How long was herbert hoover in office

Orphaned at age nine, Hoover was raised primarily by an uncle in Oregon. After attending Quaker schools, Hoover became part of the first class to enter Stanford University when it opened in He graduated four years later with a degree in geology and launched a lucrative career as a mining engineer.

Intelligent and hardworking, Hoover traveled all over the world to find valuable mineral deposits and establish business enterprises to extract the resources. His work made him a multimillionaire. On February 10, , Hoover married his college sweetheart, Lou Henry , and the couple had two sons, Herbert and Allan Henry At the start of World War I , Hoover dedicated his talents to humanitarian work.

He helped , stranded American tourists return home from Europe when the hostilities broke out, and coordinated the delivery of food and supplies to citizens of Belgium after that country was overrun by Germany. When the U. Hoover encouraged Americans to reduce their consumption of meat and other commodities in order to ensure a steady supply of food and clothing for the Allied troops. Once the war ended, Hoover, as head of the American Relief Administration, arranged shipments of food and aid to war-ravaged Europe.

During the fast-paced modernization of the s, Hoover played an active role in organizing the fledgling radio broadcasting and civilian aviation industries, and also laid the groundwork for the construction of a huge dam on the Colorado River between Arizona and Nevada.

Named for Hoover, the dam opened in In the U. Promising to bring continued peace and prosperity to the nation, he carried 40 states and defeated Democratic candidate Alfred E. Smith , the governor of New York , by a record margin of electoral votes. On October 24, —only seven months after Hoover took office—a precipitous drop in the value of the U.

Banks and businesses failed across the country. Nationwide unemployment rates rose from 3 percent in to 23 percent in Millions of Americans lost their jobs, homes and savings. Many people were forced to wait in bread lines for food and to live in squalid shantytowns known derisively as Hoovervilles.

Hoover undertook various measures designed to stimulate the economy, and a few of the programs he introduced became key components of later relief efforts. He believed in a limited role for government and worried that excessive federal intervention posed a threat to capitalism and individualism. He felt that assistance should be handled on a local, voluntary basis. He nonetheless mounted a vigorous campaign for reelection in and traveled the country by train, defending his policies at every stop.

But it came as no surprise to Hoover that he lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt in the general election. Hoover departed Washington with a heavy heart on March 4, Hoover devoted the next 12 years to writing books, speaking on issues of public concern, and serving as chairman of a number of philanthropic organizations.

Hoover and Truman also joined forces in on a commission to reorganize the executive branch of the federal government. In addition to public service, Hoover devoted his post-Presidential years to social causes such as the Boys Clubs of America and the Hoover Institution, a research center he had established on the Stanford campus in He also wrote more than 40 books during those years.

Hoover insisted that the building be modest in size in accordance with scale of the other buildings in the community. The former President made his last visit to Iowa on August 10, , to dedicate that building to the American people. Herbert Hoover died on October 20, On October 25, the body of Herbert Hoover was interred in a simple grave on an Iowa hill overlooking the cottage where he was born.

Skip to main content. On This Page. An inaugural graduate of Stanford, where he studied mechanical engineering and geology, Hoover became a mining engineer at a time when that was as glamorous and potentially profitable a career as launching a tech startup would be for a Stanford graduate now. Before he turned thirty, he was married and a father, running a large gold mine in Tientsin, China, and highly prosperous.

Hoover seems to have been an almost brutally tough, obsessively hardworking manager; certainly charm was not the secret to his success. He soon broke with his employers and struck out on his own, mainly as a financier of mining projects, rather than as a manager of them, and did very well for himself. The Hoovers moved to London and lived in a large town house. That is, if one had the means to take part in its upper life. The servants were the best trained and the most loyal of any nationality.

It was also the period in which a good deal of the familiar institutional architecture of the United States was created: big corporations and universities, the first government regulatory agencies, structured and licensed professions, charitable foundations, think tanks. Liberal intellectuals like Walter Lippmann and Herbert Croly saw the establishment of a class of trained, technocratic experts as essential to the future of democracy.

In business, efficiency experts like Frederick Winslow Taylor and Frank Gilbreth systematized the operations of industrial mass production, down to the physical movements of workers on an assembly line. Psychologists like Lewis Terman invented tests that could be used to sort the population en masse. Hoover was a creature of the engineering division of this milieu.

Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standard of living and adds to the comforts of life. Biographers usually become well acquainted with their subjects not just as public figures but also as people who lead ordinary daily lives in the company of their co-workers, friends, and family.

Unless the subject is a monster, all that intimacy typically turns the biographer into a personal partisan. This did not happen with Whyte and Hoover. Biographers want psychological access, but Hoover, though the records he left behind are vast, has the quality of not being personally present in a life that, for a long while, produced one triumph after another.

All the evidence suggests that Hoover was genuinely devoted to what he construed as the public good, with the proviso that he wanted his devotion to be recognized. What gave him renown enough to make him a plausible Presidential candidate was his self-appointment as the manager of an international effort to get food into Belgium after it had fallen to the Germans during the First World War. Whatever qualities had made Hoover successful as an operator of mines in remote areas also made him successful at delivering relief under emergency conditions.

He borrowed money to buy food before he had succeeded in getting government assistance. He persuaded George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, and other leading authors to publish statements in support of his efforts. He negotiated with food brokers and shipping companies. At a time when the world adored people who had spectacular organizational skills, here was somebody using them not to build a factory or administer an empire but for purely humanitarian purposes.

Hoover was a logistical saint. In , after many years in London, Hoover returned to the United States, won the friendship and admiration of President Woodrow Wilson, and was made the director of a new government agency called the United States Food Administration, which was charged with managing the national food supply now that the country was a participant in the war.

He wound up not entering the race, but he eventually declared himself a Republican and was appointed Secretary of Commerce by President Warren Harding.