Hoover Institution

• 1. Introduction

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  In June 1919, Herbert Hoover sent a $50,000 telegram to Stanford University president Ray Lyman Wilbur. Hoover had not yet become president of the United States. He was still a wealthy engineer, one of Stanford's first graduates, fresh from overseeing food relief in war-torn Europe. He wanted Stanford to collect the raw documents of a world just torn apart by war. What grew from that telegram is today one of the most influential think tanks on earth. The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace now houses Nobel laureates, former secretaries of state, and scholars who have shaped the policies of Republican administrations from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump. But the institution is also a place of tension: between its identity as part of Stanford University and its fiercely independent board; between its scholarly ambitions and its political reputation; between an archive built to preserve history and a research engine designed to shape it. How did a library of wartime pamphlets become a force in American public life? And what does it mean for a university to house an institution that openly promotes limited government and free enterprise?

• 2. A Library Born from War

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  Herbert Hoover's inspiration for the library came from a passage in the writings of Andrew D. White. White had lamented that most of the pamphlets and ephemeral literature produced during the French Revolution had been lost, because no one thought to save them at the time. Hoover was determined not to repeat that mistake. While directing food relief across Europe after World War I, he had been reading voraciously: prior wars, revolutions, the political and economic aftermaths of upheaval. He had set up research in London, Paris, and Berlin on how earlier famines had been managed. He became convinced that "gigantic famine would follow the present war." In his memoirs, he described watching agriculture collapse across the continent. That experience gave him an archivist's instinct: the fragments of catastrophe had to be gathered before they scattered.

  The Hoover War Collection, as it was first called, flourished in its early years on gifts from private donors. By 1922 it had been renamed the Hoover War Library, and it had grown to include rare and unpublished materials including the files of the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police, and a large body of government documents produced during the war. The collection started in the Stanford Library, separate from the general stacks. By 1926 it had become the largest library in the world devoted to World War I, with 1.4 million items.

• 3. The Tower and the Archive

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  By 1926 the collection had outgrown its original home inside the Stanford Library, and the university allocated $600,000 for a permanent building. The result is the Hoover Tower, a 285-foot structure completed in 1941, the same year as Stanford's golden jubilee. The tower has since become one of the most recognized features of the Stanford campus. Its presence gives the institution a physical permanence that few think tanks can claim: a landmark visible across the campus, housing archives related to both World War I and World War II as well as thousands of Persian books, official documents, letters, and multimedia materials documenting Iran's history, politics, and culture.

  The collection includes Herbert Hoover's personal documents, which he began gathering at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. That origin sets the Hoover Institution apart from most Washington-based policy shops. It did not begin as an advocacy organization. It began as a rescue mission for primary sources that might otherwise disappear. The transformation from archive to think tank came gradually, beginning with a major fundraising campaign in 1956 that the former president launched himself.

• 4. Mission and Ideology

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  Herbert Hoover laid out the institution's ideological mission in 1959, in language that has no ambiguity. He wrote that its purpose was to "demonstrate the evils of the doctrines of Karl Marx whether Communism, Socialism, economic materialism, or atheism" and to protect the American way of life from such ideologies. In the same year, Stanford's Board of Trustees formally established the institution as "an independent institution within the frame of Stanford University." The institution maintains its own board of overseers and relies on its own income and donations rather than Stanford's general budget.

  The institution is widely described as conservative. Its directors have pushed back on the label "partisan," and in January 2021, Condoleezza Rice addressed campus criticism directly. She shared what she described as statistics showing that Hoover fellows contribute financially to both political parties on an equal basis. The institution receives nearly half of its funding from private gifts, primarily individual contributions, and the other half from its endowment. Its funders include the Taube Family Foundation, the Koret Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Walton Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the William E. Simon Foundation.

  On climate, the institution's position is layered. According to DeSmog, Hoover accepts the scientific consensus that climate change is real but has long opposed policy action to address it. Some of its fellows have been described as downplaying the phenomenon.

• 5. The Reagan Years

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  Ronald Reagan's relationship with the Hoover Institution is one of the most consequential chapters in its history. In 1975, while still Governor of California, Reagan was designated as Hoover's first honorary fellow. He donated his gubernatorial papers to the library. At that point the institution was running on a general budget of roughly $3.5 million a year, and by 1976 one third of Stanford University's total book holdings were stored at Hoover, making it the largest private archive collection in the United States.

  For his 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan enlisted at least thirteen Hoover scholars to assist in various capacities. After he won, more than thirty current or former Hoover fellows went to work in his administration in 1981. That pipeline became a template. W. Glenn Campbell, who had been appointed director in 1960 and served until 1989, presided over this expansion. Under Campbell, the Chinese and Russian collections grew considerably. His retirement in 1989 was described as the end of an era.

• 6. Scholars and Washington

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  Condoleezza Rice had been a Hoover senior fellow before she joined the George W. Bush administration in 2001, where she served as National Security Advisor from 2001 to 2005 and as Secretary of State from 2005 to 2009. She returned to Hoover, eventually becoming its director in 2020. In 2006, President George W. Bush awarded the National Humanities Medal to the institution.

  James Mattis served as the Davies Family Distinguished Visiting Fellow from 2013 to 2016, studying leadership, national security, strategy, and the effective use of military force. He then became Secretary of Defense in the first Trump administration. In March 2019 he returned to his post at Hoover. Kevin Hassett, another Distinguished Visiting Fellow, became the first chairman of Trump's Council of Economic Advisors. Josh Rauh, the CEA's chief principal economist, took leave from his Hoover fellowship to serve; after the third CEA chairman Tyler Goodspeed resigned in 2021, he too went to Hoover.

  In February 2020, an episode tied to the institution drew public scrutiny. The Hoover board of trustees brought in senior Trump economic officials for off-the-record forecasts about an emerging contagion threat. The New York Times reported that board members then spread that information, contributing to a stock market selloff, at a time when Trump was publicly dismissing the threat.

• 7. The Fellowship and Its Reach

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  As of 2017, the Hoover Institution hosted as many as 200 resident scholars at any given time. Fellowship appointments do not require the approval of Stanford tenure committees, which keeps the fellowship process distinct from the university's regular academic hiring. Fellows work in interdisciplinary teams covering economic policy, history, education, law, foreign policy, energy, national security, and health. Some hold joint appointments as lecturers on the Stanford faculty.

  The roster of Nobel laureates among Hoover alumni is notable: Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago economist and 1976 Nobel laureate; Gary Becker, the 1992 laureate; and Thomas Sargent, the 2011 laureate, all held senior fellowships. Economist Thomas Sowell, historian Niall Ferguson, and legal scholar Richard Epstein are among its prominent senior fellows. The institution's honorary fellows have included Friedrich Hayek, Nobel laureate in economics; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet dissident and Nobel laureate in literature; and Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

  In November 2020, Scott Atlas, a Hoover fellow who had served as a major Trump advisor during the COVID-19 pandemic and was known for opposing public health measures, was condemned in a vote by Stanford University faculty. The episode captured the ongoing friction between the institution and its host university.

• 8. Publications and Rankings

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  The Hoover Institution Press is the institution's in-house publisher, producing books, essays, and several periodicals. Its quarterly publications include Hoover Digest, Education Next, China Leadership Monitor, and Defining Ideas. The press previously published Policy Review, a bimonthly periodical it acquired from the Heritage Foundation in 2001; that publication ceased with its February-March 2013 issue. The institution also co-publishes the Stanford Emerging Technology Review, a technology education report for policymakers, jointly with the Stanford University School of Engineering.

  In 2021, Academic Influence ranked Hoover as the 10th most influential think tank in the world. The Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program placed it 22nd on its "Top Think Tanks in United States" list that same year and 1st on its "Top Think Tanks to Look Out For" list. The David and Joan Traitel Building, inaugurated in August 2017, now houses the institution's headquarters on the top floor, with a 400-seat conference auditorium on the ground floor. James Stockdale, the Navy Vice Admiral, Medal of Honor recipient, and 1992 US vice presidential candidate, was among the institution's senior research fellows, a reminder of how broad the Hoover fellowship has been across its century of operation.