Herbert Hoover
Page 4
Hoover boarded the train for Palo Alto that summer with all his belongings, including a bicycle, and his modest savings, plus a surprise $50 given to him by Uncle John at the station. Having arrived at Newberg a small boy of eleven, he left not quite seventeen, a tall, gangly, yet muscular young man. He was opening a new chapter of his education. Grandmother Minthorn, now living in Oregon, tearfully kissed him good-bye and said, “I think thy mother would like to see thee now.”49 It might seem that the distance from Oregon to Stanford was much shorter than Hoover’s journey from Iowa to Newberg, Oregon. Actually, it was much greater.
TWO
Cardinal Red
Hoover stepped off the train at Menlo Park and pedaled his bicycle, packed with his clothes and meager possessions, the three miles to Palo Alto, in its own way as much a frontier outpost as West Branch, Iowa, or Newberg, Oregon. With the university’s buildings still incomplete, he took lodging at Adelante Villa, an old home converted to a boardinghouse for early arrivals. Construction workers raced to hammer and plaster together the campus’s buildings in time for an avalanche of students—no one knew exactly how many—in the midst of a vast pasture that would ultimately make Stanford the largest university, in geographical terms, in the nation. Hoover had not waited until his arrival in California to study for his second attempt to pass the entrance examination; he had crammed in the Minthorn barn every night since his failure. Now President David Starr Jordan and Dr. Joseph Swain, who also resided at Adelante Villa, helped to tutor Bert in their spare time. His chief tutors, however, were the two women who owned the boardinghouse.
The diligent, impoverished young Quaker paid for his room and board by performing odd jobs. He groomed horses and drove by buggy to Menlo Park to purchase groceries and pick up the mail for President Jordan, whom he also transported to his office on campus. Hoover’s work ethic was already ingrained, his goals were high, and from the beginning he understood his objective. Though he would enjoy college immensely, plunge into extracurricular activities with gusto, make lifelong friends, and meet the love of his life, he was driven by his goal to become an engineer, and a good one. No one anticipated how good, but they were about to find out.1
After a summer of intense study, he faced his second, and doubtless last, attempt to pass the entrance exam. The tutoring and hard work paid dividends. Bert fared well in geometry, algebra, and American history. He scored lower on literature, yet passed easily. Needing one more subject, an elective, he picked physiology, which deals with the structure and functions of the organs of the human body. Most of his data was gleaned from long carriage rides with Dr. Minthorn, who had discoursed upon his medical practice. Hoover also bought two used textbooks, read them from cover to cover during a full day and a sleepless night, and passed physiology the next morning. Yet his nemesis, English composition, continued to haunt him. He could express himself clearly and accurately, yet he did not give the meticulous attention to spelling, grammar, and punctuation that he applied to subjects he enjoyed. He failed English 1B and was admitted on the condition that he remove the deficiency before graduation, a stipulation that would hover for almost the entire next four years. In microcosm, 1B epitomized his academic career. Bert had come to Stanford to learn, not to make superlative grades, and his interests were selective. He excelled at subjects he found fascinating and went far beyond the required reading, while skimming others.2
Now a member of Stanford University’s pioneer class, Hoover became the first, and youngest, resident of Encina Hall, the incomplete men’s dormitory, which during the early weeks lacked electricity and hot water. Encina was a portion of a quadrangle that constituted the centerpiece of the new Stanford campus, enclosing a grassy commons. Carved from Senator Stanford’s enormous ranch, the campus was surrounded by fields and meadows that evolved into rolling hills and then rose to mountains in the distance. Beyond that lay the Pacific. The budding geologist felt like Alice in Wonderland, all the delights of his mind’s eye within his reach. Inwardly, Stanford represented an equally auspicious universe to explore. Students who enrolled at the school during its early years did so because it was different from other colleges; thus, it was likely that their characters were different from those of other students. They arrived at a university evolving on the spot, one that offered a different kind of college atmosphere. Isolated from urban life, the Stanford faculty and its students relied upon one another for companionship, entertainment, and the ambience of home. Each department formed a smaller family within this larger family. The Geology Department was tightly knit, with the students and faculty developing a special kinship. Faculty invited students into their homes for casual discussions on Friday evenings, and new ideas gestated informally.3
For Hoover, Stanford marked his first independence outside a predominantly Quaker environment. The work was rigorous, the pace breathtaking, offering Bert the opportunity and challenge to grow and succeed, liberated by more freedom than he had ever known. He would grow up with Stanford, and they would forever remain connected. The university would provide something Hoover had lacked since he was orphaned: a truly nurturing environment. Stanford provided some of the best years in his life.4
Under the hot California sun, an intellectual garden blossomed. Hoover was eager to sink his roots into the heart of his curriculum, geology and engineering. However, the renowned professor John Casper Branner, chair of the Department of Geology and Mining, notified Stanford officials that he had been unable to disengage from his obligations as state geologist for Arkansas until January and could not join the faculty until the spring semester. Hoover was disappointed, but he found other academic manna to feed his voracious mental appetite until Branner arrived. For the first semester of his freshman year, Bert declared a major in mechanical engineering. Through the fall term he took solid geometry, algebra, trigonometry, linear drawing, freehand drawing, and mechanical engineering.
To support himself, Hoover obtained a job in the registrar’s office. He also instigated a part-time paper route, picking up the San Francisco daily, delivering it on campus, and collecting the payment, keeping part of it as his profit. This required rising before dawn and working for several hours before his first class. It was a schedule he would keep throughout his life, habitually sleeping only five or six hours, relying on his robust stamina.5
When Branner arrived to begin the spring semester, Hoover’s morale soared. He promptly changed his major to geological engineering and signed up for as many Branner-taught courses as he could. Branner had a well-founded reputation as a superb teacher who took a special interest in helping his students. At the onset, only eleven pupils enrolled in the Geology Department, allowing the master mentor to devote a great deal of individual attention to each. Hoover, the brightest and most industrious, quickly became his favorite, and Branner strove to draw him out of his shell of shyness. “He rarely spoke unless spoken to,” a classmate said. “It wasn’t until later I realized how much it was possible to like him.”6
Hoover sparkled with the arc of a shooting star, much of it purely by instinct. He was brilliant and patient, and his passion for geology rivaled Branner’s. On the basis of Bert’s experience as an office boy in Oregon, Branner hired him to assist in routine office chores, such as filing and sweeping, but soon promoted him to laboratory assistant at a higher salary. Branner was delighted because he could delegate a task to Hoover and the aspiring geologist accomplished it without further ado. Unlike Branner’s previous lab assistants, he did not pester his instructor with details. “Most men fumble jobs, have to be supervised and directed,” Branner said. “But I can tell Hoover to do a thing and never think of it again.” The eminent professor considered Bert the best-organized student he had ever met.7
Branner did not believe in cramming the heads of students with miscellaneous facts. Instead, he opened their minds and inspired them to think independently, to imagine and innovate. He encouraged rather than repressed originality because he knew eng
ineers in the field must improvise. Branner gave his students a solid background in all the basic sciences. He emphasized a theoretical rather than an applied education for the engineers he taught, and he expected them to learn their practical tasks on the job. Branner significantly influenced Hoover’s personal method of dealing with subordinates in many aspects of his career, from mining to the presidency. Hoover wanted assistants who demonstrated the initiative he had demonstrated as a laboratory assistant. His later administrative style, which reflected, on a larger scale, Branner’s method, was to decentralize authority. That meant selecting able subordinates, giving them general instructions, and then permitting them the latitude to accomplish their tasks in their own way. He took responsibility for mistakes and allowed second chances. This motivated his subordinates, won their loyalty and affection, nurtured their creativity, and united them in a common goal. Hoover did not prescribe a precise manner for resolving a problem; he judged work by the result.8
Now taking the courses he craved, Hoover forged ahead in his second semester. He considered Branner’s Geology I, which met five days a week, intellectual caviar. His appetite for geology was insatiable. Soon he became the class star. Hoover packed his schedule with basic science and math courses and did not branch out into the humanities until his second year. Attending lectures and debates, he was especially interested in discussions that related geology to religion, including the theory of evolution, though he never considered his scientific learning in conflict with his Quaker beliefs. Only a freshman, he was in perpetual motion, dashing from one activity to another, skimping on sleep. During the second semester, he contracted measles, which affected his eyesight and compelled him to wear spectacles for two years.9
The relationship between Hoover and Branner proved symbiotic. Hoover spent the summer of his freshman year as a field assistant for Branner, surveying and mapping the outcroppings of rock formations in the Arkansas Ozarks. He then helped the professor compile the data and construct a plastic topographical map of the region, which won a prize at the 1893 World’s Fair. Hoover worked mostly alone, usually on foot, enjoying the outdoor exercise, which left him fit, tanned, and $200 richer at summer’s end. He lodged as the guest of local people, some of whom were moonshiners who suspected all strangers as “revenuers” but nonetheless were kind and hospitable to the young student and fed and housed him gratis. Bert scrupulously saved his paycheck, which proved essential in getting him from summer to summer.10
When he returned to Stanford for his sophomore year, Hoover moved out of the expensive Encina Hall and partnered with another student to supervise a cheaper boardinghouse they called Romero Hall. There, surrounded by poorer students much like him, Bert was drawn increasingly into political conversations with such new friends as Sam Collins, the oldest member of the pioneer class, Lester Hinsdale, and a young freshman, Ray Lyman Wilbur, also a transplant from Iowa with an aptitude for science who was earning his way through. Hoover’s working-class friends were concerned over the monopolization of campus offices and political influence by the Greek letter fraternities, which they considered arrogant and elitist. Despite representing a minority of students, the fraternities, by voting as a bloc, employing pledges as ward heelers, and adding big-name athletes to their tickets, created a political steamroller. The unorganized, less affluent students, known as the barbarians, or “barbs,” realized that they outnumbered the fraternity clique, and if they could organize, they might win elections and influence and assume control over the disbursement of funds collected by student clubs and athletic teams.11
Hoover’s organizational skills, ingenuity, and persuasive abilities would have proven an asset to any political group. He fit in with the barb faction because he, like them, was poor, humble, relatively powerless, and upwardly mobile. Yet Hoover’s character and nascent ideals also drew him to politics. His Quaker modesty and innate shyness caused some to underestimate him, failing to realize that he was a highly competitive person, a strong individualist who could nonetheless work with a team, even lead one. Even when involved in activities that brought him no personal gain, Bert obtained quiet satisfaction at winning in competition. Moreover, he was an idealist. When this idealism and his competitive streak were bound to a cause and propelled by his enormous energy and drive, he morphed into a daunting political dynamo who nonetheless remained relatively low-key, preferring to work behind the scenes. He was less a prototypical politician than he was an organizer, a task at which few excelled. At first, some were surprised by his successes and considered them flukes, yet when they recurred repeatedly, it seemed as unlikely a fluke as the same apple falling on the same man’s head every time he strolled through an orchard.
Hoover’s first foray into student politics involved a face-off with an elite fraternity clique that controlled athletics and the prestigious clubs. The poorer barbs, who outnumbered the “frats” and “jocks,” were steamrollered, though they were the larger faction, because they were splintered. The key to the barbs winning their first serious political fray in the spring of 1893 was turnout. They had the potential voters, but could they furnish sufficient incentives to lure them to the polls? A barb known as “Sosh,” for Socialist Zion, created an organization designed to overpower the fraternity faction by dint of numbers. Hoover’s friend Sam Collins brought the Quaker and Sosh together. It was like striking a match to dry tinder. Sosh announced his candidacy for student body president. He and his group, now including Hoover, were considered liberals, even radicals. Since they outnumbered the fraternity faction, they focused on uniting behind a single ticket and maximizing turnout. Sosh assigned the fledgling engineer-politician to recruit the poorest, previously scorned group of students to the barb standard. Unable to afford Encina Hall, they lived in workers’ shacks left from construction of the campus. They had never voted before, nor had anyone asked them to. The persistent Hoover went from shack to shack, from boy to boy, and talked to each individually. He was relatively inarticulate, yet this made him credible to the most humble students. Transparently honest, he treated them with respect. Meanwhile, freshman “Rex” Wilbur was assigned to harvest the freshman vote, focusing on Encina Hall. Both Hoover and Wilbur delivered. Although the barbs did not sweep all offices, Sosh won the presidency and they orchestrated a stunning political upset. Their newly assembled machine would need fine-tuning before the next election. Yet they were in the game for keeps, and so was Bert Hoover.12
Hoover’s gift for organizing was not channeled exclusively, or even chiefly, into politics. He made an even larger impact on Stanford’s blossoming athletic program. He donned Cardinal red and made the baseball team as starting shortstop in his freshman year. Quick, agile, sure-handed, and deft, he played the most difficult position in the infield. His playing career was cut short when a bad-hop ground ball dislocated the ring finger on his left hand, possibly even causing a hairline fracture, because the finger did not entirely heal for several years.13
Yet if Bert was a serviceable shortstop, he proved an outstanding manager for this team of gifted freshmen, who mowed down every amateur lineup they faced and remained undefeated at the end of regular play. Stepping up a notch, the collegians audaciously challenged the San Francisco professional team. Trailing 30–0 after five innings, the Stanford Cardinal asked that the game be called for “darkness.” Hoover’s job did not involve selection of a starting lineup or other in-game duties. Rather, he scheduled the games, printed and sold tickets, collected admissions, purchased equipment, and balanced the books, daunting multiple tasks. Because the field lacked fences, Hoover and his assistants circulated through the crowd collecting admissions. On one occasion, former president Benjamin Harrison forgot to pay and Hoover was the only person bold enough to approach the former chief executive and inform him that he must ante up like everyone else. Harrison smiled and handed the manager a dollar. When Bert tried to give the ex-president his 50 cents change, the Republican leader told him to keep it. Raising his voice, H
oover informed the distinguished guest that Stanford was not a charitable institution. Harrison compromised by purchasing additional tickets.14
Hoover also managed the Stanford football team, which like the baseball team fielded an all-freshman lineup during its first year. With barely enough players to assemble a squad, they could not conduct full scrimmages because they lacked sufficient teammates. All participants played both offense and defense, and some played every minute of every game. Although football is a fall sport, the team did not get organized until January and did not play its first game until mid-March of 1892. They challenged the established team of the University of California, Berkeley, which assumed the inexperienced upstarts would prove a pushover. The ambitious manager scheduled the game at a San Francisco stadium, which seated fifteen thousand, but he printed only ten thousand tickets, the maximum number of spectators anyone expected. Yet the Thanksgiving Day extravaganza quickly exhausted the tickets, and patrons continued to stream in. Bert, his assistants, and the Berkeley manager and his helpers borrowed buckets and washtubs from local housewives and collected admission in gold and silver coins, the currency of the day. Ultimately, it amounted to $30,000, enough to finance Stanford’s entire 1893 season. Incredibly, the game was delayed for half an hour because neither team had remembered to bring a football. Bert dispatched an assistant manager downtown to a sporting goods store via streetcar. The student bought two pigskins and rushed back while the opposing team captains argued at midfield. In yet another minor miracle, the Stanford team, some of whose players were involved in their first game, upset the highly touted Berkeley gridironers 14–0 in the kickoff of what became a traditional rivalry.15