HOOVER, HERBERT 1874-1964

SECRETARY OF COMMERCE, 1921-1929

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1929-1933

From Rags to Riches

Herbert Hoover was one of the most admired public figures in the United States before his reputation was tarnished by the onset of the Great Depression during his presidency. Hoover's life seemed like that of a Horatio Alger hero. Son of an Iowa farmer and orphaned at age ten, Herbert Clark Hoover earned a degree from Stanford University, became a mining engineer, and was a self-made millionaire before he reached forty. During World War I he directed the Belgian Relief Commission and headed the U.S. Food Administration, an arm of Woodrow Wilson's war mobilization effort. Hoover spent most of the 1920s as secretary of commerce under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge.

Secretary of Commerce

Known to insiders as "Secretary of Commerce and Under Secretary of Everything Else," Hoover made Commerce one of the most active cabinet departments. Not a doctrinaire conservative like many other Republican cabinet officers of the decade, Hoover championed progressive capitalism, attempting to balance laissez-faire dogma with humanitarian values. Hoover strove to implement his principles of "cooperative capitalism" by forging an alliance between government and business that relied on experts and volunteers to promote efficiency and self-regulation. To accomplish these goals he organized hundreds of national conferences to study business and economic trends, bringing together experts, amassing information, and disseminating new ideas for making business more efficient and profitable. One of Hoover's crowning achievements was his encouragement of western states to cooperate in building a major dam, later named in his honor, on the Colorado River. He also coordinated relief efforts after the Mississippi River flood of 1927, one of the worst natural disasters of the decade.

President Hoover

Hoover's success as secretary of commerce helped in his campaign for the presidency in 1928, when he handily defeated Gov. Alfred E. Smith of New York. During the first eight months of his presidency Hoover exhibited his progressive tendencies through conservation policy, prison reform, a conference on child welfare, and the promotion of humanitarian treatment of African Americans. After the stock-market crash of October 1929 ushered in the Great Depression of the 1930s, however, Hoover's philosophy of self-help and voluntary cooperation proved inadequate to resolve the nation's economic problems and left the once-revered Hoover one of the nation's most criticized political figures for decades to come.