Herbert Hoover

by Glen Jeansonne

  The university did not penalize Hoover for returning late from his summer of mapping with Lindgren, and gave the star student eight credits for his summer surveying. He would need every one of those credits to graduate. During the fall semester of 1894, Hoover plunged into his work as treasurer, reorganizing student financing and implementing bookkeeping methods that would be adopted by his successors. He complained that administration of the athletic teams, which generated the greatest revenue but also incurred the largest debts, consumed too much of his time. Yet Hoover was so conscientious that, although he achieved his goal of slicing through the Gordian knot of student finances, his own grades suffered. The aspiring geologist was pulled in different directions: a social whirl with Lou, the mundane daily grind that combined academic work with part-time jobs to support himself, and student government. The job as treasurer required infinite patience, yet he felt that it needed doing and he earned the appreciation of his fellow students for his unselfish, unremunerated attention to the task at hand. If Diogenes had set out to find an honest man on the Stanford campus, he could have stopped by Bert’s room at Romero Hall.31

  Bert redoubled his classroom efforts, exploited his abilities to prioritize and to manage stress, and exerted every ounce of his resolute stamina. He did not compromise on his commitments to Lou, to the student association, or to his part-time jobs. Neither did he dodge any of the tough courses. During his final semester, he took history, ethics, hygiene, economics, and three geology courses. This involved a steady grind in and outside class, yet Bert thrived and reaped personal and academic rewards. He had to obtain university permission to carry an overload, yet he focused on graduating on time because he was exhausting his money. Miraculously, he passed nineteen credits, removed the conditions from the fall courses, and could add eight hours for his summer work with Lindgren toward graduation. Bert’s final semester represented the conquest of mind over matter.32

  Yet a major roadblock stood between Bert and his AB in geology: English 1B. Since failing it on his entrance exam and being “conditioned” to remove the deficiency, he had flunked the dreaded exam on every subsequent try. But another fluke soon appeared. One of Hoover’s sympathetic professors—and there were many—found it incomprehensible that Stanford would deny a diploma to the most exceptional geology student it had ever produced. The noted paleontologist Professor J. P. Smith pondered how Hoover could write scientific papers with impeccable stylistic clarity, yet repeatedly fail the 1B exam. He finally solved the riddle. As a student, and later as an author, Hoover infinitely, patiently, inexorably revised his work until the meaning was precise and the prose and grammar were impeccable. He could not do this on the 1B exam because he was timed. Smith took Hoover’s best paper, had him revise it out of class for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and even neatness, and brought it to the chair of the English Department. He argued that no student who could communicate so clearly, and who had satisfied his professors by writing exacting scientific treatises, should be denied a Stanford degree. Although this was a bit irregular, the English chair agreed and scribbled “passed” across the top of the paper. It had been a close call, closer yet because Hoover could not have financed an additional semester. Stanford had a heart, and Hoover would never forget it.33

  It would be misleading to overemphasize the magnitude of Hoover’s multifarious activities as an undergraduate without also remembering the sound education the young geologist achieved in the classroom and in the laboratory. For a small, private university in the foundational stage, Stanford attracted an extraordinarily talented faculty and student body. An unusual number of its graduates became successful in law, politics, science, athletics, and a vast array of other pursuits. Moreover, many of them remained connected and reached out to one another across barriers of time and distance. The engineers were a particularly close, gifted group. Professor Branner grounded his students firmly in mathematics, geology, chemistry, physics, and civil engineering to a greater degree than most prominent professors. Though rigorous, he gave them unbounded individual attention and permitted them the freedom to explore. Inside and outside the classroom, Hoover absorbed a first-rate education and a love of his craft and of his alma mater that remained with him all his life. To some extent, before and after Stanford, Hoover was self-educated, but this education was layered upon the sound, solid schooling he received at Stanford. In his professional life, he always gave preference to Stanford engineers.34

  On May 29, 1895, Hoover received his AB degree. He did not make the rounds to tell his friends good-bye, because he felt confident he would see them again. His idealism had been sharpened, not blunted, by his college experience, yet the practical side of Bert Hoover always remained dominant. He had set foot on the Stanford quad as an unsophisticated seventeen-year-old from a small-town upbringing, raised almost exclusively by members of his own religious sect. He was leaving his alma mater a professionally trained engineer who had forged abundant friendships that were destined to endure and were bound in common endeavors. He had learned to be efficient at managing his time and energy and had acquired an appreciation for his own leadership abilities. He had found he could be elected to office, yet he had also learned that popularity mattered less to him than making a contribution. He discovered that he could match wits with the best students in California and felt confident he could succeed in the wider world. Hoover was still naïve when he left Stanford, but he was also flexible and ambitious, and the budding mining engineer had demonstrated an ability to get along with people. Like most college graduates, he had mixed feelings. He was leaving a world he loved and entering an uncertain, larger universe.

  In the late spring of 1895, the newly minted engineer stepped into a world that would challenge his wit, grit, and perseverance. The nation was writhing in the throes of the Panic of 1893, which made finding any type of engineering job almost hopeless. Yet Hoover had beaten the odds before. Those who knew him at Stanford knew that betting against him was imprudent.

  THREE

  The Great Engineer

  In 1893, a financial panic struck the nerve center of the American economy in the East and slowly crept westward, reaching the Pacific almost simultaneously with Herbert Hoover’s graduation from Stanford. Businesses and banks failed, workers were laid off, unemployment skyrocketed, and a contagion of fear intimidated Americans from buying, investing, borrowing, or lending. As the young Hoover prepared to launch his career, job opportunities vanished. Most men with money to hire workers balked, reluctant to invest in hazardous enterprises. In normal times, Hoover’s gilt-edged credentials, with the support of Professors Branner and Lindgren, would have made him the pick of the new litter of engineers. Yet, despite his network of connections, Branner could not find a single job for his protégé, the best student he had ever taught.1

  Hoover’s transition from academia to the harsh world of reality was eased by one final summer mapping the topography of California’s High Sierras for Waldemar Lindgren. With money in his pockets, Bert considered working permanently for the government, which might bring security but would impose a low ceiling on his ambitions. Already he reminisced nostalgically about Stanford. In a letter to a friend written during the first summer after graduation, Bert confessed, “But this is life—the other was happiness.”2

  Then the first stage of his career arced downward when the federal bureaucracy shrank via panic-driven layoffs and he was laid off in the fall of 1895. Briefly, Hoover considered enrolling in graduate school at the Columbia School of Mines or at Johns Hopkins. Branner advised him to keep active in the field by penning scientific articles, which Hoover did, publishing half a dozen essays about mining in engineering quarterlies in the following months. Hoover’s heart, nonetheless, always lay in fieldwork, and he began making the rounds in the region he knew best, the Grass Valley goldfields, to seek a job as an engineer. To his dismay, he found a college education a liability during hard times. Many mine supervisors considered college me
n arrogant elitists, afraid to soil themselves by hard work, unable to meld with common miners. They preferred men who rose steadily through the ranks. Accepting reality, Hoover learned to conceal his Stanford qualifications and humbly accepted a job starting literally at the bottom—as an underground “mucker,” wielding a pick, pushing and loading an ore cart, working first at the Reward Mine, then at the Mayflower Mine, on ten-hour night shifts, seven days a week, for about $2.50 per day. After some initial hesitation, the miners, many of Cornish extraction, accepted him, and mutual respect resulted. Hoover bonded and learned lessons about both mining and people the hard way. In February of 1896, Bert took a daring leap of faith. Aspiring to move up, though he knew the odds were long, he quit his job and joined Tad, May, and his cousin Harriette Miles, whose father, his uncle Laban, had been an Indian agent. When he moved in, the four shared a house in San Francisco, and Hoover’s family was united for the first time in many years. Bert enjoyed a brief vacation and then sought greater professional opportunities.3

  Instead of returning to the mining fields, Bert audaciously approached Louis Janin, a French-born mining engineer employed part-time by the Rothschild enterprises who was the most renowned consultant on the West Coast. If Bert could not obtain a position under Janin, his referral might help. Over lunch, Janin patiently explained that he had a lengthy backlog of applications and no openings, except for a typist. Boldly, Hoover accepted the clerical job, explaining that he had filled similar positions for the Oregon Land Company and had handled Professor Branner’s office correspondence. He might derive valuable experience about the business side of becoming a mining engineer just as he had learned the workman’s perspective by working with manual laborers at the Reward and Mayflower mines. Janin started Bert at somewhat less than he had made shoveling ore, yet Hoover believed proximity alone might open doors. Janin soon found in Hoover the same flawless execution that had pleasantly surprised Branner in his laboratory assistant. With a minimum of instructions, Bert produced a maximum of work. Janin gradually increased Hoover’s responsibilities. He sometimes dispatched him to inspect mines and to temporarily manage properties. At the office, Janin asked Hoover, in collaboration with an eminent attorney, to edit and polish a legal brief for a case dealing with mining assets in the High Sierras for which he was serving as an expert witness. Hoover completely rewrote the brief, explaining that his boss and the famed attorney were starting from a false premise and reasoning to fallacious conclusions, peppering his own brief with minute, specific details. Astounded, Hoover’s boss and the lead attorney asked how he knew so much about the mines in question, conceding that his arguments made good sense. Bert explained that he had mapped the region for three summers with Waldemar Lindgren and had worked as a mucker in the mines described in the lawsuit. Hoover’s version was adopted and Janin won the suit. This proved the first of many surprises. Janin had opened an oyster and found a pearl. He promoted Hoover again and increased his salary to $3,000 annually. The young Stanford alumnus became a jack-of-all-trades. His chief job was to scout mines for investment potential, but he also managed mines and helped in the office as a business consultant. Though his grammar remained imperfect, Janin found Hoover’s field and office reports succinct and logical and his judgment reliable. His mind could store information like a vault and he could bear a strenuous workload without stress. Janin considered him the most capable young engineer he had encountered in years, and he appreciated his humility and his selfless devotion to the task at hand.4

  In October 1897, the prestigious British mining firm of Bewick, Moreing asked Janin to recommend an experienced mining engineer of at least thirty-five years to manage its ten gold mines in Western Australia and to prospect for additional ones. A gold rush comparable to that in California in 1849 was under way in Australia. American engineering technology was the world’s best, and someone who worked for Janin would be the best of the best, the Britons reasoned. Hoover had worked for Janin for about eighteen months, and the astute consultant knew he might earn a great deal of money employing him over time. Nonetheless, he decided unselfishly that the opportunity was too great to deny the young man. He wrote a long, glowing letter strongly urging the British firm to hire Hoover, stretching the truth by stating that Bert, only twenty-three, was “not quite 35.” The British firm telegraphed an offer to Hoover without even a preliminary interview. The untried engineer, who grew a beard and mustache to conceal his youth, started at $150 per week, which was equal to his monthly salary under Janin. The new position placed Bert on the fast track to making him a mining superstar. Over the long term, it changed his life, tangibly and intangibly, in profound ways no one could have predicted. Janin’s generosity was a gift, a break in the direction of Hoover’s destiny, which had been loping along and now leaped ahead. As in other cases in which fate was bountiful, he passed along his good fortune. His first act was to notify Tad, urging him to quit his job and to enroll in Stanford’s engineering school at Bert’s expense. Bert also pledged to support May.5

  Hoover took a roundabout route to Australia, traveling east by transcontinental rail with visits in West Branch and New York, and crossing the Mississippi River for the first time. Then he embarked by steamer to London, boning up on Australia by reading books he had purchased in San Francisco and New York. Wearing his best double-breasted blue suit, he met his new employer, Charles Algernon Moreing, whose family had cofounded the partnership in 1750. Having begun with a single mine in Cornwall, the firm now constituted an octopus with tentacles wrapped around the globe. The company controlled coal mines in Wales, the African Transvaal, and China; gold mines in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and West Africa; a tin mine in Cornwall; a turquoise mine in Egypt; lead-silver mines in Cornwall and Nevada; and copper mines in Canada and Queensland in northeastern Australia. Not satisfied, they scoured the globe for lucrative properties. They acted as consultants to other companies and managed specific mines for a fee. Hoover’s job in Australia was to wring greater profits out of declining mines and find new ones to exploit. Communications were slow to the island continent, and Hoover would be largely on his own, with only general instructions, and would learn to improvise. Hoover and his boss hit it off at the initial meeting, with the older man commenting that the American seemed well preserved for thirty-five. They spent the weekend brainstorming at Moreing’s opulent country estate. Hoover was impressed, yet also mortified, for he had glimpsed the hordes of London’s poor. After a brief tour of British historic sites and the bucolic countryside, he boarded a steamer bound for the austere Australian desert he would call home for almost two years.6

  Departing Britain on a bleak winter morning, he crossed the Channel to France, then proceeded down through Italy, crossed the Mediterranean to Egypt, plowed southward via the Red Sea, then crossed the Arabian Sea to India. The last leg took him below Java to Albany, a port town in southwestern Australia, where the passengers were quarantined for two weeks because a few had contracted smallpox. Hoover was unimpressed by some of his fellow travelers. “The Englishmen on board are a thorn in our sides,” he wrote. “They are all alike, no more expression than a nail keg; all combined could not show the intelligence of an American 10-year-old.” Bert found the British snobbish, bland, humorless, dull, and clannish. Perhaps the most onerous leg of the journey involved the poverty and desperation he encountered at Port Said along the Suez Canal. “As one goes up the street,” he wrote, “you are followed by a swarm of would be guides and dealers in all sorts of truck.” The description is vivid: “Beer sellers with tanks on their backs and a glass in each hand, boys with watches, photographs, men with cigars, women with fruit.” In a long letter permeated by descriptive prose, Hoover seemed appalled by the people desperate for Western cash at every corner.7

  When Bert arrived at the mines in Western Australia, conditions were primitive, the heat searing. For three weeks the temperature remained in triple digits around the clock. Wind gusts blew through the outpost at Coolga
rdie, carrying scorching sand, which penetrated clothing, shelter, and belongings. Hoover described a landscape that was flat and bleak. The desert was monotony in triplicate: bush, bush, bush. “Some gray brown and some brownish gray.” There were “no birds, no animals, no beasts except ants and flies, chiefly flies. Graves everywhere, indicating the spot his water bag became empty and warning others to bring larger bags or more bottles.” At night, the men sometimes camped on the desert floor or crammed, twelve to a room, in a cheap inn where the sheets had not been changed in weeks. If a man died between stops, burial was burdensome. The sand was too shallow for a proper grave; one would have had to dynamite into the bedrock. In their haste, gravediggers sometimes buried two to a grave. One claimed to have struck gold while digging a grave and quickly abandoned the corpse.

  Surface water could be found only every fifty or sixty miles. Thunder rumbled nightly, but it rained down dust with no water in it. In the vast stretches of Western Australia, it was easy to get lost, hard to be found. Often horses were supplanted by the more durable camels. Hoover sometimes used a bicycle, and later, a primitive motorcar. Unlike in American goldfields, firearms were absent, banned by the government. The population was enticed by a single obsession: gold. Thousands of prospectors poured into the goldfields, seeking a materialistic form of nirvana.8