Herbert Hoover

by Glen Jeansonne

  Despite his public reticence, enthusiasm for a Hoover candidacy continued. Michigan Republican leader Justus S. Stearns was asked by the Grand Rapids Herald, “What are we going to do for a presidential candidate since Mr. Coolidge has kicked the chair from under us?” Stearns replied, “Nominate a better one. Hoover!”7 Henry Ford, an ardent Hoover backer, said of the engineer, “He knows the working man’s point of view,” adding, “Hoover can bring capital and industry together.”8 Senator George H. Moses of New Hampshire, a political admirer of the commerce secretary, explained the dynamics of the Hoover campaign. “He has not said so, but we are making a candidate of him. He is attending to his job as secretary of commerce, but we are carrying him to the people.”9 Another U.S. senator, Frederick H. Gillett of Massachusetts, said that Hoover “has the gift of infecting his subordinates with his own energy and inciting in them the most strenuous loyalty; he has an unblemished character, and, in my opinion, is extraordinarily equipped to make a great president.”10 Former president William Howard Taft and former New York senator Elihu Root counted themselves among Hoover’s prominent supporters.11 He also won ringing endorsements from famed inventor Thomas Edison and from Hollywood moguls Louis B. Mayer and Cecil B. DeMille.12 The advertising impresario and bestselling author Bruce Barton toiled for Hoover, even offering him free lessons on how to polish his speaking style, which Hoover declined.13

  No issue dominated American life during the twenties more than the federal ban on alcohol, which had become law with the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1920. In February 1928, during the Ohio primary campaign, Senator William E. Borah of Idaho, a passionate defender of the ban, mailed a questionnaire to leading GOP contestants to determine their position on Prohibition. A light drinker, Hoover had abstained during Prohibition on the grounds that he favored obedience to the law. He believed Prohibition had increased industrial efficiency but was impractical without concurrent state enforcement. Hoover did not complete all of Borah’s questions, and he attempted to tread a middle path. “Our country has deliberately undertaken a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose,” he wrote. “It must be worked out constructively.”14 (Almost every historian who has quoted this well-known passage has omitted the final sentence.) Hoover stated that in the short run he opposed repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment and supported attempts to enforce it, but he did not comment on possible repeal of the Volstead Act, which carried out the amendment, and also declined to recommend a Prohibition plank for the party platform.15

  Hoover drew solid support from numerous constituencies. He had enthusiastic backing from women because of his support for women’s suffrage, children, relief, recreation, and better housing. The Scripps Howard newspaper chain, which had backed La Follette in 1924, now supported Hoover. Many European ethnic groups, including Poles, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Russians, and Germans, were grateful for his help to their native lands during the Great War.16

  The South posed unique complications. The region controlled about one-third of the delegates needed to nominate the candidate, yet Southern delegations comprised large numbers of blacks, who, denied suffrage by state law, were ineligible to vote in general elections. To appease black delegates en bloc might alienate whites whose votes would be needed to win, yet to discriminate against them might lose the support of Northern blacks, who were eligible and voted largely Republican. Southern politics was boss dominated and riddled with corruption. Some delegations, called “black-and-tans,” included both races, while “lily-white” delegations were entirely Caucasian. Sometimes contesting delegations of monolithic or mixed-race varieties challenged for seats, which were settled by the credentials committee at the convention. Hoover carefully avoided personal involvement and his lieutenants pragmatically backed the delegations solidly committed to the commerce secretary, who enjoyed a distinct advantage in the region where citizens of all races fondly recalled his service during the Mississippi Flood of 1927.17

  The nomination process on a state-by-state basis was a greater obstacle to Hoover than a single nationwide referendum would have been, as the general election clearly indicated. Hoover remained on the job at Commerce, skipped some primaries to avoid annoying powerful favorite sons, and did not campaign actively even in those states in which he did enter. Hoover’s showing was mediocre, but he did not hurt his chances while his friends lined up delegates in the nonprimary states through more conventional tactics. Hoover lost to Frank Lowden in Illinois, Lowden’s native state. James Watson edged Hoover in Indiana and Guy Goff beat him narrowly in West Virginia. In Indiana, the strong support of the Ku Klux Klan that helped Watson top Hoover there probably aided him in other states. The engineer lost to Senator George Norris in Nebraska, where Norris was a favorite son, and also in Wisconsin, where both candidates were outsiders. Hoover carried California and New Jersey unopposed and topped weak opponents in Michigan, Maryland, and Oregon. The commerce secretary did not enter the Massachusetts primary, yet won a whopping 85.2 percent of the vote with write-in ballots.18

  In May, Hoover trekked to Coolidge’s office for one final attempt to approach the president. He told Coolidge he had about four hundred votes for certain, almost enough to guarantee a first-ballot victory for the nomination. But if Coolidge wanted to be drafted, he was welcome to all of Hoover’s ballots. As penurious with words as he was with pennies, the incumbent replied, “I think if you have 400 delegates you ought to keep them.” This was about as effusive as Coolidge ever got. It marked the passing of the scepter. Approaching the final stages of the campaign, the president, although he did not overtly help Hoover, generously removed any final impediments to his nomination. Coolidge discouraged his own supporters from entering him into the race. In May he declined to appear on the Wyoming ballot and in April he refused to enter the Massachusetts primary. Coolidge bluntly told two of his supporters, “I have studied it all over and have finally concluded that I do not want the nomination.” Shortly before the convention, Secretary Mellon and National Committee Chairman William Butler instructed their home-state delegates from Pennsylvania to vote for Hoover. This was enough to ensure a first-ballot victory.19

  The Republican convention convened on June 12, 1928, at Kansas City and remained in session for four days. Hoover had already obtained commitments from 476 of the 545 delegates needed for nomination. Prior to the conclave, the commerce secretary and Senator Borah had hammered out a draft platform, which was adopted in substance by the platform committee. Hoover’s most formidable challenger, Lowden, withdrew from consideration after the platform committee rejected inclusion of his major objective, the McNary-Haugen plan, which guaranteed price supports for farmers. The hard work of the Hoover team triumphed. They had assembled a virtually unbeatable first-ballot nomination as the final opposition to Hoover melted away at Kansas City. There would be no deadlock, no smoke-filled, boss-dominated coronation in 1928. Hoover had carved out a consensus. The only member of the Hoover family to attend was son Allan, who served as a page. The commerce secretary canceled his appointments and directed his campaign by telephone from Washington.20

  The commerce secretary listened to the proceedings by radio at his Washington office. On June 14, when the evening nominations were made, family and close friends huddled in the library of the Hoover home to hear the announcement over the airwaves. Neighbors gathered in the drawing room, and a few reporters awaited the outcome in the dining room. Hoover had selected a California friend, John L. McNab, to deliver the nominating speech, but he read only a few sentences before the convention floor and the galleries erupted into a demonstration for Hoover that continued for twenty-five minutes. When order was restored, McNab described Hoover’s life as a series of epic achievements. “If the American people a quarter of a century ago had set out to prepare a man for the presidency, they could hardly have devised more apt experience than Hoover’s,” McNab said. Afterward, the nominating of other candidates resumed, followed b
y the balloting, which resulted in a comfortable first-ballot victory. Hoover won 837 votes, Lowden 74, Curtis 64, Watson 45, Norris 24, and Coolidge 17. Most of the votes for other candidates came from Midwestern states. In his home, Hoover showed little emotion before the assembled well-wishers and reporters, except to smile and kiss his wife, and withheld immediate comment from the press. On June 15, the delegates nominated for vice president Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas, an elderly conservative expected to help attract votes in the farm belt. For the first time in American history, both nominees on a party ticket had been born west of the Mississippi River. While Hoover did not choose Curtis, he consented to his nomination.

  George Moses notified Hoover of his nomination for president by telegram, and Hoover accepted by return cable, stating that he would strive to maintain the high standards of rectitude set by Coolidge. The president responded with a cable backing Hoover in what were for Coolidge glowing terms. He wrote the nominee that “your great ability and your wide experience will enable you to serve our party with marked distinction.” The vigor of Coolidge’s message mattered enormously. The GOP was closing ranks behind its ticket.21

  On June 26, the Democrats met at Houston, where seats on the floor and the galleries were segregated, and nominated their only serious candidate, Alfred E. Smith, who had won four two-year terms as governor of New York. Though Smith’s background was as prototypically urban as Hoover’s had been rural, both were self-made men. While Hoover’s chief assets were his superb mind and his ability to forge lifelong friendships, Smith was a more natural politician, gregarious, opportunistic, a political professional who had risen through the ranks, who knew politics intuitively but lacked a polished formal education. Temperamentally and intellectually, there was a gaping contrast; one man’s strengths were the other man’s weaknesses. Al Smith had begun as a fish peddler and ward heeler for New York’s notorious Tammany Hall machine, which thrived on patronage, and he tolerated the degree of corruption necessary to grease the political wheels. Neither well-read nor erudite, he was rather provincial, ignorant of both world affairs and even those of much of his own nation west of the Hudson. With his New York brown derby, cigar, and East Side accent, which grated on the ears of Midwesterners, he could not persuade Western farmers that he understood their problems. Smith was a better, more convivial public speaker than Hoover, a good mixer, with a magnetic personality, yet he fidgeted before the stationary microphones of that day, which caused some words to be mangled, especially via radio. Except for his urban style, which he flaunted, and his Catholicism, as well as his desire to repeal Prohibition before it had yet grown widely unpopular, his generally conservative views, especially on business, might have appealed to many conservatives. Indeed, some of the Democrat’s positions were distinctly traditionalist; he disliked women’s suffrage, the expansion of government, and extensive regulation of business. As Martin Fausold points out, “In many respects, Hoover was the more liberal and progressive candidate in 1928.”22 On the whole, however, the men were not far apart ideologically; neither roamed far from the political mainstream of their time, and each might be considered center-left. Their chief differences were in style and personality. The glad-handing, ebullient New Yorker, who chose as his theme song “The Sidewalks of New York,” might have given the impression that his philosophy lay to the left of Hoover’s, but these differences were largely superficial.23 Hoover was much better known nationally and internationally than Smith, and both candidates were men of integrity who never deliberately said a false or unkind word about each other, although some of their less-principled subordinates embraced a win-at-all-costs philosophy. Moreover, Smith’s chief enemy was neither Hoover’s stature nor his own provincialism, but the deceiving glow of the Coolidge-era prosperity. Voters were to ultimately vote their pocketbooks in 1928. As one analyst explained, “No one will shoot Santa Claus.”24 Phrased differently, mammon was a powerful ally.

  Now focused on the general election, Hoover applied his virtuosity in organization to his campaign, as did his legion of friends. He did not appoint a special campaign committee but instead delegated the task to the Republican National Committee, chaired by his most respected political consultant in the cabinet, Interior Secretary Hubert Work. After Coolidge declined to run for another term, Work had been the first cabinet member to endorse Hoover. A conservative Westerner, Work helped forge ties with Old Guard Republicans. With the Progressives already backing Hoover, the GOP was more united than at any time since the split between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft in 1912. Work’s task was to implement strategy devised by Hoover. As in most previous Hoover operations, policy was centralized and execution decentralized. Regional campaign managers focused on local issues, fund-raising, and turnout, operating under the rubric of Hoover and the central committee. Within each region, volunteers were organized on the state, county, municipal, and ward levels. Like the CRB and the ARA, the campaign organization resembled an octopus with many tentacles but a single head. Work considered overall prosperity more important than parochial or interest-group issues. Hoover emphasized farm problems to a greater degree, especially cooperative marketing. He was confident of his support in the West and portions of the East, yet he considered the Midwest a battleground where farmers had not fared as well as most groups during the prosperous 1920s. Many farmers still blamed Hoover for urging them to maximize production during the Great War, only to have prices plummet when the war ended suddenly. Nonetheless, most did not consider New Yorker Al Smith a plausible alternative.25

  American political tradition—until Franklin D. Roosevelt shattered it in 1932—held that nominees were not officially informed of their designation until a party of official representatives visited them at their homes and personally notified them of their selection. For Hoover and his wife, who still considered Palo Alto their permanent home, this required a transcontinental trek by rail. Along the ride west, he visited briefly with Vice President Dawes in Chicago and paid homage to President Coolidge at his fishing lodge along the Brule River in Wisconsin. While the men fished, Coolidge with worms, Hoover with artificial flies, the nominee angled for a more important prize—Coolidge’s public endorsement. Afterward, the two quiet men attempted to chat, seated in rocking chairs on the porch of the lodge. Coolidge joked that Hoover would not hold up his end of the conversation but conceded that his commerce secretary was a better fisherman.26 Coolidge gave his imprimatur to Hoover’s campaign and said he would render some help, but he intimated that he wanted Hoover to remain in the cabinet a bit longer to finish some incomplete projects. As they resumed their rail journey west, Lou received a telegram that her father, Charles Henry, was seriously ill, followed by a second telegram informing her of his death. She retired to a private car to grieve. Her husband continued to greet crowds along the way, but the passing of Lou’s father had dimmed the spirit of the trip. Hoover canceled a celebratory parade at San Francisco and the couple went directly to the chapel at Stanford for a memorial service for Charles Henry.27

  After arriving in Palo Alto, Hoover went about his chief task of drafting and revising his acceptance speech. A scrupulous perfectionist, he was the last president to craft his own speeches, not only in the White House, but throughout his life. In composing his address, Hoover attempted to express his ideas accurately and with little embellishment. As a speaker, he tended to mumble, speaking into the microphone in a flat monotone voice with little use of inflection. Never prone to exaggerate, he minimized his own accomplishments, a virtue in ordinary people but a vice among politicians.

  Before an audience of seventy thousand students, professors, alums, friends, and news media personnel, Hoover stood on a small platform in Stanford’s cavernous stadium, which he, as a trustee, had been influential in constructing. Beyond Palo Alto, between 34 million and 40 million people listened via radio, or later viewed the address on newsreels at theaters. He spoke directly into the microphone; his words carried clearly, and h
e expressed gratitude for the opportunity to serve.28 “In no other land could a boy from a country village without inheritance or influential friends look forward with unbounded hope,” he said.29 Hoover’s address synthesized ideas and programs he had advocated for years. His tone was philosophical, his content broad and general, including passages denoting moral and spiritual uplift. Hoover praised his party, especially Coolidge for facilitating prosperity, but prudently omitted Harding. He indicated, however, that his administration would move at a brisker pace. Foreseeing that religious prejudice would inevitably creep into the campaign, he tried to preempt it. “I come of Quaker stock,” he reminded listeners. “My ancestors were persecuted for their beliefs. By blood and conviction I stand for religious tolerance both in act and in spirit.”30 He also believed in racial equality and opposed the model of status based on class. “Equality of opportunity is the right of every American—rich or poor, foreign or native-born, irrespective of faith or color,” he explained.As commerce secretary, he had worked to ensure prosperity, yet economic plenty was merely a means to a higher purpose, he elaborated. “Our party platform deals mainly with economic problems, but our nation is not an agglomeration of railroads, of ships, of factories, of dynamos, or statistics,” he continued. “It is a nation of homes, a nation of men, of women, of children.”31