Skip to Main Content

U.S. Presidents & Presidency: Hoover

A topic guide covering the Presidents of the United States. This is an ongoing project. As such, additional individuals will be added over time.

Herbert Hoover

Herbert Hoover served as the 31st president of the United States from 1929 - 1933. Prior to the presidency, he served as the head of the Food Administration under Wilson and helped to provide food to Europe during World War I while avoiding rationing at home. 

After his election to the White House, the stock market crash launched the nation into the Great Depression. Despite the nation's challenges, Hoover "announced that while he would keep the Federal budget balanced, he would cut taxes and expand public works spending" (White House). Hoover firmly believed, "that while people must not suffer from hunger and cold, caring for them must be primarily a local and voluntary responsibility" (White House). 

Hoover died on October 20, 1964. 

Resources

Archives & Primary Sources

Hoover and the Great Depression Revisited

Herbert Hoover came to the White House regarded as both a skilled manager and great humanitarian, yet left the presidency perceived as just the opposite. Gain an understanding of how this could happen through a detailed examination of both his forgotten accomplishments and his often misunderstood failures.

Source: Kanopy

Perspectives

Hoover

"An exemplary biography--exhaustively researched, fair-minded and easy to read. It can nestle on the same shelf as David McCullough's Truman, a high compliment indeed." --The Wall Street Journal The definitive biography of Herbert Hoover, one of the most remarkable Americans of the twentieth century--a wholly original account that will forever change the way Americans understand the man, his presidency, his battle against the Great Depression, and their own history. An impoverished orphan who built a fortune. A great humanitarian. A president elected in a landslide and then resoundingly defeated four years later. Arguably the father of both New Deal liberalism and modern conservatism, Herbert Hoover lived one of the most extraordinary American lives of the twentieth century. Yet however astonishing, his accomplishments are often eclipsed by the perception that Hoover was inept and heartless in the face of the Great Depression. Now, Kenneth Whyte vividly recreates Hoover's rich and dramatic life in all its complex glory. He follows Hoover through his Iowa boyhood, his cutthroat business career, his brilliant rescue of millions of lives during World War I and the 1927 Mississippi floods, his misconstrued presidency, his defeat at the hands of a ruthless Franklin Roosevelt, his devastating years in the political wilderness, his return to grace as Truman's emissary to help European refugees after World War II, and his final vindication in the days of Kennedy's "New Frontier." Ultimately, Whyte brings to light Hoover's complexities and contradictions--his modesty and ambition, his ruthlessness and extreme generosity--as well as his profound political legacy. Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times is the epic, poignant story of the deprived boy who, through force of will, made himself the most accomplished figure in the land, and who experienced a range of achievements and failures unmatched by any American of his, or perhaps any, era. Here, for the first time, is the definitive biography that fully captures the colossal scale of Hoover's momentous life and volatile times.

Herbert Hoover

"At last, a biography of Herbert Hoover that captures the man in full... [Jeansonne] has splendidly illuminated the arc of one of the most extraordinary lives of the twentieth century."--David M. Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winning Author of Freedom from Fear Prizewinning historian Glen Jeansonne delves into the life of our most misunderstood president, offering up a surprising new portrait of Herbert Hoover--dismissing previous assumptions and revealing a political Progressive in the mold of Theodore Roosevelt, and the most resourceful American since Benjamin Franklin.   Orphaned at an early age and raised with strict Quaker values, Hoover earned his way through Stanford University. His hardworking ethic drove him to a successful career as an engineer and multinational businessman. After the Great War, he led a humanitarian effort that fed millions of Europeans left destitute, arguably saving more lives than any man in history. As commerce secretary under President Coolidge, Hoover helped modernize and galvanize American industry, and orchestrated the rehabilitation of the Mississippi Valley after the Great Flood of 1927.   As president, Herbert Hoover became the first chief executive to harness federal power to combat a crippling global recession. Though Hoover is often remembered as a "do-nothing" president, Jeansonne convincingly portrays a steadfast leader who challenged congress on an array of legislation that laid the groundwork for the New Deal. In addition, Hoover reformed America's prisons, improved worker safety, and fought for better health and welfare for children. Unfairly attacked by Franklin D. Roosevelt and blamed for the Depression, Hoover was swept out of office in a landslide. Yet as FDR's government grew into a bureaucratic behemoth, Hoover became the moral voice of the GOP and a champion of Republican principles--a legacy re-ignited by Ronald Reagan and which still endures today.   A compelling and rich examination of his character, accomplishments and failings, this is the magnificent biography of Herbert Hoover we have long waited for.  INCLUDES PHOTOS

Hoover, Conservation and Consumerism

Herbert Hoover rose to political leadership in the 1920s, just as consumer society became dominant in the United States. Although personally uncomfortable with the values of consumerism, he worked to strengthen the economy through policies of conservation and to find desirable occupations for the new leisure available to modern workers. He envisioned great voluntary programs to promote standardization and simplification in American industries that would permit companies to pay both high profits and high wages. And he sought opportunities for healthful, moral outdoor recreation to fill the leisure hours made possible by rising worker productivity. Kendrick Clements illuminates the influence of Hoover's broadly conceived ideas about conservation on virtually every economic policy of the Republican era, from the expansion of the National Park system by 40 percent to the attempt to eliminate radical swings in the business cycle. Locating the roots of Hoover's personal beliefs in his Quaker upbringing in Oregon and seeing his outlook on the natural world shaped by his frontier experience and education, Clements finds that this policy maker combined an interest in conserving the environment with an engineer's drive to rationalize the use of natural resources. He examines Hoover's difficult negotiation of the Colorado River Pact that permitted the construction of the dam that would bear his name as well as his efforts to create a St. Lawrence Waterway to link the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. Hoover's relief efforts during the 1927 Mississippi River flood and his promotion of timber and oil conservation reveal other dimensions of his approach to conservation. Although Hoover was not a modern environmentalist, he pioneered some of the first broad environmental policies in the United States. The National Conference on Outdoor Recreation brought together wilderness advocates and urban planners, passage of the first federal law to limit oil pollution in navigable waters began an ongoing effort to control the effects of industrialization, and his advocacy of pleasant, affordable housing introduced the idea that the world we live in every day is our most important environmental concern. In a period most often seen as a wasteland by historians who have viewed Republican environmental policies of the 1920s as mistaken, ineffective, or corrupt, Clements proposes that Hoover's conservation efforts were an attempt to balance growth and conservation. This unparalleled examination of early-twentieth-century conservation speaks to ongoing debates about how best to protect the environment without ruining the economy.

Lou Henry Hoover

Although overshadowed by her higher-profile successors, Lou Henry Hoover was in many ways the nation's first truly modern First Lady. She was the first to speak on the radio and give regular interviews. She was the first to be a public political persona in her own right. And, although the White House press corps saw in her "old-fashioned wifehood," she very much foreshadowed the "new woman" of the era. Nancy Beck Young presents the first thoroughly documented study of Lou Henry Hoover's White House years, 1929-1933, showing that, far from a passive prelude to Eleanor Roosevelt, she was a true innovator. Young draws on the extensive collection of Lou Hoover's personal papers to show that she was not only an important First Lady but also a key transitional figure between nineteenth- and twentieth-century views on womanhood. Lou Hoover was a multifaceted woman: a college graduate, a lover of the outdoors, a supporter of Girl Scouting, and a person engaged in social activism who endorsed political involvement for women and created a program to fight the Depression. Young traces Hoover's many philanthropic efforts both before and during the Hoover presidency--contrasting them with those of her husband--and places her public activities in the larger context of contemporary women's activism. And she shows that, unlike her predecessors, Hoover did more than entertain: she revolutionized the office of First Lady. Yet as Young reveals, Hoover was constrained as First Lady by her inability to achieve the same results that she had previously accomplished in her very public career for the volunteer community. As diligently as she worked to combat the hardship of the Depression for average Americans by mobilizing private relief efforts, her efforts ultimately had little effect. Although her celebrity has paled in the shadow of her husband's negative association with the Great Depression, Lou Hoover's story reveals a dynamic woman who used her activism to refashion the office of First Lady into a modern institution reflecting changes in the ways American women lived their lives. Young's study of Hoover's White House years shows that her legacy of innovation made a lasting mark on the office and those who followed.

Herbert Hoover & Huey Long

The Great Depression crashed upon America in 1929. This program profiles Herbert Hoover, president from 1929 to 1933, and Huey Long—governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932, senator from 1932 to 1935, presidential hopeful, and victim of assassination—murdered at the height of his popularity.

Source: AVON