The Great War and his commitment to relief for Belgium ultimately forced Hoover to dispose of his holdings. The timing was unfortunate for Hoover because by 1913, the mine was producing enormous profits from a variety of ores, and the war made its assets even more valuable. Eventually, the Bawdwin development became the richest silver and lead mine in the world. The mine’s expansion was a phenomenal achievement. Hoover constructed a tunnel 350 feet deep, despite the water level that had deterred the Chinese, and struck untapped veins of silver, in addition to the silver Hoover extracted from the slag heaps aboveground. It was a difficult task as well because of the rugged terrain, the distance from civilization, and the lack of a skilled workforce. Moreover, Hoover demonstrated that he had grown beyond a mining engineer. He became an international businessman, a problem solver, potentially a tycoon on the scale of Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford. Hoover enjoyed the challenges, but money was not his main objective, and he willingly gave it up when the time came. Still, had he chosen a different path, one wonders how high he might have risen in his chosen profession. Though Hoover could be highly focused, over his lifetime he consummated a multitude of ventures, many of them simultaneously. He preferred those involving people to those involving technology.50
When his contract was due for renewal in 1908, Hoover sold out to investor W. J. Loring for $150,000 and decided to strike out as an independent consultant. Moreing pleaded for him to stay, even offering the American the controlling interest in the firm. Business had tripled during Hoover’s seven years with the partnership, and his star quality attracted clients. However, Hoover felt he already had sufficient money, was tiring of the incessant travel, and wanted to spend more time in America. He also had temperamental differences with the British senior partner, who flaunted his wealth ostentatiously, speculated with company money, and harbored political pretensions. Moreing, whom Hoover considered a reactionary dilettante gliding along on the firm’s reputation, had run for Parliament as a Tory and lost. However, more than lifestyle differences were at stake. Hoover was moving in new directions and wanted greater latitude to pursue his own interests and become rooted in America. He was entering the period of his career where he had risen beyond the stage of a technician who patched up failing mines to a venture capitalist and an international businessman who raised capital, sought prudent investments, developed them, and received commissions enduring indefinitely, which would provide a stream of income so long as the mines produced.51
Meanwhile, Bert’s older brother, Tad, had earned his engineering degree at Stanford, worked for a London company, Minerals Separation, and struck out as a private consultant at about the same time as his sibling, with offices in the same building, which housed a cluster of Europe’s leading engineers. Tad was a savvy engineer, only a notch below Bert, even though he had gotten a later start because of a deferred education in engineering. Ultimately, he enjoyed a distinguished career as an engineer and a scholar and administrator at Stanford. The brothers had much in common, including fine minds, a rugged constitution forged in the outdoors, tenacity, a gift for mechanical objects, a fascination with engineering, practicality, common sense, and sound judgment. Tad never developed the enormously successful mines that his brother found in Australia, Burma, and Russia, yet few engineers did. Tad perhaps understood Bert better than anyone except Lou. He recognized that Bert combined the gift of Midas with the grit of hard work. Yet capital and mine owners sought Hoover as a consultant not simply for his success, but also for his reputation for absolute fidelity to his word. His sterling reputation for absolute honesty, along with his engineering virtuosity, attracted more clients than he could accommodate.52
At Bewick, Moreing, Hoover had earned a reputation as a man who could fix problems, who could deal with people, negotiate contracts, and discover potential wealth in remote regions of the world. With inexorable energy and the drive of a locomotive, he also possessed a keen intuition about people and about ores. In a profession in which only one in one thousand mines proved profitable, Hoover experienced failures, yet his success rate was among the highest of his time, and the enormity of some of his successes more than compensated for the inevitable failures. For an investor, a bet on Hoover was a safe bet. Moreover, Hoover was adaptable to differing climates, terrains, underground formations, and types of people; he was versatile, flexible, and inventive. He viewed obstacles as opportunities and was daunted neither by men nor by nature. Perhaps among his secrets were his zest for his work and his intrinsic joy in problem solving. He never gave up, nor deserted a friend or people in need. He eventually applied these skills and traits to fields beyond engineering. All American engineers who worked abroad had higher reputations because of Hoover’s place in the firmament. If they could not get Hoover himself, many entrepreneurs believed, the next best thing was an American engineer complemented by American technology. There was a high esprit de corps among the American engineers based in London, especially those housed in proximity to Hoover’s office, making it the epicenter of the profession. Many American engineers who had never met Hoover opened doors by claiming to be intimates. This remained true for decades. He was a legend in his profession beyond his own time.53
The timing of Hoover’s break with Bewick, Moreing was not coincidental. By 1908, his boys were about school age and he wanted them to be educated in America. By 1909, the Hoovers were spending more time at their real home in California. In 1912, they lived primarily in Palo Alto, San Francisco, and New York, with Hoover’s chief office in San Francisco. He continued to maintain foreign offices in London and St. Petersburg, and they retained the Red House. Once Herbert Jr. and Allan were enrolled in public school at Palo Alto, Lou found herself traveling less with her husband yet commuting to Europe frequently to be with Bert. Although Hoover still set a backbreaking pace, he became marginally less peripatetic than previously. However, much of his work went on inside his head. His chief job lay in thinking. He was, in effect, renting his mind to clients. Hoover became extremely selective in his choice of customers, and the bidding price for his time was high. He retained only a skeleton staff, hiring talented young engineers on an ad hoc basis and parceling out specific assignments, relying largely, though not exclusively, on Americans. He named John Agnew, a gifted British engineer he had met in Australia, as his chief of staff. Hoover chose the project, devised the plan of action, raised the capital for development, then delegated the details to Agnew and moved on to another venture. Although the American was famed for restoring mines to profitability, he was also astute in abandoning mines that did not fulfill their promise, cutting his losses. The scope of his projects actually increased; more than ever, he thought big. Gifted engineers found it a privilege to work for him because he rarely interfered with the details of their work and his name fattened their résumés. Hoover never incorporated nor gave his company a name. The only name on the door at any of his offices was “Herbert C. Hoover.” He did not advertise, nor did he need to. Bert accepted commissions or stock in enterprises rather than a flat fee for his work, which kept a torrent of income flowing for many years beyond his retirement as an engineer. This is one explanation for the fact that he lived the remainder of his life after 1914 with very little visible means of support.54
One of Hoover’s most ambitious projects lay on the eastern rim of the Ural Mountains, which separate Europe from Asia. The vast estate—sprawling some 1.5 million acres—was owned by Baron Meller-Zakomelsky, a distant relative of the Romanoffs. For generations, some 170,000 peasants had earned a living from the forests and mines, which held deposits of iron and copper. Unfortunately, the owners lived profligately and the property had declined. After a Scottish businessman refinanced the debt-ridden estate, Baron Zakomelsky gave Hoover carte blanche to restore the region to prosperity. The American engineer found the high-grade ore depleted, and thus he designed techniques to process the remaining low-grade ore cheaply in large quantities, importing American engineers from Butte, Montana, w
ith experience in mining low-quality iron ore. Because of the isolated location, Hoover constructed smelters near the mines, built factories to convert the metals into finished products, and laid 350 miles of railroads to deliver them to market. He restored the lumbering industry and produced turpentine, sulfuric acid, and acetone as by-products. Within a few years the once decaying outpost in the wilderness was showing profits of $2 million annually. Further, Hoover improved the lives of the peasants by paying them higher wages. He constructed schools, churches, hospitals, and theaters, believing that high morale inspires productive workers. The baron caught the reform fever and sold some land to peasants at reasonable prices. Kyshtym became a model town. The once sulky peasants developed a sense of community and professional pride. The businesses prospered until the Russian Revolution of 1917, well after Hoover’s departure in 1915. Animated by class resentment, the inflamed workers expelled the managers and attempted to run the industries themselves, resulting in a collapse of discipline, a decline in technical standards, and a relapse into abject poverty.55
In addition, Hoover developed the massive Irtysh properties, about a thousand miles up the Irtysh River from Omsk, a remote location in Siberia. Despite the bleak setting, the land harbored rich deposits of lead, zinc, iron, gold, silver, lead, and copper beneath the surface. Hoover was particularly impressed by the rich, deep veins of coal ore. The problem was that the minerals were intermixed, and transportation was totally absent. There were no roads, rail lines, or canals. Having raised $10 million for the project, including some of his own money, he constructed a lengthy railroad, smelters, and refineries. The prodigious undertaking included unearthing and smelting the ores and manufacturing from them such diverse products as metal doorknobs, steel rails, and even steamboats to ply the Irtysh River. As at Kyshtim, he erected a model town and raised the peasants’ morale. The enormous project was just on the verge of becoming highly successful when it was interrupted by the Great War, followed by the Bolshevik Revolution. The train of prosperity careened off the tracks into the abyss of chaos.56
At the request of the czar, Hoover also developed several remote mines previously worked by slave labor, which the Russian ruler had hidden from the world. After Hoover had witnessed the dilapidated slave camp, any illusions he might have had about the motives of the czar or the prospect for peaceful reform vanished. He had contempt for the brutal system the Russian autocracy represented, observing, “Some day the country would blow up” in a revolution. He had learned a great deal about the world during his mining career, and America looked better and better. He considered the British snobbish, the Germans arrogant, the Russian system corrupt and degraded, China hopelessly backward, and Europe aristocratically top-heavy. Long ago Benjamin Franklin had concluded that travel broadened one but did not necessarily make one a happier person. Hoover remained a tough-minded idealist who all his life admired the upward mobility in his own country over any other. After Russia, as he pondered his future, Hoover considered his alternatives and reflected that free will can be either a blessing or a curse and that life holds few certainties.57
Hoover’s aspiration for public service began around 1910, when he asked David Starr Jordan to write a letter recommending Hoover for a position in the Taft administration. In 1912, Jordan wrote a second letter on Hoover’s behalf to President Wilson, yet neither offered the prominent engineer an opportunity in public life. Hoover’s desire and perceived duty to influence history had many dimensions. He always wanted to write, and he poured out his passions in heartfelt letters to Lou and Tad, eloquent in their simple, unadorned affection. At sea, he would retire to his cabin at night to write journals about his experiences. His earliest attempts to realize his ambitions as a writer were in the field of mining. He began publishing in mining journals regularly, first in America, then in Europe. Between 1896 and 1912, Hoover published almost two dozen articles on the geological, administrative, and economic facets of mining in prominent professional journals. He even suspected, and his college mentors did as well, that he might have a future in academia. Certainly some major universities might have hired him on the basis of these early publications alone. His administrative credentials would have served him well as a college president—ideally, as president at Stanford. He might well have missed his calling in academia, he later reflected, but decided instead to undertake the relief of Belgium. He had by then padded his credentials. Hoover’s series of lectures, practical, theoretical, and ethical, about geological engineering at Stanford, and then Columbia, were collected and published as Principles of Mining in 1909. Lou reorganized, polished, and edited his prose. As a primer on the techniques of mining, it stood in the advance guard of its time. It was straightforward and accurate, with descriptive insight, drawing upon his experience. The brief study was used as a college textbook for several decades. More important to historians, the book included a chapter about the ethics of engineering. Hoover emphasized the obligations of engineers to employees and to the general public, supported labor unions, admonished businessmen that the days of laissez-faire had vanished and with them the roughshod treatment of workers, who deserved respect and decent pay and worked better when they got it. Drawing upon his experience with common laborers worldwide, Hoover concluded that well-paid workers with high morale produced more for the dollar than meagerly paid workers, who did just enough to get by. Mine administrators, and in fact employers in general, were obligated to demonstrate fairness and equity. Otherwise, turmoil would ensue, to the detriment of all concerned.58
Shortly after Hoover made the transition from partner in Bewick, Moreing to independent consultant, he and Lou embarked on a project that resulted in the most important book ever published by a husband-and-wife team who became a presidential couple. Lou became intrigued with the most inscrutable mining classic of the Renaissance, a codification of mining processes by a Saxon, George Bauer, writing under the pen name of Georgius Agricola. Agricola, a contemporary of Martin Luther, a physician and scientist, and one of the most learned men of his time, wrote in Latin, still the language of science. When he described mining processes that had no equivalent in ancient Latin, Agricola coined Latinate words, which had befuddled translators for centuries. Lou commenced an attempt to create the first readable English translation but was thwarted by the bastardized Latin used to describe the chemical and metallurgical procedures. Bert joined her effort by painstakingly replicating the experiments until he determined the meaning of the improvised Latin, a tedious process of trial and error. Lou, who read both Latin and German, worked from an earlier, defective German translation. The team approach solved the riddles incrementally. Earlier attempts had failed because Latin experts were not mining engineers and few mining engineers were as proficient in Latin as Lou. The couple devoted five years to their two-pronged labor of love: they loved each other and they loved their task. Lou, who had initiated the project, enjoyed challenges, both mental and physical, and was undeterred by the prospect of failure. Meanwhile, Bert continued his normal work, but the translation consumed virtually all their leisure time. The couple canceled social invitations and Hoover did not fish.59
In 1912, the translation was complete. For about five years it had consumed virtually all of their spare time and had almost become an obsession. The couple carried the bulky manuscript wherever they traveled and worked on shipboard. The book was published by their friend Edgar Rickard, and no expense was spared. Published in white vellum, the book duplicated the nearly three hundred woodcuts from the original manuscript. The book quickly became a collector’s item, a contribution to art, science, and the humanities. No modern president, nor any of the economic titans of the age—the Carnegies, Rockefellers, or Morgans—completed such an undertaking. However, Bert could not have done it without Lou. His spouse, who possessed skills in all the relevant fields, might have done it without Bert, but she had no desire to do so. Indeed, although they were listed as coauthors, Bert usually received most of the credit, eve
n though Lou’s contributions were more essential. Hoover’s contributions were nonetheless significant. He wrote copious footnotes that explained the chemical processes, an introductory biography of Agricola, and appendices that included all editions and translations in every language, as well as a bibliography of books describing mining technology to 1700. The couple dedicated the edition to the man who not only had inspired them both, but also had produced the match that lit the spark, John Casper Branner. The finely crafted book was reviewed favorably in the American Historical Review and was partly responsible for Hoover’s appointment to the Stanford board of trustees in 1912. The couple was jointly awarded the first gold medal issued by the Mining and Metallurgical Society of America, though most people referred to Bert as the author.60
Herbert Hoover Page 10