Herbert Hoover

• 1. Introduction

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  Herbert Hoover, the 31st president of the United States, once drew a remark from a Secret Service agent that few presidents have ever earned. The agent put it this way. "I've been traveling with Presidents since Roosevelt and never before have I seen one actually booed, with men running out into the street to thumb their noses at him."

  Hoover served from 1929 to 1933, and by the end of that term he was among the least popular men in the country. Yet in the years after World War I he had been one of the most admired private citizens in the world. He was a wealthy engineer who became famous for feeding strangers on a scale few people had ever attempted.

  Historians and political scientists generally rank his presidency among the worst in American history. The same scholars praise his work as a humanitarian and public official. This documentary asks how one man can stand on both sides of that verdict. How did an engineer who made his name solving problems meet one he could not solve? What did he believe about the proper limits of government, and where did those beliefs come from? And what happened to him during the more than thirty years he lived after leaving the White House?

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• 2. Orphan to Magnate

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  Herbert Clark Hoover was born on the 10th of August 1874 in West Branch, Iowa, into a Quaker family. His father, Jesse, was a blacksmith who also ran a farm implement store. His mother, Hulda Randall Minthorn, had grown up in Norwich, Ontario, before moving to Iowa in 1859.

  The boy was known as "Bertie." Around the age of two he caught a serious case of croup. He was briefly thought to have died, until his uncle John Minthorn revived him. His father liked to call him "my little stick in the mud," because the child kept getting trapped crossing the unpaved street.

  Jesse died suddenly of a heart attack in 1880, at the age of 34. Hulda died of typhoid in 1884. That left Herbert, his older brother Theodore and his younger sister May as orphans. Herbert spent the next eighteen months on a nearby farm belonging to his uncle Allen Hoover. In November 1885 he was sent to Newberg, Oregon, to live with John Minthorn. Minthorn was a Quaker physician and businessman whose own son had died the year before.

  Newberg, like West Branch, was a frontier town settled mostly by Quakers from the Midwest. The Minthorn household was cultured and demanding about work. Hoover disliked his chores and often resented his uncle. One observer described him as "an orphan who seemed to be neglected in many ways". At thirteen he left Friends Pacific Academy, now George Fox University, to work in his uncle's real estate office, the Oregon Land Company, in Salem. He never attended high school, but he picked up bookkeeping, typing and mathematics at night school.

  In 1891 Hoover entered Stanford University as part of its first class, the Pioneer Class, even though he failed every entrance exam except mathematics. Working for the geology chairman John Casper Branner, he dropped mechanical engineering in favor of geology. He was a mediocre student who filled his days with part-time jobs and campus activities. With William Foster Hidden he co-founded the Romero Hall Boarding Club, a student cooperative proposed by Sam Collins for "sociability and economy". Shy at first, Hoover won election as student treasurer and disliked fraternities and sororities. He managed the baseball and football teams and helped organize the first Big Game against the University of California. Two summers as an intern under the economic geologist Waldemar Lindgren of the United States Geological Survey convinced him to become a mining geologist.

  Hoover graduated in 1895, in the shadow of the Panic of 1893, and could not find a proper job. He took low-level mining work in the Sierra Nevada until he talked the prominent mining engineer Louis Janin into hiring him. After a year as a mine scout, he was taken on by Bewick, Moreing & Co. This London-based firm ran gold mines in Western Australia. He went first to Coolgardie, then the center of the Eastern Goldfields, on a salary of $5,000. Hoover described the rangelands at the edge of the Great Victoria Desert as a land of "black flies, red dust and white heat".

  He traveled constantly across the Outback to judge and manage the company's mines. He persuaded Bewick to buy the Sons of Gwalia gold mine, which became one of the most successful in the region. Partly thanks to him, the firm came to control about 50 percent of Western Australia's gold production. To cut costs and counter the labour movement among Australian miners, he brought in many Italian immigrants. In these years he also turned against minimum wages and workers' compensation, which he considered unfair to owners.

  In 1898 he was promoted to junior partner. An open feud with his boss, Ernest Williams, ended only when the firm's leaders offered him a post in China. Near Tianjin he developed gold mines for Bewick and for the Chinese-owned Chinese Engineering and Mining Company. He publicly called Chinese workers inefficient and racially inferior, yet he also urged an end to long-term servitude contracts. The Boxer Rebellion erupted soon after he and his wife arrived. It trapped them and many other foreigners until a multinational force won the Battle of Tientsin. By late 1901 a new Sino-British venture existed, and Hoover was its operating partner.

  Trouble followed in December 1902, when one of the firm's partners admitted to fraudulently selling stock in a mine. In 1904 the British government appointed two royal commissions to examine Bewick's labor practices and finances in Western Australia. After the company lost a lawsuit, Hoover sold his shares in mid-1908.

  Working from London as an independent consultant and financier, he specialized in reviving troubled mines in return for a share of the profits. He called his team "engineering doctors to sick concerns" and earned a reputation as a "doctor of sick mines". He co-founded the Zinc Corporation near Broken Hill, New South Wales, whose plant was the world's first selective ore differential flotation plant. The company developed the froth flotation process for pulling zinc from lead-silver ore. Hoover also worked with the Burma Corporation at the Namtu Bawdwin Mine and helped raise copper output at Kyshtym, Russia. He managed a mine in the Altai Mountains that, he said, "developed probably the greatest and richest single body of ore known in the world".

  His lectures at Columbia and Stanford were published in 1909 as Principles of Mining, which became a standard textbook. The book showed his drift toward progressive ideas, since he now endorsed eight-hour workdays and organized labor. Drawn to the history of science, he and his wife published the first English translation of De re metallica in 1912. That was a 16th century work on mining and metallurgy by Georgius Agricola. He also joined the Stanford board of trustees and led the campaign that made John Branner the university's president. By 1914 his personal fortune was estimated at $4 million. He kept offices in San Francisco, London, New York City, Paris, Petrograd and Mandalay, British Burma.

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• 3. Feeding Europe

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  "I did not realize it at the moment, but on the 3rd of August 1914, my career was over forever. I was on the slippery road of public life." That was how Hoover later remembered the first days of World War I. He and other London-based American businessmen formed a committee to bring home roughly 100,000 stranded Americans. With the assent of Congress and the Wilson administration, Hoover chaired it. By early October 1914 it had given relief to at least 40,000 people.

  Belgium was the larger problem. A country that relied heavily on imported food was suddenly occupied by Germany. The Germans refused to feed Belgian civilians. The British refused to lift their blockade unless the U.S. government supervised food imports as a neutral party. Hoover worked with the Wilson administration and with a Belgian relief body, the Comité National de Secours et d'Alimentation. Together they founded the Commission for Relief in Belgium.

  The commission brought in millions of tons of food and made sure the German army did not seize it. Private gifts and government grants paid for most of an $11-million-a-month budget. The organization grew into a kind of independent republic of relief, with its own flag, navy, factories, mills and railroads. Hoover worked 14-hour days from London, overseeing more than two million tons of food for nine million war victims. He crossed the North Sea forty times to argue with German authorities, an early form of shuttle diplomacy. He also won over David Lloyd George, then British Chancellor of the Exchequer, who agreed to let individuals send money to Belgium. In 1915, at the request of the French government, the commission began serving German-occupied Northern France. In 1926 the American diplomat Walter Page called Hoover probably the only living man to have negotiated privately with five governments. Those were the British, French, German, Dutch and Belgian.

  America entered the war in April 1917, and President Wilson named Hoover head of the U.S. Food Administration. Hoover had wanted a role since at least 1916 and lobbied several members of Congress and Wilson's confidant Edward M. House to get it. Called the "food czar", he enlisted hundreds of thousands of women as volunteers and ran propaganda in movie theaters, schools and churches. He chose four men to help lead the agency: Alonzo E. Taylor for technical skill, Robert Taft for political connections, Gifford Pinchot for agricultural influence and Julius Barnes for business sense.

  Meatless Mondays and wheatless Wednesdays were Hoover's answer to the formal rationing he wanted to avoid. He asked Americans to skip chosen foods on set days so that more could go to soldiers. Another slogan said, "when in doubt, eat potatoes". Publicists dubbed the effort "Hooverizing", even though Hoover kept ordering that publicity should not mention him by name. The Food Administration shipped 23 million metric tons of food to the Allied Powers, which kept them from collapsing. Progressives came to see him as the model of an expert administrator.

  The fighting ended in November 1918, but Hoover estimated that as many as 400 million people in Europe still faced starvation. The Food Administration became the American Relief Administration, which was to feed Central and Eastern Europe and rebuild infrastructure along the way. At the Paris Peace Conference he advised Wilson and shared his goals. These were a League of Nations, borders drawn by self-determination and no harsh punishment of the Central Powers. The next year the British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace. In it he said wider use of Hoover's "knowledge, magnanimity and disinterestedness" would have produced "the Good Peace".

  When government funding ran out in mid-1919, Hoover made the American Relief Administration a private body and raised millions from donors. He also created the European Children's Fund, which helped fifteen million children in fourteen countries. Over the opposition of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and other Republicans, he sent aid to defeated Germany and to famine-stricken Soviet Russia. He condemned the Bolsheviks, but he warned Wilson against intervening in the Russian Civil War. He thought the White Russian forces were little better, and he feared a long American entanglement.

  The Russian famine of 1921-22 killed six million people, and the American Relief Administration probably saved millions more. Asked whether relief was helping Bolshevism, Hoover answered, "twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!" In July 1922 the Soviet author Maxim Gorky told Hoover that "your help will enter history as a unique, gigantic achievement, worthy of the greatest glory, which will long remain in the memory of millions of Russians whom you have saved from death".

  In 1919 Hoover founded the Hoover War Collection at Stanford to keep the records. He donated the files of all three relief organizations and pledged $50,000 as an endowment. Scholars went to Europe to gather pamphlets, newspapers, posters, proclamations and other ephemeral material about the war and the revolutions that followed. It was renamed the Hoover War Library in 1922 and is now the Hoover Institution Library and Archives.

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• 4. Secretary of Everything

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  In March 1920 Hoover, who had never tied himself to a party, declared himself a Republican. He had been almost unknown to the public before 1914. His wartime work made him a contender in the 1920 presidential election. His support for the minimum wage, a forty-eight-hour workweek and an end to child labor appealed to progressives in both parties. He had also criticized Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's actions during the First Red Scare. Hoover had hoped one of the conventions would simply draft him. His wartime service had alienated farmers and the conservative Old Guard, and Hiram Johnson beat him in the California primary. Warren G. Harding emerged as a compromise nominee from a deadlocked convention, and Hoover backed him.

  Harding offered Hoover a choice between Secretary of the Interior and Secretary of Commerce. Commerce was thought a minor post with vague duties, but Hoover took it. Senate Republicans disliked his progressive views, his support for the League of Nations and his recent conversion to the party. Harding paired his nomination with that of the conservative favorite Andrew Mellon for Treasury, and the Senate confirmed both. Hoover served from 1921 to 1928, under Harding and then under Calvin Coolidge after Harding died in 1923. Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty and Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall were caught up in major scandals. Hoover came through the investigations largely unharmed.

  Hoover pictured the Commerce Department as the hub of national growth and stability. His wartime experience had convinced him that government could promote efficiency by cutting waste, raising production, using data and conserving resources. Contemporaries called his approach a "third alternative" between unrestrained capitalism and socialism. Hoover sought a balance among labor, capital and government, and scholars have labeled him a corporatist or an associationalist. He demanded and received authority to coordinate economic affairs across the government. When he judged that another department was neglecting its work, he sometimes took over its duties. Colleagues began calling him "Secretary of Commerce and Under-Secretary of all other departments."

  The Depression of 1920-21 gave him an early test of his views. He persuaded Harding to appoint a presidential commission on unemployment, which urged local governments to spend on infrastructure to cushion the downturn. At a conference in 1921 he argued that a nation with a surplus of every necessity should not leave willing workers without them. Still, he insisted that the answer lay in voluntary and local action rather than federal intervention. He opposed payments to the unemployed, fearing deficit spending and dependence on government. Handouts from the public treasury, he warned, would bring "that ultimate paternalism that would undermine our whole political system".

  Radio ownership grew from 300,000 families in 1923 to 10 million in 1929, and Hoover's department was in the middle of that boom. From 1922 to 1925 Hoover convened conferences of manufacturers, news agencies and government bodies that shaped how broadcasting was organized and regulated. He helped pass the Radio Act of 1927, which let the government shut down stations judged "non-useful" to the public. Some congressmen, the Senate and station owners fought his efforts.

  He was equally active in aviation, where he wanted a thriving private industry helped by government subsidies. He promoted emergency landing fields, demanded lights and radio beams at runways, and encouraged farmers to use planes for crop dusting. He also established federal power to inspect aircraft and license pilots, a precedent for the later Federal Aviation Administration. On the roads, he hosted the National Conference on Street and Highway Safety. It began as an effort to cut traffic deaths and grew to cover vehicle standards and city traffic control. Hoover let the interest groups negotiate among themselves, and the best organized were automotive trade associations. The conferences produced a Uniform Vehicle Code for states and a Model Municipal Traffic Ordinance for cities. Both tended to put the automobile first on city streets.

  Automobile tires and baby bottle nipples were among the small things the department pushed to standardize. He opened overseas offices to advise businessmen and was eager to promote Hollywood films abroad. His "Own Your Own Home" campaign, backed by groups such as the Better Houses in America movement, pushed single-family ownership. It also promoted the new long-term mortgage, which sharply boosted home construction. He won U.S. Steel's agreement to an eight-hour workday and fostered the Colorado River Compact among Southwestern states. In April 1927 he accepted the first ceremonial Picturephone call in Washington, placed from New York City by Walter Gifford, the chairman of AT&T.

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• 5. Image and Flood

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  Phillips Payson O'Brien argues that Hoover had a British problem. He had spent so many years in Great Britain and Australia, working for British companies, that he risked being labeled a British tool. He tried three remedies, working closely with a press that admired him. The first was the image of a dispassionate scientist, committed to the best solution. The second was his reputation as a humanitarian, built on Belgian famine relief and his wartime food work.

  The third remedy was the old tactic of twisting the British tail, and the 1925-26 rubber crisis supplied the occasion. American automakers consumed 70 percent of the world's rubber, but British investors controlled much of the supply. They planned deep cuts in output from British Malaya, which tripled prices. Hoover denounced the scheme in speeches and interviews. The State Department wanted no such confrontation and compromised the matter in 1926. When Hoover ran in 1928, he silenced charges that he was too close to British interests.

  His biggest public moment came in early 1927, when the lower Mississippi broke its banks and levees. Millions of acres flooded, and 1.5 million people lost their homes. Disaster relief was no part of the Commerce Department's duties. Even so, the governors of six states along the river asked President Coolidge to put Hoover in charge. Coolidge believed disaster response was not the federal government's job and at first refused. Under political pressure he finally named Hoover to chair a special committee.

  Hoover set up more than one hundred tent cities, assembled a fleet of over six hundred vessels and raised $17 million. By 1928 his fame had begun to eclipse that of the president himself. The praise had a darker side. Hoover ordered reports of mistreatment of African Americans in the refugee camps to be suppressed. He did so with the cooperation of Robert Russa Moton, a Black American leader who was promised unprecedented influence once Hoover became president.

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• 6. Landslide and Crash

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  In August 1927 Calvin Coolidge announced, "I do not choose to run." The nation was surprised. Hoover had gathered support quietly through the 1920s while taking care not to offend a president who might have sought another term. He became the front-runner at once and assembled a campaign team led by Hubert Work, Will H. Hays and Reed Smoot. Coolidge declined to anoint him and once complained that for six years Hoover had offered unsolicited advice, all of it bad. Hoover won the nomination on the first ballot. Coolidge, who loathed Vice President Charles Dawes, called Dawes as a running mate "a personal affront", so the convention chose Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas.

  Hoover accepted the nomination at Stanford Stadium. The Democrats chose New York governor Al Smith, the first Catholic nominee of a major party. Hoover disliked giving speeches and left much of the campaigning to Curtis and others. Smith was warmer and more gregarious, but anti-Catholicism and his open opposition to Prohibition hurt him. Hoover called Prohibition "a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose". He won 58 percent of the popular vote and 444 of 531 electoral votes, and he took five Southern states.

  "Volunteerism" was Hoover's term for his view of the presidency as a tool for lifting all Americans through public and private cooperation. On taking office he predicted the policies of the past eight years would soon bring the day when "poverty will be banished from this nation". The first major bill he signed, the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929, created the Federal Farm Board to stabilize farm prices. He leaned on commissions to study problems, many of them funded by private donors. One of them, the Research Committee on Social Trends, was assigned to survey all of American society.

  A persistent farm crisis, saturated markets for goods like automobiles, and rising income inequality lay beneath the optimism. The worst threat was speculation that had pushed stock prices far above real value. Some regulators and bankers warned that failing to curb it would bring "one of the greatest financial catastrophes that this country has ever seen". Neither Coolidge nor Hoover wanted to meddle with the Federal Reserve. In late October 1929 the stock market crashed, and the world economy began sliding into the Great Depression.

  Hoover judged that the root problem was a loss of confidence in the financial system. He wanted to strengthen banks and railroads and avoid federal intervention. He believed relief to individuals from Washington would bring "an inevitable train of corruption and waste such as our nation had never witnessed". Days after Black Tuesday he asked business and labor leaders to avoid wage cuts and strikes. He persuaded railroads and utilities to spend more on construction and maintenance. In early 1930 he obtained another $100 million for the Federal Farm Board.

  The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act began as an attempt to help farmers. Hoover had wanted higher farm tariffs, but the measure grew into a broad increase in rates. He stayed out of the congressional debate, and in June 1930 he signed the bill over the objections of many economists. Canada, France and other nations retaliated, international trade shrank and the economy worsened. Senator William E. Borah of Idaho and other progressive Republicans were outraged, and Hoover's relations with that wing never recovered.

  By the end of 1930 unemployment stood at 11.9 percent, and bank failures hinted at a larger collapse. Hoover refused to leave the gold standard and derided any other monetary system as "collectivism". He won a one-year moratorium on European war debts, which Germany still could not survive. By mid-1931 unemployment had reached 15 percent. Hoover feared public speaking, and his Democratic opponents defined him as cold and out of touch. They coined names that stuck. "Hooverville" meant shanty towns, "Hoover leather" meant cardboard in worn shoes, and "Hoover blanket" meant old newspaper used against the cold.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt, then governor of New York, launched the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration for the unemployed. By early 1932 unemployment neared 23 percent, and Hoover finally accepted more federal action. In January 1932 he got Congress to create the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which made government-secured loans to banks, railroads and local governments. It rescued many businesses but did little to revive lending, partly because conservative bankers ran it. That same month he signed the Federal Home Loan Bank Act, and he helped pass the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932 to widen bank credit. In July 1932 he signed a $2 billion public works bill, the Emergency Relief and Construction Act.

  After a decade of budget surpluses, the government ran a deficit in 1931. Most politicians and economists still believed in balanced budgets, although William Trufant Foster favored deficit spending. Hoover proposed a tax plan to raise revenue by 30 percent, which became the Revenue Act of 1932. It put the top rate at 63 percent, doubled the top estate tax rate and raised corporate rates. A sales tax in the bill was defeated in the House by 211 to 178.

  In June 1932 thousands of World War I veterans and their families camped in Washington. They demanded immediate payment of bonuses that a 1924 law had promised for 1945. Police could not disperse the crowd, shots were fired, and two protesters were killed. Hoover sent Army forces under General Douglas MacArthur, who believed he was fighting a Communist revolution and cleared the camp with military force.

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• 7. Fault Lines

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  Hoover appointed more African Americans to federal positions than Harding and Coolidge combined, yet many Black leaders condemned his administration. He rarely mentioned civil rights as president, believing that African Americans and other groups could improve their lot through education and individual initiative. He would not push for a federal anti-lynching law. He also kept up the "lily-white" strategy he had used in the South in 1928. It removed Black Republicans from party leadership in hopes of ending Democratic dominance there. Robert Moton and a few others accepted this as a temporary measure, but most Black leaders were outraged. His nomination of the conservative Southern judge John J. Parker to the Supreme Court deepened the anger. The NAACP and organized labor helped defeat it in the Senate. In 1932 many Black voters moved to the Democrats, and they later became an important part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal coalition.

  In 1930 Hoover issued an executive order requiring would-be immigrants to have a job before coming to the country. It was one of his efforts to limit unemployment. His administration also began a campaign to prosecute illegal immigrants, and it fell hardest on Mexican Americans, especially in Southern California. The federal government backed the Mexican repatriation of the 1930s. Somewhere between 300,000 and two million Mexicans and Mexican Americans were repatriated, deported or expelled, mostly during his term. Forty to sixty percent were American citizens. State and local authorities organized most of it with private support, and the Hoover administration itself deported 34,000 people to Mexico between 1930 and 1933. Voluntary departures were more common than deportations. Some scholars treat the repatriations as Hoover administration policy. The legal scholar Kevin R. Johnson argues that the campaign meets modern legal standards of ethnic cleansing. On a different front, Hoover reorganized the Bureau of Indian Affairs to limit exploitation of Native Americans.

  Prohibition gave him a different kind of trouble. After taking office Hoover urged Americans to obey the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, and he created the Wickersham Commission to advise him. He hoped its report would back his stance. Instead, the report published in 1931 criticized enforcement of the Volstead Act and noted growing public opposition. Some of his closest allies urged him to change course. Hoover refused to endorse any revision of the Volstead Act or the amendment, fearing he would lose Prohibition's supporters. Opinion kept turning, more people flouted the law, and a grassroots repeal movement grew. Congress approved a repeal amendment in January 1933, and by December 1933 enough states had ratified it as the Twenty-first Amendment.

  Leuchtenburg described Hoover as "the last American president to take office with no conspicuous need to pay attention to the rest of the world". Even so, the postwar order began to crumble on his watch. His Clark Memorandum of 1930 rejected the Roosevelt Corollary and moved toward non-interventionism in Latin America. He did not abandon force entirely. Three times he threatened intervention in the Dominican Republic, and he sent warships to El Salvador to help the government against a left-wing revolution. Still, he wound down the Banana Wars, ending the occupation of Nicaragua and nearly ending the one in Haiti.

  Disarmament was a priority for Hoover, who hoped to shift money from the military to domestic needs. With Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, he worked to extend the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty. The result was the 1930 London Naval Treaty, the first time the naval powers capped their tonnage of auxiliary vessels rather than only capital ships. At the 1932 World Disarmament Conference he urged deeper cuts and the outlawing of tanks and bombers, but his proposals were not adopted. When Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and set up the puppet state of Manchukuo, his administration deplored it without wanting to provoke Japan. He feared that a harsh stand would weaken moderates in Tokyo. It might also lose a possible ally against the Soviet Union, which he saw as the greater threat. Hoover and Stimson settled on the Stimson Doctrine, under which the United States would not recognize territory gained by force.

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• 8. The Long Retirement

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  Franklin D. Roosevelt won the 1932 Democratic nomination on the fourth ballot, defeating Al Smith, the party's 1928 nominee. Republican hopes were so dim that Hoover faced no serious challenge for renomination, and Coolidge and other prominent figures passed on the chance. Democrats painted Hoover as the cause of the Depression and as indifferent to millions in distress. Progressive Republicans such as George Norris and Robert La Follette Jr. deserted him. Roosevelt's platform promised repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, while Hoover offered a vague proposal for a new amendment. Hoover first planned only a few major speeches. He ended up giving nine major radio addresses defending his philosophy and urging voters to hold to the "foundations of experience". Historians say his awkward, monotone delivery hurt how the speeches were received. He lost the electoral vote 59-472, carrying six states, and took 39.6 percent of the popular vote, down 18.6 points from 1928.

  Hoover left Washington in March 1933, bitter about his defeat. He lived in Palo Alto with his wife until she died in 1944, then moved permanently into the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City. He called himself a conservative and wrote more than two dozen books answering attacks on his record. The Challenge to Liberty of 1934 assailed the New Deal harshly. He called the National Recovery Administration and Agricultural Adjustment Administration "fascistic" and the 1933 Banking Act a "move to gigantic socialism". Only 58 when he left office, he hoped for another term throughout the 1930s. In 1936 the convention applauded his speech against the New Deal but nominated Kansas governor Alf Landon. In 1940 the nomination went to the internationalist Wendell Willkie instead.

  In 1938 Hoover traveled to Europe, met Adolf Hitler and stayed at Hermann Göring's hunting lodge. He was dismayed by the persecution of Jews in Germany. He thought Hitler was mad but not a threat to the United States, and he judged Roosevelt the greater danger to peace. In his view Roosevelt's policies provoked Japan and discouraged France and the United Kingdom from seeking an "accommodation" with Germany. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Hoover opposed American involvement in the war, including Lend-Lease, and joined the isolationist America First Committee. He also kept doing what he knew best. With old friends from the Belgian commission he helped found the Commission for Polish Relief. He gave aid to Belgian civilians after the 1940 occupation. In December 1939 he led the Finnish Relief Fund, which sent more than two million dollars to Finns by the end of January. On the 29th of June 1941 he said on radio that war alongside Stalin to impose freedom was "more than a travesty. It is a tragedy."

  Roosevelt did not call him back to service. When Bernard Baruch suggested Hoover might help the war effort, Roosevelt replied, "I'm not Jesus Christ. I'm not raising Hoover from the dead." Roosevelt did arrange for General Albert Coady Wedemeyer to visit Hoover regularly at the Waldorf Astoria. Wedemeyer brought news of Allied war plans, though not of the atomic weapon program. Hoover voiced support for Zionism in 1943. In 1944 he did not pursue the Republican nomination and, at nominee Thomas E. Dewey's request, did not campaign. In 1945 he urged President Harry S. Truman to drop the demand for Japan's unconditional surrender because of the projected casualties of an invasion, still unaware of the Manhattan Project.

  Truman, despite their ideological differences, became his friend after the war. In 1946 Truman sent Hoover to tour Allied-occupied Germany and Rome to assess food needs. Hoover's reports criticized American occupation policy, rejecting the illusion that Germany could become a "pastoral state" unless 25,000,000 people were exterminated or moved out. On the 14th of April 1947 a school meals program that Hoover had urged began in the American and British zones, serving 3,500,000 children. That year Truman also appointed him to lead a new study of the executive branch. It became known as the Hoover Commission. Truman accepted some of its proposals to cut waste, fraud and inefficiency, consolidate agencies and strengthen White House control of policy. Though he had opposed Roosevelt's concentration of power, Hoover now thought the Atomic Age demanded a stronger presidency.

  Hoover backed Dewey against Truman in 1948 but stayed on good terms with the president. He favored the United Nations in principle. He opposed membership for the Soviet Union and other Communist states, and he found the Soviet Union as morally repugnant as Nazi Germany. He supported Richard Nixon and others in exposing Communists. Public opinion of him improved in the 1940s and 1950s, largely because of his work for Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, including the Hoover Commission. He died on the 20th of October 1964.

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