. And nobody quite knew what he was talking about. So they asked for, do you mean just the Belgian relief files? Because Prof. Adams wanted Hoover to give those to Stanford, so Adams knew about that. And Hoover writes back, note on the war generally.

So he saw himself as in a position to his financial resources to have people like Prof. Adams and others who came over collect not so much the military records. But the records on social conditions, posters, newspapers, material that might easily get lost. And that became kind of the core of this war collection, as it was initially called.

And as time went by, he expanded its scope to include the post-war period and then 20th century ideologies, communism in particular. And to this day, I think I'm correct in saying the Hoover Institution is the greatest repository outside of Russia of documentation dealing with communism in the history of world communism in the 20th century.

So Hoover was, I think, for someone of his background, remarkably sensitive to historical issues and the historical significance of what was happening around him. And that was, I think, a prime motivation for his founding this archive library that evolved eventually into a think tank, even. And today, I am told it has over 6,000 archival collections.

And that's only a part, of course, what the Hoover Institution does as a think tank. But it has just amazing resources on its grand theme of war, revolution, and peace, essentially 20th century and now even into the 21st. So I think those were Hoover's motives. And during that time, those ensuing years, he was very closely monitoring things, providing extra money for it out of his own pocket, and finding resources from friends of his.

And when World War II came, he had people collecting for that period, and it became almost a global operation for him. And he saw great significance to this institution, I must emphasize, he said, late in his life, he said, this is probably my greatest contribution to American life because he thought that one could learn from history.

Here are the records that can show us human folly and the better side of human nature, too, and he therefore use his own files as a core, but it expanded well beyond that. And he spoke on many occasions about the importance of what the Hoover Institution had and has for understanding modern times.

I think it really was one of the great achievements of this man.

Bill Whalen: George, August is my anniversary at the Hoover Institution, 25 years I've been there now. And I will confess, when I first came there, 1999, I didn't know much about President Hoover outside of the things that you mentioned, the depression, the market crash, Hoover flags, Hoover blankets, and so forth.

So I've taken the opportunity over the years to read about him, and fortunately, Herbert Hoover has left us a lot of bodies of work to study. I've read American individualism, I've read his book, the Challenge of Liberty. George, could you sort of briefly explain Hoover's core political philosophy?

George Nash: Yes, he developed at first in a systematic way in a little book that you just mentioned, American Individualism, published in 1922. That was really an outgrowth of all that he had witnessed, this world in ferment, the war, the aftermath, the communist uprisings and revolutions in Hungary and parts of Germany and so on.

Dealing with Lenin and the communists that was ongoing, as he wrote. And he felt that America was vulnerable to the intrusion from this cauldron in Europe, an intrusion over here of various social diseases, as he called them, that is to say, ideologies. We would say social philosophies, was his term, fascism, communism, socialism.

And he felt that they were bankrupt. And in contrast, he saw American society as based philosophically on the concept of equality, of opportunity. He said America was based on, and he says, somewhere, the negation of class. He had lived and worked in, Class dominated, rigid societies in Europe had seen what he called the squalor of Asia and oligarchies and tyrannies and so on.

And he thought America was different. And in fact, he even said at that point in time, around 1919, 1920, that he thought America as a civilization had moved 300 years apart from Europe. He had seen Europe in its way, at its worst. He admired European culture, but the European political situation, system and so on was something else.

So he developed this argument that American individualism is not sheer Laissez Faire. It is not certainly collectivism, but it is American individualism, by which he meant a kind of regulated individualism, but with government as umpire, not as tyrannizer over the private sector. And he said, government management of business enterprise is communism, socialism, whereas government direction of that is fascism.

And he argued that he believed in properly regulated individualism, mildly regulated, with government as empire and not as director in chief. And he thought that that was a very false direction to go. So he spelled that out in this little book called American individualism. And then he refined that, expanded on it in 1934, after he was left the White House.

In the book, the challenge to Liberty, which was somewhat more polemical in tone because by then fascism was in power in places. Communism was certainly there. And he saw the New Deal as being unfortunately susceptible to some of these. What he regarded as authoritarian tendencies, he called the New Deal.

His term for it in that latter book was regimentation, and he fought against that and became what he called, as he described himself eventually, as a crusader against collectivism. With historic liberalism now becoming his preferred term of describing his own philosophy, historic liberalism, as opposed to statist liberalism a la New Deal.

And historic liberalism is, in a sense, American individualism, but it's a later coinage that he chose.

Bill Whalen: George, you very nicely walked us through the first 50 years of Herbert Hoover. I think we should skip through the next ten. Let's go past the Washington years. Let's go past the presidency.

That's a separate podcast in itself. And let's focus on the last 30 years of his life, 34 to 1964, in particular, his crusade against collectivism. What was that, the crusade against collectivism?

George Nash: Well, Hoover left office in 1933, a repudiated figure. He's probably vilified more than any other person living at the time, seen as a.

Not only as a failure as president, but as uncaring. And these are stereotypes that are not accurate. And that's maybe a separate discussion. But he stayed quiet for a year or so. But then he said his conscience couldn't allow him to stay quiet forever. And out came the challenge to liberty in 1934, that book, which became a kind of manifesto for Hoover's return to the public arena.

And he then quickly became a fierce critic of the tendencies of the New Deal. He became a, the crusader, as I say, against collectivism and really, in a way, the intellectual leader of the Republican Party. And he regarded these stakes as that high. So in many ways, he seeking now first vindication of his own record as president.

So he spent a good deal of time in those ensuing years writing his three volumes of memoirs and other works, defending his historical record as president. But also he wanted to vindicate what he saw as the American system of ordered liberty, as opposed to the statist collectivist alternatives, which he regarded as truly frightening.

And in that way, he crisscrossed the country in the mid and late thirties as a very vocal critic of FDR. I think that Hoover. I don't think I shouldn't say, I think, I believe I should say that it is a fact that in 1940, Hoover covertly wanted the republican presidential nomination.

There are many in indications of that from diaries of his associates and documents like that. He wouldn't admit it publicly, but he wanted to have a vindication again at the polls, if possible. He decided to write a stem winder of a speech, but somehow, mysteriously, to be delivered at the convention, which he did in 1940.

But somehow the public address system didn't work, and he suspected with some reason that it had been tinkered with by people on the, in the Willkie camp. At any rate, Wendell Willkie came out of the woodwork to become the new crusader, if you will, against FDR. And Hoover lost what he saw as his last opportunity at his age to run again that way.

So he chose then in the remaining years, through many projects, to develop his critique of statism and attempt to turn America in a better direction. So I would argue that he really became, some people have said that he kind of led us into the New Deal by certain measures taken.

Again, that might be a separate discussion, but I would also argue that he became a leading personality in containing the collectivist tendencies of the New Deal and in reviving this kind of anti statist viewpoint. And I'm just looking now, yes, I have it right here behind, in front of me here.

It's just a line he says in 1937, the New Deal having the label of liberalism for collectivism, coercion and concentration of political power. It seems historic liberalism must be conservatism in contrast. And I think it was at that point that he realized that he was a man of the right.

He had been a progressive Republican early on, a Teddy Roosevelt supporter, Bull Moose Republican in 1912. Thought of as being a little more to the left of Coolidge in the 1920s, but certainly not to the left of FDR, but to the right of FDR. So he thought he was outflanked on his left.

And he became a defender of historic liberalism in all sorts of ways, including, for example, helping William Buckley a bit in setting up Buckley's conservative National Review magazine in 1955. And Hoover was very much a Robert Taft supporter in 1952 against Eisenhower. Most people may not know that Robert Taft worked for Herbert Hoover in World War I as an attorney and so forth in the food administration.

And I think that Taft, along with Admiral Louis Strauss, who had been Hoover's secretary from 1917 to about 1919, those two really held Hoover up in regard as almost a surrogate father. So Hoover had all sorts of causes that he wanted to promote, including the two Hoover commissions that we should mention in this later period, the commissions for reorganizing the federal government.

The first was set up by Congress, and Truman appointed him. It was during the Truman administration, 1947 to 1949. And Hoover was forced, because Dewey didn't win that election, to become maybe a little more technocratic and nonpartisan in the outcome of that commission, the reports. So it kind of devolved into a way of advocating streamlining of the federal bureaucracy that had grown so much during the New Deal and during the Second World War and much of its.

Relatively uncontroversial recommendations were implemented. Then in 53 to 55, under Eisenhower, Hoover has a second Hoover commission, that Congress sets that up and asked him to run it, now, he's about 80 years old and going full steam into this. And he had a some what more ideological drive to that latter commission, particularly he was trying to reduce the sphere of public regulation in the power industry and elsewhere.

So it was, in a way, a little more of a conservative thrust to it had than the earlier Hoover commission. But these were part of his scheme of a multitude of activities. And then finally, in the late 50's, he started writing more memoirs about not only his own life, but about the relief work that he regarded as, I think, the pinnacle of his career other than his presidency.

So between the ages of 85 and 90, Bill, he published seven books. Four of them were called an American epic, it was his study or a story of American humanitarian work in the 20th century, not only his own, but heavily his own, but he gave credit to many other enterprises.

He published a little book on his letters to children and he kept doing all through his ex presidency, eight volumes of his collected addresses upon the American road, which gives you a quick indication of how active he was. He just did not slow down. And his secretaries, I was able to interview a couple of his secretaries who were his secretaries in his last years, and they said he was just a marvel, we might say a workaholic, but in a good way.

For him, work was his life and his pleasure, except for fishing, fly fishing is one of his great hobbies.

Bill Whalen: And I wanna get to that in a minute. We are starting to get short on time here George, so I'm gonna do something bad this historians probably don't care for, but by my count, Hoover would have had brushes with seven presidents over the course of 50 years.

So put yourself into Herbert Hoover's head, George, and just briefly tell me what he would have said about the following presidents, Woodrow Wilson.

George Nash: Woodrow Wilson, he admired, he didn't agree with entirely, and I think his disagreements became more notable later on. But Wilson brought Hoover into public life in the us government, as one of Wilson's inner circle, as us food administrator.

And I think he always admired Wilson's idealism, I've written a paper I've never published called the founding friendship, which I think was that important to Hoover as he made his way into public life. Harding appointed Hoover secretary of commerce in 1920. By then, Hoover was clearly established as a Republican in affiliation and all, and it even sort of run for president in 1920, Harding called him the smartest gink I know.

And that's a quotation, yeah, gink. And Hoover saw Harding as a benevolent person, but he had some reservations. His relationship with Coolidge started off very well, but it became complicated, and I think he got on Coolidge's nerves and was a little more of a big spending engineering activist than Coolidge the conservative really liked.

That's a long story, I've written a long article about it, actually, but Coolidge, although they had their disagreements behind the scenes, nevertheless, publicly and faithfully supported Hoover in 1928 and in 1932. So I think we can overstate this distancing that the two felt from each other, on a day when party loyalty meant a lot and Coolidge felt his duty as ex president was to support the nominee of the party.

And spoke glowingly about Hoover, even though I know that Coolidge at times felt rather annoyed by what he saw as Hoover's excessive involvement in other departments. Various cabinet agencies sometimes thought Hoover was encroaching on their turf.

Bill Whalen: And now, the complicated one, Franklin Roosevelt. You're working on a book on this, I believe.

George Nash: I am, I'm working toward completion of it, it was a friendship initially, in World War one and its immediate aftermath, the most interesting thing one might say about that phase was just this. Roosevelt wanted Hoover to run for president in 1920 as a Democrat. And he gave permission to Justice Brandeis nephew, who was a kind of a party activist, to go around the Democratic Party and talk up the Hoover ticket with Roosevelt, his running mate.

They remained friendly, but not intimately friendly. And then, of course, their careers clashed, their ambitions clashed, in that Roosevelt, who did not intentionally plan to do it this way. But when the depression set in and Roosevelt could see that Hoover was fading in popularity, he challenged Hoover and course won, and they never reconciled.

And then after the war, Hoover became pretty good friends with Truman, felt very indebted to Truman for giving him. Hoover, a constructive public role again through the Hoover commission and in other ways after Hoover had pretty much been shut out by FDR. And then Eisenhower recognized Hoover, too.

And Hoover even had a friendship with John Kennedy, mostly through John Kennedy's father, the former ambassador Joseph Kennedy, who served on, I think, one or both of the Hoover commissions. And he and Hoover saw eye to eye in a lot of things. So Hoover had a remarkable array of friendships, not just including those presidents you mentioned, but it's quite an interesting angle on his life.

Bill Whalen: It is indeed. There's so much more we can get into, George, but I'm gonna start to wind down this conversation. Let's talk briefly about two of Hoover's sanctuaries, I'd call them, one is a Bohemian Grove.

George Nash: Hoover was a member of that from, I think, 1914 on.

And he regarded that as a great refuge most of the time, not while he was president, but before and after he went to the Bohemian Grove. He belonged to the caveman camp within the grove, which he and others founded around 1924. For Hoover, this was who was kind of an outdoorsman and being an engineer, he had been an outdoorsman and all he just enjoyed that thoroughly.

There's much more that I could say about it, but that was, I think, a very special part of his life.

Bill Whalen: Okay, and then the other reference is fishing, fly fishing in particular. This is something I find curious, George, in this regard. There are two American presidents in the 20th century who you'd associate with fishing, and one is Herbert Hoover and the other one is George HW Bush, who loved to angle.

But these are two very opposite people. HW Bush was kind of famously frantic, he played speed golf, he drove a speedboat, he was always in a hurry. And if you look at his background, George, he's a son of privilege, he grew up in Connecticut, he went to Yale.

He didn't know what it was like to be an orphan or be a more of a bootstraps person like Herbert Hoover, but he loved to fish. What was it about fishing that attracted Hoover?

George Nash: I think partly the solitude of it, remember he was an orphan. He was brought up by an uncle who, while good to him, was nevertheless a rather austere individual.

And I don't think there was perhaps as much warmth in that relationship as one might have wished. I don't wanna overstate that point, but there is some evidence to that effect. And I rather think that Hoover just seemed to discover fishing when he was as a little boy in Iowa, a bit, how little boys do.

But I think that for him became a kind of a scene of serenity for him. And although knowing Hoover as I think I do, I suspect he was often thinking about public affairs while he was trying to catch fish. Hoover's mind never stopped turning, as one of his grandchildren told me.

And then he became expert at it, got into big deep sea fishing as an ex president, went to key, I guess it was key Largo, Florida, in the keys. And spent a number of winters there in his last years and got some very large fish and so forth.

So a friend of mine, Hal Elliott Ward, has written a book called Hoover the Fishing President, if you ever wish to explore that theme in itself. But I think those are probably the reasons for Hoover. In fact, the book that he wrote about fishing was called Fishing for Fun And to Cure Your Soul.

I think I should look at the title, that may be not quite right. But anyway, there was a sense that this was soul satisfying for him. It wasn't just a hobby to catch fish out of the water, but it had a sort of a deeper kind of spiritual experience or importance or significance to him, I would say.

And that was kind of his way of getting away from it all. And he did it all over the place in North America and in the ocean and so forth. So that was a side of Hoover that a few people know. I'm glad that you are aware of it, and it was something that I think meant a lot to him.

Bill Whalen: And finally, George is close with a few thoughts on Lou Henry Hoover. They would have been married for 45 years. She passed away in 1944, I believe, and maybe this explains his prolific work in the last 20 years of his life, because his wife is gone. So it probably has to channel his energy into writing, maybe to get over his grief.

George Nash: Well, I think that would probably have been a factor in that, although he started writing those memoirs in 1940, as soon as he realized he wasn't going to be the republican nominee. So even before she died, he was quite active in that gargantuan set of memoirs. And he was active in the late thirties on the lecture circuit, republican gatherings of all kinds, so that I wouldn't attribute all of his energy to that.

But he certainly had more of a focus later on after her unfortunate passing. They were very close. They were together at Stanford. She was actually a few months older than he, but she didn't go to Stanford directly. She went to what is now San Jose state when it was a teacher's college, and then switched over to Stanford.

So she was a freshman at Stanford, a first year student when he was a senior. And yet they were both born in the same year, 1874. And she was a geology major, maybe the first woman in the United States of whom that could be said. Certainly, I think the first woman at Stanford.

And so they had much in common, and she traveled with them in those years of adventure, as he called them, as they traveled the world and with little boys of theirs in tow. So they were very compatible that way. And she was an outdoors woman, and, well, she did some fishing, too, I think, and was sort of brought up by her father to be an outdoors person.

So there were things that they had in common that way, and I think that should be pointed out for the record.

Bill Whalen: George, the birthday celebration on August 10, would Hoover enjoy this birthday? Was he a birthday person? Did he like being celebrated? Did he like being feted?

And more of the point, George, if he could attend his 150th birthday, what do you think he'd like to talk about?

George Nash: Good question. I don't think he was one to make a lot of it, particularly, and yet people wanted to make something of it in his later years.

So, for example, I think in 1948, he was in West Branch and gave one of his most evocative speeches about what it meant to be an American. In 1949, I think he was the Stanford commencement speaker, as he had been in 1935. In 1954, I think he was in Oregon.

And on and on it goes. So it seemed like those became honorific occasions later on. And so I don't think he was one to want all that fuss and so forth, he nevertheless obliged those who wanted to invite him on those special occasions, and he gave speeches and so forth.

So it wasn't exactly all just fun and games and relaxation. What would he like to talk today? As I spoke, I think he would want to talk about the importance of the next generation. One of his notable speeches in the early fifties, I think, was called Think of the next generation.

He was worried even then, if you would believe this, about the size of the federal debt. And the way that we were spending money, in his view, profligately, to a point that was going to impact negatively the life prospects of the next generation. So Hoover, with his interest in the Boys club movement, which he ran that organization for almost 30 years as an ex president, Hoover, his interest in youth and an opportunity.

Again, the opportunity that he felt he had gotten as a young man getting into Stanford without ever having graduated from high school. He only had a middle school education in a formal way. So he was grateful to America and to those who had helped him along the way.

And I think he was anxious to give back in various ways that he pursued later on. So I suspect that if he were here for his 150th, he would say America is a very special place, or at least it should become that way again and think of the next generation.

That would probably be what would be on his mind, if I can venture a guess.

Bill Whalen: George, I'll leave it there. I really enjoyed this conversation. I hope you come back when the book comes out. I'd love to hear more about his relationship with FDR.

George Nash: Well, thank you.

I would look forward to that. Thank you.

Bill Whalen: You've been listening to matters of policy and politics, a Hoover Institution podcast devoted to governance and balance of power here in America and around the globe. If you've been enjoying this podcast, please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to our show.

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For the Hoover Institution, this is Bill Whalen wishing President Hoover and his family a happy 150th birthday. Take care, thanks for listening.

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