Some engineers, in the wake of the slaughter of World War I, even redefined democracy. Henry Gantt, a prominent Taylor disciple, bluntly repudiated “the average politician’s conception of democracy. His is the debating-society theory of government…[policies determined] not according to the laws of physics but by majority vote…. Real democracy consists of the organization of human affairs in harmony with natural laws.” Thorstein Veblen, a Stanford faculty member whom Hoover knew, talked of engineers forming a “directorate” and leading a revolution for “a more competent management of the country’s industrial system…. As a matter of course, the powers and duties of the incoming directorate will be of a technological nature…. The old order has most significantly fallen short…on the avoidance of waste and duplication of work; and on an equitable and sufficient supply of goods and services to consumers.”
Who better to spread such rational analysis through the culture than Hoover? He was, said Morris Cooke, a prominent engineer-philosopher, “the engineering profession personified.”
HOOVER HAD FIRST gotten into the big game in a large way by feeding occupied Belgium during the war. (Helping him were a select handful of young men of America’s elite, including several Rhodes scholars and William Alexander Percy.) To succeed, he had manipulated two warring Great Powers, Britain and Germany, which both initially opposed his effort. He had done so largely by using the press, and he subsequently told the Saturday Evening Post “the world lives by phrases.”
When America entered the war, Hoover returned to Washington. Woodrow Wilson named him food administrator, giving him vast if indirect powers over everything from pricing to distribution. He performed successfully enough that Louis Brandeis called him “the biggest figure injected into Washington life by the war.” After the war, he ran a European relief program that fed millions. He used power well. After Polish soldiers had executed thirty-seven Jews, he ordered the Polish government to end such incidents. Since he could halt food shipments there, the government obeyed. John Maynard Keynes called him “the only man who emerged from the ordeal [of the peace conference] with an enhanced reputation.”
In the aftermath of war, in Europe and America intellectuals on both right and left were asking questions about the nature of society. Hoover, as head of the American Engineering Council, entered the debate by injecting his own ideas, which merged those of the engineering profession, the Quakers, and Edmund Burke. He called for “abandonment of the unrestricted capitalism of Adam Smith,” condemned “the ruthlessness of individualism,” called for “ordered liberty,” bemoaned “the social and economic ills” caused by “the aggregation of great wealth,” and argued, “No civilization could be built or can endure solely upon the groundwork of unrestrained and unintelligent self-interest.” His answer to wasteful competition was “associational” activity in which producers in each industry cooperated to cut waste and match supply and demand. Hoover’s formulation answered the assault from the left on the brutality of industrialism and capitalism while recognizing some truth to the left’s charges; simultaneously, he rejected mass rule, demanded room for individual initiative, and welcomed rule by an elite meritocracy. He wrote, “[T]he real need…can be determined only by deliberative consideration, by education, by constructive leadership…. [Leaders] must be free to rise from the mass; they must be given the attraction of premiums to effort…. The crowd is credulous, it destroys, it consumes, it hates, and it dreams—but it never builds.”
In this context he said engineering’s “precise and efficient thought” could devise “a plan of individualism and associational activities that will preserve…individuality…and yet will enable us to synchronize socially and economically this gigantic machine that we have built out of applied science.”
THESE PUBLIC COMMENTS and many others signified his intense interest in politics, but his intense shyness when he had no defined agenda seemed to block him from running for office. Meeting people was agony. A political writer would later call him “abnormally shy, abnormally sensitive…and ever apprehensive that he be made to appear ridiculous…. He looks down so much of the time, the casual guest obtains only a hazy impression of his appearance.” Hoover himself complained of “the pneumatic drill of constant personal contact.”
So he initially chose to become a power behind the scenes and bought newspapers in Washington, D.C., and Sacramento, the national and state capitals. And he spoke of “those strong men [who] with practically no organization, but with definite purpose, exert a greater influence on the situation from the outside than from in.” He clearly intended to be one such strong man.
Soon, however, his head was turned. Democrats expressed interest in recruiting him as a presidential candidate, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “He is certainly a wonder and I wish we could make him President of the United States.” But he declared himself a Republican. While claiming to have no interest in public office, he did everything possible to procure it. He asked a friend how to get a cabinet post and was advised to run for president. In 1920 he did.
It was a strange campaign of and for the elite. He did not want to be seen as seeking the nomination, so his campaign was geared toward trying to generate a draft. To this end his backers mailed 21,210 letters soliciting support from every person listed in Who’s Who, every member of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, and every Stanford alumnus. At the Republican convention, he published a daily Hoover newspaper with contributions from such major writers as Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Robert Benchley, Heywoud Broun, and Dorothy Parker. Louis Brandeis announced: “I am 100 percent for him. [His] high public spirit, extraordinary intelligence, knowledge, sympathy, youth, and a rare perception of what is really worthwhile for the country, would, with his organizing ability and power of inspiring loyalty, do wonderful things in the Presidency.”
But he generated no support among professional politicians, and his campaign disintegrated. Harding offered him a cabinet post. Hoover chose secretary of commerce. Old Guard GOP senators balked and told Harding they would confirm him only if Andrew Mellon was named secretary of the treasury. Harding acceded and offered Hoover what he had asked for. Hoover then pretended, if only to himself, he was answering duty’s call, wiring Harding, “I should prefer infinitely not to undertake the burden of public office [but] I have no right to refuse your wish and I will accept the Secretaryship of Commerce.”
As commerce secretary he called for rational planning for everything from the economy to the home. Edward Eyre Hunt, another Taylor disciple, was thrilled; he noted, “Hoover sees in the Department of Commerce a great opportunity to make the work of the engineers effective on a national scale.”
HARDING TOOK OFFICE during a brief but severe recession, and one of Hoover’s first acts was to organize a conference on unemployment and the business cycle. The findings would yield fertile seeds that germinated later. When the economy recovered, Hoover took credit and said it proved that prosperity could be “organized”; it was simply a matter of “intelligent cooperative group effort [and] national industrial planning.”
Hoover then had the Federated American Engineering Societies, of which he was past president, survey waste in American industry. The survey’s methodology was farcical; reviewers discarded questionnaires that did not conform to their wishes. In not a single industry did the survey blame management for less than 50 percent of the waste; in one industry it allocated 81 percent of waste to management. Only more planning and technocrats, of course, could eliminate this problem.
Accused of standardizing all of America, he did not dispute the charge; he had his department set standards for hundreds of products, measurements, and tools, seeking standardization to increase efficiency and spur productivity leaps, simultaneously spurring mass marketing. Applying science to the home, he sponsored (and controlled) the Better Homes of America Association, a voluntary group of 30,000 women in 1,800 chapters, each with a public relations division disseminating Commerce De
partment advice. This group advocated everything from rationalizing domestic labor and using specialists in such things as child nurturing and juvenile delinquency to building low-cost homes, and helped get uniform building codes and zoning regulations adopted in thirty-seven states.
Hoover also spurred the growth of aviation. He controlled radio licensing and helped it grow; in 1920, Westinghouse established the first radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, but there would soon be hundreds. He helped make second mortgages a new financing vehicle by convincing Julius Rosenwald, who built Sears, to issue them at 6 percent interest. Banks, which had been demanding 15 percent, quickly followed. He annexed the Bureau of Mines and the Patent Office from other departments. He told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, “We are passing from a period of extreme individualistic action into a period of associational activities.” Then he tried to force the Justice Department to reinterpret anti-trust laws to accommodate his views.
Finally, Hoover built a tremendous public relations apparatus. Advertising was a new industry, expected to have vast power to mold opinion and engineer thoughts, and J. Walter Thompson was theorizing about it. Bruce Barton, a Hoover political supporter, wrote about Jesus as a salesman and called his parables “the most powerful advertisements of all time…. [Jesus] picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.” At the least, national advertising was knitting the country together in a web. Brand names born or made national by advertising then included Ivory Soap, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Crisco, Old Dutch Cleanser, Campbell’s soup, Milky Way, Popsicles, Heinz pickles, and Scotch tape. New lines of copy were creating moods; typical was, “Often a bridesmaid but never a bride? For halitosis, use Listerine.”
Hoover believed public relations could change behavior. He used the media bluntly. In five hundred working days as food administrator he had issued 1,840 press releases. He also used the media with sophistication. Leaks and a public relations campaign were his tools to bully the steel industry into accepting the eight-hour day. (It was inefficient and wasteful to work longer, he believed.) Meanwhile, he generated a national magazine story about his accomplishments in his first two years as commerce secretary, seeing to it that all Republican senators received it, and making sure it was “not marked as coming from this office.” In 1922 his book American Individualism appeared; in it he articulated his beliefs, which owed much to Edmund Burke. The New York Times judged his book “among the few great formulations of American political theory.”
Yet for all this—or because of it—by 1927 his political fortunes were fading. The public had tired of his constant doings. Professional politicians and GOP insiders despised him.
If Coolidge did not seek reelection—something by no means clear in the spring of 1927, although the two-term tradition suggested he would not—the leading contenders for the 1928 Republican nomination were Frank Lowden, the former Illinois governor who had been a favorite in 1920, Vice President Charles Dawes, Senate Republican leader Charles Curtis, and Senator William Borah.
Before the flood, the Survey, a national magazine considered quite progressive, reviewed the chances of these and other contenders, including dark horses. It did not mention Hoover. Even after the flood began, Literary Digest ran a story and cartoon about candidates chasing the GOP nomination. It did not mention Hoover.
Then, on Good Friday, 1927, the same day that torrential rains were deluging the Mississippi valley, Coolidge insulted Hoover when speaking to a group of White House reporters. The front page of the New York Times read, “Capital Mystified over Hoover’s Status with the President.” Privately, Coolidge, who called Hoover “Wonder Boy,” said, “That man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad.”
But Hoover’s ambition still churned. The flood was pouring through the belly of America, and it would be on every front page in the nation for weeks. Hoover could not have been unaware of his possibilities as he took charge. Since entering public life, he had mixed good works and ambition. Now he would mix them again.
Agnes Meyer, wife of Hoover’s confidant Eugene Meyer, a financier and later owner of the Washington Post and head of the Federal Reserve and the World Bank, wrote in her diary that Hoover was “consumed with ambition…. The man’s will-to-power is almost a mania. The idea of goodwill, of high achievement, is strong in him, but he is not interested in the good that must be accomplished through others or even with the help of others. Only what is done by Hoover is of any meaning to him. He is a big man but cannot bear rivalry of any sort.”
He had immense confidence, as much as Eads. After a conversation with him in 1927, the novelist Sherwood Anderson said, “I felt, looking at him, that he had never known failure.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE APRIL 22 CABINET MEETING in which Coolidge named Hoover head of the flood effort adjourned at lunch. Two hours later Hoover sat down in his office with the other cabinet secretaries involved, American Red Cross vice chairman James Fieser, and senior staff. Hoover had rivalries with nearly everyone present. Davis, the secretary of war, was a potential presidential candidate and also resented Coolidge having given Hoover authority to issue orders directly to the Army. Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon was far larger than Hoover in the world outside Washington and scoffed at his ideas. And Hoover had repeatedly tried to usurp the power of several secretaries of agriculture. Hoover ignored these rivalries now; this meeting had purpose. Even while everyone was taking their seats, he demanded a report on the situation.
DeWitt Smith of the Red Cross gave it. Exactly one week earlier, as reports had come in of the extraordinary rains, senior Red Cross officials had gathered late at night to plan for a disaster. Quickly they had concluded that they could handle the crisis in Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee. But the most likely scenario in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana would be beyond their capabilities. There would be 200,000 refugees at a minimum. If other levees broke, as expected, the number of refugees could rise above 500,000.
Hoover turned to Davis, who reported gloomily, “The Army Engineers believe nothing can be done to stop further breaks in the levees, and flood conditions will grow worse hourly.”
They had defined the problem. Hoover quickly shifted the discussion to organization. The Red Cross had set up a headquarters in Memphis. Smith asked that each government department appoint a senior liaison person with direct access to the secretary. Done. Hoover went further, soon wiring to Henry Baker, the Red Cross relief director in Memphis, authority “to use such government equipment as necessary and charter any private property needed.”
Finally came money. The Army, Davis said, had already spent $1 million with no way to recoup it. The Red Cross had a highly developed fund-raising apparatus. Davis suggested that the president set a specific target and ask for donations from the nation. Five million dollars was agreed upon as the initial goal, although all present knew it would be insufficient and a second call would have to be issued.
Meanwhile, a special train, including a railroad car for reporters, was being put together by the Illinois Central. As soon as it was ready, Hoover, Fieser, and Jadwin left for Memphis on it. They would arrive at 7 A.M. Jadwin would stay in the flooded region only briefly, but Hoover and Fieser would spend weeks there together, sleeping more than half their nights on a boat or train.
FROM THE FIRST, Hoover’s plans went beyond simply rescuing and maintaining hundreds of thousands of people. Enormous as that task would be, he intended to rebuild the region after it was devastated. Any more personal ambitions would be taken care of by the stories written and broadcast by the railroad car full of reporters. Hoover and Fieser both understood how useful the reporters would prove to all of their respective purposes. They jointly alerted all Red Cross personnel: “In the course of the next few weeks many representatives of magazines, newspapers, and feature syndicate companies will be in the flood area…. [G]ive these writers every possible cooperation.”
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br /> Fieser separately wired Washington headquarters: “Essential push all publicity angles next week or ten days for sake of financial drive”; “Secretary Hoover is magnetic center of publicity. Wire us currently anything useful for release by Secretary in interviews enroute”; “Keep us informed all fact matter with publicity value”; “Get pictures of Coast Guard and other boats flying Red Cross flags. Send them immediately to Douglas Griesemer, Director of Publicity, Red Cross, Wash., D.C. Also suggest similar photography by news photographers.”
Hoover’s staff, particularly George Akerson, fed the stories and photographs to reporters accompanying Hoover. Simultaneously, Commerce Department staff in Washington assembled clips from hundreds of newspapers and wired them to Akerson. Together, Akerson and the Washington staff would create a potent publicity machine.
Hoover himself concentrated on business. From the moment he got off the train in Memphis, he sought only people who could give him information. At first, there was chaos. For days Henry Baker had been fielding frantic calls for aid. He had worked sixty straight hours in an empty office building put at his disposal. Carpenters, electricians, and telephone and telegraph technicians had banged hammers around him. The day of the Mounds Landing break Army liaison officers had arrived from each of four Army corps located in the South and Midwest. Supplies were arriving as well. Baker was being drowned in detail. Finally, a Memphis banker cleaned up the lines of communication by arranging for men in forty towns to wire daily reports on conditions in their regions.
They still had the immense problem of distributing supplies and services throughout the flooded region. Baker recommended to Hoover and Fieser that they centralize policy but decentralize execution. If they put each county Red Cross chapter in charge of relief in its area, they would save money on administration, speed reaction time, and strengthen the Red Cross by building up local chapters. Chapters already existed in most counties. Generally, they were chaired by prominent men, such men as, in Greenville, LeRoy Percy’s son William Alexander Percy. And in case of scandal Baker pointed out decentralizing would put responsibility “squarely on the local community and not the national organization…. Therefore, criticism may be localized very definitely.”
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