Herbert Hoover
Page 16
Hoover had returned to America a tired and disgruntled man. Despite his misgivings about the flawed handiwork of the peacemakers in France, he now believed ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations was essential to cobble Europe back together. “Until peace is made, Europe cannot get back to work and production,” he warned. “Until peace is consummated, none of the European countries which have been at war can borrow money; none can reorganize their internal finances; raw materials cannot be obtained; industry cannot be restarted.”25
Hoover considered the League of Nations as vital to the successful implementation of the Treaty of Versailles and the maintenance of peace by providing international arbitration for disputes between nations. Without the League, the treaty itself would falter, national boundaries would remain scrambled, and communication, transportation, and trade would be paralyzed. During speeches in October he linked American recovery with Europe’s.26
Once again, Hoover faced the haughty, stubborn leader of the opposition, his old archenemy, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, who opposed the creation of the League because he was concerned that American membership would diminish national sovereignty, and who fought to reject the Treaty of Versailles. Yet Hoover could not placate Wilson either. The president vainly insisted that the treaty be ratified completely intact, refusing to budge as congressional approval of it without revision diminished. Hoover, less stubborn than the president, advocated ratification with reasonable Republican reservations rather than see it fail entirely. During a nationwide speaking tour, Wilson suffered a series of strokes that left him partially paralyzed and bedridden. Their leader now sidelined, the pro-League forces faltered. Hoover joined with former president William Howard Taft and other moderates to create the League to Enforce Peace, advocating a settlement based on the belief that a compromise treaty was better than no treaty. Without ratification, America would be denied a voice in continental foreign policy altogether. Hoover was willing to accept a concession; Wilson and Lodge, poles apart, wanted a treaty only on their terms, or else a diplomatic vacuum.27
Hoover’s support for a moderate treaty was based partly on economic considerations. Without peace, a large portion of world trade would be paralyzed, punishing America as well as Europe. Whatever one thought of European power politics, he warned, self-interest dictated approval of the treaty in revised form. Further, Hoover doubted Europeans had the backbone to enforce peace without America. He preferred full participation but reluctantly concluded that the pact could not be ratified without the diluting amendments. Hoover’s readiness to bargain soon earned him enemies in Washington. He was despised by the irreconcilables of the GOP, including Hiram Johnson, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Robert La Follette, for not throwing his weight wholeheartedly against the peace pact. He was equally reviled by others in both parties for his willingness to compromise. The logjam killed the treaty, just as it had disabled and disillusioned Wilson, leaving him a shell of his former self. Hoover rebounded to fight another day.
On November 13, 1919, the League to Enforce Peace endorsed the debilitating Lodge Reservations, and Hoover reluctantly followed suit. He appealed to the president to yield, yet received no response from the embittered recluse, who never spoke to him again. Nonetheless, the treaty was defeated in the Senate on November 19. Purists on both sides of the diplomatic divide voted against it. The Democratic Party had fractured, and the nation was left deeply divided. The treaty’s defeat gratified the irreconcilables, yet history’s verdict gratified virtually no one.28
Hoover’s return to America had sparked speculation about a possible run for the White House. He was widely admired for his food relief, administrative abilities, and character, and his prominent role in the treaty fight had only increased his presidential appeal. Yet Hoover lacked the drive that propels most successful candidates. Friends and surrogates pushed forward a diffident candidate for the 1920 Republican nomination. The campaign swelled among progressive journalists, a core of devoted Stanford alums, and former food relief partners. Hoover was especially popular among college students, university faculty, women, and labor leaders, yet he made no effort to harvest votes from specific interest groups. Many of his backers were uncertain of his political affiliation, and he received support for the nomination from both parties.29
The bid to nominate Hoover received little encouragement from the man himself. Over the course of the primary elections, he did not campaign in a single state, nor did he deliver any political speeches designed to boost his candidacy. On several occasions, he declared that he was not a candidate and urged supporters to cease their campaign. He disliked personal attention and opposed political pandering, patronage politics, and cultivating interest groups, and he considered cutting backroom deals unethical. Hoover explained that he lacked the temperament for politics. He considered himself too sensitive to endure political smearing and believed that he could do more good outside of Washington. When a former Stanford classmate offered to promote him for president, the reluctant Hoover replied, “Consulting my own personal inclination I do not want public office.” He explained, “This implies entry upon a road of self-seeking, whereas my view is that I should agitate for issues, not for myself.” Some doubted his disclaimers, but Hoover knew the presidency could be a prison.30
Hoover attracted early support from prominent progressive journalists in both parties, including Ray Stannard Baker, Ida Tarbell, and William Allen White. Nonpartisan advocates included Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, and the New Republic, edited by Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann. Other journalistic support, such as from the Boston Herald and the E. W. Scripps newspaper chain, seemed willing to back Hoover as the candidate of either party. On December 27, 1919, The Saturday Evening Post wrote that Hoover’s dearth of political ambition was refreshing and would make him a better president.
Hoover seemed all the more attractive because there was a power vacuum in each party. Wilson wanted a third term, which was impractical politically and impossible due to his health. None of the wannabes stirred much genuine enthusiasm. Therefore, early in the primary season, at a time when Hoover’s political loyalty was uncertain, the Democrats courted him tirelessly. Some advocated pairing Hoover with New Yorker Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the Democratic ticket in the hope that their youth and kinetic energy would stir voters. Roosevelt himself sought to recruit Hoover for such a ticket. On January 2, 1920, FDR wrote diplomat Hugh Gibson, “I had some nice talks with Herbert Hoover before he went west for Christmas. . . . He certainly is a wonder, and I wish we could make him president of the United States. There could not be a better one.” Yet Hoover believed he would be hitching his fate to a lost cause. Nonetheless, when Roosevelt was nominated for vice president on the Democratic ticket, Hoover wrote generously, “If you are elected you will do the job properly.”31
The longer Hoover could remain above the fray, his best-informed advisers knew, the better his prospects. The moment he declared a party allegiance, the deference given him would vanish and political attacks would begin. Yet it was unrealistic to believe he could remain uncommitted indefinitely and win a major party nomination without exerting himself and personally directing his own campaign. The GOP Old Guard was unlikely to permit his nomination, preferring a more pliable man such as Warren Harding or an utterly predictable candidate like Calvin Coolidge. Republicans did not believe they needed Hoover on the ballot to win. Disenchanted with Wilson’s leadership in the controversy over the Treaty of Versailles and the domestic turmoil of 1919, the nation was likely to vote against the incumbents, which would make a Republican victory relatively easy with a nominal candidate.32
On March 30, 1920, Hoover made clear his party affiliation by wiring a supporter in California that he would not repudiate a campaign being waged for him in the GOP primary in that state, although he would not actively campaign. His chief objective was to discredit his major opponent in the primary, arch-isolationist Senator H
iram Johnson, an irreconcilable enemy of treaty ratification. Hoover had been a member of the Republican Club of New York from 1909 to 1917 and had cast his only presidential ballots for Republican William McKinley in 1896 and Bull Moose Republican Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. His family and most of the communities in which he had been raised in Iowa and Oregon were predominately Republican. Entering the primary was a risk for Hoover; losing his home state would be an embarrassment. Moreover, Johnson controlled a slickly oiled political machine capable of steamrolling opponents. Johnson polled about 370,000 votes to some 210,000 for Hoover. It was not a bad showing for a novice politician against a grizzled veteran, and it did seriously cripple Johnson’s chances of capturing the nomination. However, Hoover did not win a single delegate, and his embryonic campaign was virtually stillborn. Both men were wounded by the outcome.33
Hoover’s backers entered him in several later primaries, yet his campaign never gained traction and he garnered few delegates. Beginning in late May, Hoover’s enthusiasts traveled to Chicago for the GOP convention. By then, command of the campaign had been handed off to George Barr Baker, a close associate of Hoover from New York. The engineer himself did not attend the conclave. There was a great deal of excitement surrounding Hoover in the galleries, and his friends, such as William Allen White, hoped a stampede among the delegates might develop in the likely event of a deadlock among the front-runners, General Leonard Wood, former Illinois governor Frank Lowden, and Hiram Johnson. The predicted deadlock materialized, yet overnight the party chieftains resolved to nominate Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio. Harding’s chief recommendation was that nobody hated him and nobody feared him. A glib politician, Harding was not a polarizing figure and stood to help the GOP in the swing state of Ohio.
Hoover polled a paltry nine and a half votes on the final ballot. He was not seriously disappointed by the outcome, and likely his friends were more downcast than he was. Hoover conferred with Harding after the nomination and attempted to persuade him to back ratification of the League of Nations with reservations. Harding appeared to agree, but he wavered after talking with opponents of the League. During the campaign he straddled the issue, suggesting that possibly a new type of organization could be created, less objectionable than the League, which the United States might join, a scheme that was promptly forgotten. As a practical measure, Hoover supported Harding, destined to be a certain winner, whose Democratic opponent, Ohio governor James M. Cox, had an uphill battle against public weariness with Wilson’s stubborn refusal to compromise over the League of Nations and his insistence that America play a guiding role in world affairs. Harding’s campaign slogan, “Back to Normalcy,” resonated with voters. On the remote chance that Cox upset Harding, the Democrat would inevitably face a Republican Congress in which he could never muster a two-thirds majority to ratify the treaty. Deliberately or unwittingly, Hoover had impressed Harding, which would open doors for him to take a cabinet position.34
FDR biographer Patrick Renshaw notes the effect that timing had on Hoover’s reputation. “Had he won as a Republican in 1920, it is intriguing to think counterfactually for a moment,” Renshaw writes. “Presumably, he would have presided over the prosperous 1920s and left office in March 1929 one of the most admired and successful presidents in history.”35 Certainly in 1920 no one could have foreseen the election of 1928, much less the stock market crash of October 1929.
Hoover’s party loyalty, his standing as a gifted administrator, and Harding’s personal respect for him led to an invitation to join the new cabinet as secretary of commerce. Hoover accepted, conditional on his being given a voice in everything that dealt with national or international commerce, sometimes overlapping the departments of other cabinet officials. Harding relied on him heavily. Early in his tenure, Hoover became involved in a greater humanitarian undertaking than the feeding of Belgium and postwar Europe, providing sustenance to the fledgling Soviet Union, which was teetering on the brink of starvation. At Versailles, Hoover had attempted to lift the food blockade on the Soviet state clamped down by the Allies, and also to provide food relief through the vehicle of Norwegian Arctic and Antarctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen, acting as Hoover’s proxy. The Allies had intervened in the Russian civil war, backing the White Army opposed to Lenin’s Bolsheviks, and the Communist leader was suspicious of their motives. The Allies were reluctant as well; France initially blocked transmission of the offer to Lenin. Hoover ghosted all the correspondence signed by Nansen and masterminded the overtures for the Norwegian, a figurehead with no diplomatic experience. The efforts to provide food relief to the Communist state foundered upon the shoals of dogma. The Western nations insisted on a truce in the Russian civil war. The embattled Soviet leader snubbed that stipulation and coupled his rejection with a diatribe against capitalism, which made food relief both ideologically and logistically awkward at that time.36
By 1920, the Russian civil war was winding down and Hoover’s place in Harding’s incoming cabinet provided a forum to dispatch unilateral relief furnished by the United States. By this time, conditions in the former Russian Empire had deteriorated from hunger to outright famine. Early in 1921, reports reached America that a torrid drought, compounding the destruction of the Great War, revolution, civil war, and the collectivization of agriculture, had devastated the Soviet state. The broiling heat and lack of rain rivaled Dante’s inferno. There was not even seed corn for planting, because the peasants had eaten it, so the coming harvest would be minuscule. There were few draft animals, because the farm families had eaten them as well, and had also devoured their pets, including rodent-killing cats. The dogmatism and brutality of the Bolsheviks contributed to the misery. They had ruined the economy and wrecked the infrastructure of men and machines needed to perform skilled labor, employing policies based more on dogmatic political theory than on realism. Mines and factories manufactured 75 percent less than before the war. Railroads carried less than 7 percent of prewar freight. Once an exporter of foodstuffs, the one-party nation could now not feed itself. Suffering increased throughout the Communist state but was most severe in the Volga Valley and in Ukraine. Foreign investors avoided the Soviet Union as inexorably as the pestilence perpetrated by nature and men fastened its grip.37
In July 1921, the celebrated Russian writer Maxim Gorky directed an open letter to the Western nations pleading for aid for his struggling country. When Gorky’s letter fell into Hoover’s hands, it had reached perhaps the only man in the world capable of providing adequate nourishment to Bolshevik Russia, an international pariah that had already threatened invasion of Poland and the Baltic nations and had fomented Red revolutions throughout Europe, most conspicuously in Hungary and Germany. Hoover exemplified the experience, the heart, the skills, and the will to feed the needy. Moreover, as an influential figure in the American government, he could tap the world’s most bounteous food supply, unravel red tape, and overcome logistical obstacles to speed provisions to their destination. Hoover found Communism offensive, nor did he sympathize with the previous czarist regime, but he disliked starvation more. He must persuade the American people, his own government, and the Bolsheviks that the task of collaboration was worthy and doable and that diametrically opposing ideologies could somehow find common ground. When some Americans objected that aiding the Soviets might clamp the iron grip of the dictators upon their nation, he exclaimed: “Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed.”38
Walter Lyman Brown, the chief ARA official in Europe, opened negotiations with Maxim Litvinov, the English-speaking assistant people’s commissar of foreign affairs, at Riga, Latvia, to consummate an agreement in mid-August 1921. Hoover insisted that the Soviets release all American political prisoners held in Russian dungeons. The Soviets complied. Brown stipulated that the ARA must operate under its normal ground rules, some of which were alien to Bolshevik dogma. The Soviets must permit ARA volunteers free movement, exemption from search, and immunity from
arrest. Food would be distributed solely on the basis of need and Russian assistants hired on the basis of merit alone. These conditions were difficult to implement, because nothing in the Soviet Union was done on the basis of need or merit. The ARA would pay for food and transportation to the Russian borders. Within Russia, the Soviet government would pay for storage and transportation. In addition, $10 million of czarist gold the Bolsheviks had seized must be contributed, funding a small portion of food purchases. The gold was given reluctantly, because much of the czarist reserve was being used to finance revolutions throughout Europe. The ARA pledged to avoid participation in any political activities within Soviet Russia. On August 20, Brown and Litvinov signed the Treaty of Riga, defining the dimensions of the ARA’s authority in Russia. Although the Soviets fudged on some provisions and the two groups elbowed for power, for the most part, both sides complied. There was less friction at the top level than among lower-level party functionaries and ARA volunteers.39
Russia’s agricultural infrastructure had disintegrated under the burden of the Great War, subsequent droughts, the civil war, and the forced collectivization of farms and incitement of class warfare against wealthy peasants, or kulaks, who possessed agricultural expertise, during the period of war Communism in 1920–21. War Communism was supplanted by Lenin’s pragmatic retreat to limited capitalism under the New Economic Policy of 1921, a necessity detested by the doctrinaire Bolsheviks. Ideologically, the peasants were defined as mere paraphernalia to the urban working class, the nexus of pure Marxist theory. Yet theory uncomfortably fit reality. More than 80 percent of the Russian population was rural, and by 1920 the working class, the theoretical vanguard of orthodox Marxism, numbered as few as 1.2 million amid a population of 150 million. The constant upheavals and diminution of the peasants had devastated the countryside. Shipments of grain from the rural areas shrank drastically. Moreover, strikes of recalcitrant workers, peasants, and transport operators, bickering for the crumbs of spoils, paralyzed the economy at the precise time the arid heat baked the dry fields.40