Books by Hoover, Herbert
- Hoover, Herbert. American Individualism. Introduction by George H. Nash. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, [1922] 2016. ISBN 978-0-8179-2015-9.
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After the end of World War I, Herbert Hoover and the American
Relief Administration he headed provided food aid to the
devastated nations of Central Europe, saving millions from
famine. Upon returning to the United States in the fall of
1919, he was dismayed by what he perceived to be an inoculation
of the diseases of socialism, autocracy, and other forms of
collectivism, whose pernicious consequences he had observed
first-hand in Europe and in the peace conference after the end
of the conflict, into his own country. In 1920, he wrote,
“Every wind that blows carries to our shores an infection
of social disease from this great ferment; every convulsion
there has an economic reaction upon our own people.”
Hoover sensed that in the aftermath of war, which left some
collectivists nostalgic for the national mobilisation and
top-down direction of the economy by “war socialism”,
and growing domestic unrest: steel and police strikes, lynchings
and race riots, and
bombing
attacks by anarchists, that it was necessary to articulate
the principles upon which American society and its government
were founded, which he believed were distinct from those of
the Old World, and the deliberate creation of people who had come
to the new continent expressly to escape the ruinous doctrines of
the societies they left behind.
After assuming the post of Secretary of Commerce in the newly
inaugurated Harding administration in 1921, and faced with
massive coal and railroad strikes which threatened the
economy, Hoover felt a new urgency to reassert his vision of
American principles. In December 1922, American Individualism
was published. The short book (at 72 pages, more of a long
pamphlet), was based upon a magazine article he had published
the previous March in World's Work.
Hoover argues that five or six philosophies of social and
economic organisation are contending for dominance: among them
Autocracy, Socialism, Syndicalism, Communism, and Capitalism.
Against these he contrasts American Individualism, which he
believes developed among a population freed by emigration and
distance from shackles of the past such as divine right
monarchy, hereditary aristocracy, and static social classes.
These people became individuals, acting on their own initiative
and in concert with one another without top-down direction
because they had to: with a small and hands-off government, it
was the only way to get anything done. Hoover writes,
Forty years ago [in the 1880s] the contact of the individual with the Government had its largest expression in the sheriff or policeman, and in debates over political equality. In those happy days the Government offered but small interference with the economic life of the citizen.
But with the growth of cities, industrialisation, and large enterprises such as railroads and steel manufacturing, a threat to this frontier individualism emerged: the reduction of workers to a proletariat or serfdom due to the imbalance between their power as individuals and the huge companies that employed them. It is there that government action was required to protect the other component of American individualism: the belief in equality of opportunity. Hoover believes, and supports, intervention in the economy to prevent the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few, and to guard, through taxation and other means, against the emergence of a hereditary aristocracy of wealth. Yet this poses its own risks,But with the vast development of industry and the train of regulating functions of the national and municipal government that followed from it; with the recent vast increase in taxation due to the war;—the Government has become through its relations to economic life the most potent force for maintenance or destruction of our American individualism.
One of the challenges American society must face as it adapts is avoiding the risk of utopian ideologies imported from Europe seizing this power to try to remake the country and its people along other lines. Just ten years later, as Hoover's presidency gave way to the New Deal, this fearful prospect would become a reality. Hoover examines the philosophical, spiritual, economic, and political aspects of this unique system of individual initiative tempered by constraints and regulation in the interest of protecting the equal opportunity of all citizens to rise as high as their talent and effort permit. Despite the problems cited by radicals bent on upending the society, he contends things are working pretty well. He cites “the one percent”: “Yet any analysis of the 105,000,000 of us would show that we harbor less than a million of either rich or impecunious loafers.” Well, the percentage of very rich seems about the same today, but after half a century of welfare programs which couldn't have been more effective in destroying the family and the initiative of those at the bottom of the economic ladder had that been their intent, and an education system which, as a federal commission was to write in 1983, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America …, we might well have viewed it as an act of war”, a nation with three times the population seems to have developed a much larger unemployable and dependent underclass. Hoover also judges the American system to have performed well in achieving its goal of a classless society with upward mobility through merit. He observes, speaking of the Harding administration of which he is a member,That our system has avoided the establishment and domination of class has a significant proof in the present Administration in Washington, Of the twelve men comprising the President, Vice-President, and Cabinet, nine have earned their own way in life without economic inheritance, and eight of them started with manual labor.
Let's see how that has held up, almost a century later. Taking the 17 people in equivalent positions at the end of the Obama administration in 2016 (President, Vice President, and heads of the 15 executive departments), we find that only 1 of the 17 inherited wealth (I'm inferring from the description of parents in their biographies) but that precisely zero had any experience with manual labour. If attending an Ivy League university can be taken as a modern badge of membership in a ruling class, 11 of the 17—65%, meet this test (if you consider Stanford a member of an “extended Ivy League”, the figure rises to 70%). Although published in a different century in a very different America, much of what Hoover wrote remains relevant today. Just as Hoover warned of bad ideas from Europe crossing the Atlantic and taking root in the United States, the Frankfurt School in Germany was laying the groundwork for the deconstruction of Western civilisation and individualism, and in the 1930s, its leaders would come to America to infect academia. As Hoover warned, “There is never danger from the radical himself until the structure and confidence of society has been undermined by the enthronement of destructive criticism.” Destructive criticism is precisely what these “critical theorists” specialised in, and today in many parts of the humanities and social sciences even in the most eminent institutions the rot is so deep they are essentially a write-off. Undoing a century of bad ideas is not the work of a few years, but Hoover's optimistic and pragmatic view of the redeeming merit of individualism unleashed is a bracing antidote to the gloom one may feel when surveying the contemporary scene. - Hoover, Herbert. The Crusade Years. Edited by George H. Nash. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8179-1674-9.
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In the modern era, most former U.S. presidents have largely
retired from the public arena, lending their names to
charitable endeavours and acting as elder statesmen rather
than active partisans. One striking counter-example to this
rule was Herbert Hoover who, from the time of his defeat by
Franklin Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election until
shortly before his death in 1964, remained in the arena,
giving hundreds of speeches, many broadcast nationwide on
radio, writing multiple volumes of memoirs and analyses of
policy, collecting and archiving a multitude of documents
regarding World War I and its aftermath which became the core
of what is now the Hoover Institution collection at Stanford University,
working in famine relief during and after World War II, and
raising funds and promoting benevolent organisations such
as the Boys' Clubs. His strenuous work to keep the U.S. out
of World War II is chronicled in his
“magnum opus”,
Freedom Betrayed (June 2012),
which presents his revisionist view of U.S. entry into and
conduct of the war, and the tragedy which ensued after victory
had been won. Freedom Betrayed was largely completed
at the time of Hoover's death, but for reasons difficult to
determine at this remove, was not published until 2011.
The present volume was intended by Hoover to be a companion to
Freedom Betrayed, focussing on domestic policy
in his post-presidential career. Over the years, he envisioned
publishing the work in various forms, but by the early 1950s he
had given the book its present title and accumulated 564
pages of typeset page proofs. Due to other duties, and Hoover's
decision to concentrate his efforts on Freedom Betrayed,
little was done on the manuscript after he set it aside in 1955.
It is only through the scholarship of the editor, drawing upon
Hoover's draft, but also documents from the Hoover Institution
and the Hoover Presidential Library, that this work has been
assembled in its present form. The editor has also collected a
variety of relevant documents, some of which Hoover cited or
incorporated in earlier versions of the work, into a
comprehensive appendix. There are extensive source citations and
notes about discrepancies between Hoover's quotation of documents
and speeches and other published versions of them.
Of all the crusades chronicled here, the bulk of the work is devoted
to “The Crusade Against Collectivism in American Life”,
and Hoover's words on the topic are so pithy and relevant to the
present state of affairs in the United States that one suspects that
a brave, ambitious, but less than original politician who simply
cut and pasted Hoover's words into his own speeches would rapidly
become the darling of liberty-minded members of the Republican
party. I cannot think of any present-day Republican, even
darlings of the Tea Party, who draws the contrast between the
American tradition of individual liberty and enterprise and
the grey uniformity of collectivism as Hoover does here. And
Hoover does it with a firm intellectual grounding in the history
of America and the world, personal knowledge from having lived and
worked in countries around the world, and an engineer's pragmatism
about doing what works, not what sounds good in a speech or makes
people feel good about themselves.
This is somewhat of a surprise. Hoover was, in many ways, a
progressive—Calvin Coolidge called him “wonder boy”.
He was an enthusiastic believer in trust-busting and regulation
as a counterpoise to concentration of economic power. He was
a protectionist who supported the tariff to protect farmers and
industry from foreign competition. He supported income and inheritance
taxes “to regulate over-accumulations of wealth.”
He was no libertarian, nor even a “light hand on the tiller”
executive like Coolidge.
And yet he totally grasped the threat to liberty which the
intrusive regulatory and administrative state represented. It's
difficult to start quoting Hoover without retyping the entire
book, as there is line after line, paragraph after paragraph,
and page after page which are not only completely applicable to
the current predicament of the U.S., but guaranteed applause lines
were they uttered before a crowd of freedom loving citizens of
that country. Please indulge me in a few (comments in italics
are my own).
I could quote dozens more. Should Hoover re-appear and give a composite of what he writes here as a keynote speech at the 2016 Republican convention, and if it hasn't been packed with establishment cronies, I expect he would be interrupted every few lines with chants of “Hoo-ver, Hoo-ver” and nominated by acclamation. It is sad that in the U.S. in the age of Obama there is no statesman with the stature, knowledge, and eloquence of Hoover who is making the case for liberty and warning of the inevitable tyranny which awaits at the end of the road to serfdom. There are voices articulating the message which Hoover expresses so pellucidly here, but in today's media environment they don't have access to the kind of platform Hoover did when his post-presidential policy speeches were routinely broadcast nationwide. After his being reviled ever since his presidency, not just by Democrats but by many in his own party, it's odd to feel nostalgia for Hoover, but Obama will do that to you. In the Kindle edition the index cites page numbers in the hardcover edition which, since the Kindle edition does not include real page numbers, are completely useless.(On his electoral defeat) Democracy is not a polite employer.
We cannot extend the mastery of government over the daily life of a people without somewhere making it master of people's souls and thoughts.
(On JournoList, vintage 1934) I soon learned that the reviewers of the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Saturday Review and of other journals of review in New York kept in touch to determine in what manner they should destroy books which were not to their liking.
Who then pays? It is the same economic middle class and the poor. That would still be true if the rich were taxed to the whole amount of their fortunes….
Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt….
Regulation should be by specific law, that all who run may read.
It would be far better that the party go down to defeat with the banner of principle flying than to win by pussyfooting.
The seizure by the government of the communications of persons not charged with wrong-doing justifies the immoral conduct of every snooper.
- Hoover, Herbert. Freedom Betrayed. Edited by George H. Nash. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8179-1234-5.
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This book, begun in the days after the attack on Pearl
Harbor, became the primary occupation of former U.S.
president Herbert Hoover until his death in 1964. He
originally referred to it as the “War Book”
and titled subsequent draft manuscripts
Lost Statesmanship, The Ordeal of the
American People, and Freedom Betrayed,
which was adopted for this edition. Over the two decades
Hoover worked on the book, he and his staff came to
refer to it as the “Magnum
Opus”, and it is
magnum indeed—more than
950 pages in this massive brick of a hardcover edition.
The work began as an attempt to document how, in Hoover's
view, a series of diplomatic and strategic blunders
committed during the Franklin Roosevelt administration
had needlessly prompted Hitler's attack upon the Western
democracies, forged a disastrous alliance with Stalin,
and deliberately provoked Japan into attacking the U.S.
and Britain in the Pacific. This was summarised by Hoover
as “12 theses” in a 1946 memorandum to his
research assistant (p. 830):
- War between Russia and Germany was inevitable.
- Hitler's attack on Western Democracies was only to brush them out of his way.
- There would have been no involvement of Western Democracies had they not gotten in his (Hitler's) way by guaranteeing Poland (March, 1939).
- Without prior agreement with Stalin this constituted the greatest blunder of British diplomatic history.
- There was no sincerity on either side of the Stalin-Hitler alliance of August, 1939.
- The United States or the Western Hemisphere were never in danger by Hitler.
- [This entry is missing in Hoover's typescript—ed.]
- This was even less so when Hitler determined to attack Stalin.
- Roosevelt, knowing this about November, 1940, had no remote warranty for putting the United States in war to “save Britain” and/or saving the United States from invasion.
- The use of the Navy for undeclared war on Germany was unconstitutional.
- There were secret military agreements with Britain probably as early of January, 1940.
- The Japanese war was deliberately provoked. …
