Herbert Hoover
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Roosevelt swamped Willkie by 5 million votes and consigned Hoover permanently to the status of an ex-president. Hoover’s friend reporter Paul Smith echoed what many said of Willkie—that he had an attractive personality, yet lacked philosophical depth, sophistication, and philosophical grounding. He considered himself a liberal, but this was a losing proposition in a race against Roosevelt.36
On November 16, 1940, shortly after Willkie’s defeat by FDR, Hoover invited the party’s standard-bearer to his apartment at the Waldorf Astoria to discuss the recent election and to stiffen Willkie’s resolution to fight against involvement in World War II. Hoover believed Willkie might be contemplating another run at the Republican nomination in 1944, something he wanted to avert. They concentrated on three topics: keeping the country out of war; measures short of war to help England; and the inevitable collapse of American democracy if the United States entered the war. They also discussed Willkie’s defeat. Hoover told Willkie that many Republicans had voted against him. Ultimately, Willkie befriended Roosevelt, became an ardent internationalist, went on a Roosevelt-sponsored worldwide tour, and published a bestselling book, One World.37
Hoover learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor some hours later than many Americans. Arriving back at the Waldorf after a pleasant weekend with friends, he found two dozen reporters camped at the Waldorf Towers, clamoring for his opinion on the war. The next day, Congress, at the president’s request, declared war. Hoover advised Robert Taft that he would be happy to travel to Washington and offer ideas on the food situation. He also expressed gratitude that Roosevelt had limited his initial request for a war to the Pacific and he hoped it could be contained to a one-front war.38
Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Hoover issued a statement lending his total support to President Roosevelt and calling upon the country to unite to win the war. “American soil has been treacherously attacked by Japan,” he stated. “Our decision is clear. It is forced upon us. We must fight with everything we have. I have believed alternative policies would have been better,” he explained. “But whatever our differences of view may be as to the causes that led to this situation, those are matters to be threshed out by history.” He continued. “Today there is just one job before the American people. We must defeat this invasion by Japan and we must fight it in any place that will defeat it. Upon this job we must and will have unity in America.” He threw full support behind the man he had recently castigated. “We must have and will have support for the President of the United States in this war to defend America. We will have victory.” Hoover even advocated giving Roosevelt “dictatorial economic powers.”39
FOURTEEN
The Maelstrom of War
When Japanese bombs rained on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, it altered the direction of Herbert Hoover’s career. Looking back, he had lost all three of his major objectives since 1938, including his quest for redemption at the polls in 1940; his struggle to play a role in war relief of Europe; and his attempts to avert war. Now he ceased his open opposition to Franklin Roosevelt’s policies and loyally supported the war effort, although privately he continued to compile FDR’s diplomatic blunders for a work that would not be published until long after Hoover’s death. The day following the Japanese attack, the ex-president summoned the nation to duty. “The president took the only line of action available to any patriotic American,” he proclaimed. “He will and must have the full support of the entire country. We have only one job to do now and that is to defeat Japan.”1
Hoover’s feelings were complex. After the attack, Hoover unreasonably resented the lack of a second opportunity to reorganize food resources on the home front in service of the war effort. After America entered the war he offered his services through two intermediaries, publisher John C. O’Laughlin and Bernard Baruch, a Democratic businessman and a mutual friend of the president and Hoover. The commander in chief was caustic in his rejection of Baruch’s entreaty, replying acidly, “Well, I’m not Jesus Christ. I’m not going to raise him from the dead.”2
Hoover found himself in an anomalous situation. He had warned that placing economic sanctions on Japan was dangerous; it would not deter the Japanese warlords and might lead to military conflict. Some, but not all, of Hoover’s fears were borne out. He was as surprised by the timing of the attack on Pearl Harbor as most Americans were; he also initially believed Nazi Germany would defeat Communist Russia. Ultimately, he conceded that the Soviets would triumph and was reconciled to their absorption of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bessarabia, half of Poland, and large chunks of Sweden. He warned his countrymen not to trust Stalin, inveighing, “Five years after this war we’ll be arming Germany and Japan to help protect us from Russia.” He believed Roosevelt and some of his advisers were naïve about Stalin’s ambitions and the nature of Communism.3
During the war, Hoover muted his criticism of the Roosevelt administration and threw himself wholeheartedly into striving for victory and a just peace. Though he considered it unlikely that the incumbent administration would solicit his advice, he kept himself available. Hoover avidly desired a role in reorganizing the home front. He continued and even accelerated his customary hectic regimen, testifying at congressional hearings, writing articles, delivering speeches, and dabbling in Republican politics, though he no longer aspired to the White House. He hoped the articles and his speeches would sway public opinion, and, more important, establish a record for history. Hoover retained the respect of many in both parties and maintained a high profile in GOP politics. Although Hoover endeavored to mend fences between the liberal Willkie wing and the conservative wing of the GOP, the estrangement widened as Willkie moved left and courted favor with FDR. For his part, the former president solidified his alliance with Alf Landon. Willkie lent no help to Republican candidates in the 1942 congressional elections, yet the GOP gained ten seats in the Senate and forty-seven in the House. Meanwhile, Willkie embarked on a worldwide goodwill tour that implicitly endorsed Roosevelt’s liberal internationalist policies. This was the prelude to another attempt by Willkie to win the Republican nomination in 1944. Although Hoover conceded that he would not be offered a job helping to mobilize the home front, he nonetheless continued to desire a role in food relief.4
Hoover believed the president had bungled both foreign policy and domestic policy during the war, although he muted his criticism after the war began. The ex-president was concerned that the home-front effort was disorganized, ill coordinated, and hydra-headed, and that FDR had overbureaucratized the stateside machinery and created various agencies and bureaus with overlapping activities, which led to inefficiency. He pointed to inefficient production and distribution of food resources for domestic consumption, the military, and the worldwide famine certain to follow the war. He called for draft exemptions for some farmworkers, whom he considered as essential as munitions workers, and furloughs for others at harvesttime. Hoover believed the free market should be permitted to function as normally as practicable during wartime. Some Republicans advocated Hoover himself as the man best qualified to untangle the red tape. Instead, he published numerous articles, delivered speeches, and testified on Capitol Hill about topics related to efficient production and distribution of food. He also realized that some idealists among the New Dealers wanted to exploit the opportunity presented by the war to redistribute wealth and create a leviathan welfare state. Hoover believed coupling war mobilization with social reform would detract from the priority of winning the war. Further, the GOP conservative believed that some New Dealers, including the president himself, underestimated the moral evils of Communism. Indeed, a few even sympathized with it. Hoover himself possibly underestimated the moral evils of Nazism until he learned of the full horrors of the Holocaust, which appalled him. Hoover was also dismayed by elements of the president’s diplomacy, which he considered too compliant to Soviet expansionism and British imperialism during the summit conferences held during the war. He believed the New Dealer was moving
away from his earlier commitment to internationalism and self-determination for nations and returning to the old balance-of-powers concept in which the Great Powers divided the world into spheres of influence. Nonetheless, near the end of the war the Chief was less critical of Roosevelt’s concessions at Yalta than were some of his friends, who believed Hoover staked too much on an updated successor to the League of Nations. He emerged as the voice of reason among the divided Republican factions.5
From 1939 to 1947, Hoover crusaded for food and medical relief for the civilian populations in the German-occupied nations in Europe. After an appeal to him by the exiled governments of Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands, and Greece, Hoover proposed that the American and British governments create a public organization to feed these nations. Churchill, with the backing of Roosevelt, refused. Upon their refusal, Hoover created the National Committee on Food for the Small Democracies, which operated from 1940 through 1942, subsisting on donations. However, its shipments were terminated by the British blockade. The Great Humanitarian also played an unofficial role in organizing the home front during the Second World War. He cooperated with farm and business organizations in staging numerous conferences inspiring methods to increase production and to resolve economic problems during the conflict. At their request, Hoover appeared before numerous congressional committees to testify about economic strategy and relief issues.6
Hoover’s efforts to feed the destitute masses of war-ravaged Europe during and after World War II included some of the continent’s largest concentrations of Jews and helped save millions from starvation. He pleaded with FDR to open the gates of America and admit Jews who were being persecuted in Europe, especially in Poland. The president replied that the only practical way to help the Jews was to win the war. In 1943, Hoover broadcast a speech before the Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People in Europe. The ex-president remarked that there was no language that would either portray their agonies or describe their oppressors. “To find relief for them is one of the great human problems today.”7 He called upon the Allies to provide food relief as well as clothing and medicine to Jews who had escaped Germany to neutral nations. During the same period, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise presented definitive evidence that Jews from Poland and Russia were being gassed and cremated at sites such as Treblinka and Auschwitz. FDR’s Jewish treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, pressured the president to act and warned him that if he did not he might lose Jewish votes. Within days of his meeting with Morgenthau, Roosevelt issued an executive order creating the War Refugee Board. Its mission was described as to take “effective measures for the rescue, transportation, maintenance and relief of the victims of enemy oppression.” The board’s efforts resulted in saving about two hundred thousand Jews and twenty thousand non-Jews and laid to rest the argument that the only way to help the Jews was to win the war.8
By late 1943 there was a consensus among most Americans in both parties that Jews needed and deserved a homeland, but there was no consensus on where that homeland should be. Most Jews desired land in Palestine, their ancient home, but many Arabs vehemently rejected the proposal and vowed to fight to prevent its implementation. Hoover proposed a plan to create a homeland for Arabs in a fertile but uninhabited portion of Iraq in order to open Palestine for the Jews, but political leaders considered this impractical. Near the end of the war several proposals were considered to end the friction between Arabs and Jews. Hoover viewed the issue in nonideological terms but recognized that both Arabs and Jews had a historic claim to Palestine. The new United Nations proposed to partition Palestine, creating both Arab and Jewish states, which failed to satisfy passionate nationalists on either side. Further, the Western nations would not agree to any proposal that would inhibit their access to Arab oil. Nonetheless, by 1944, when the full extent of the Holocaust was realized, both party platforms endorsed unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine and the creation of an independent Jewish state there. Both common sense and the logic of politics dictated the long-delayed conversion.9
Once he realized that he would not be invited to help his country organize for war, Hoover decided to devote the bulk of his time during the conflict to serving his nation in another way. He would put his words into thoughts for articles and books. The articles might serve the short-term purpose of influencing public opinion. The books, more importantly, would preserve the historical record of his life and history and serve future historians and policy makers with raw materials that would still be read long beyond his own lifetime. Hoover had always read books for pleasure as well as for information, and he hoped his own books would contribute in that respect. In the process, the ex-president perfected his prose by dint of repetition, hard work, and meticulous attention to detail, and became a more polished writer. His mature books are sprinkled with quips and jovial self-insight. Hoover wrote not only about events he recollected, reinforced by research, but about those that were happening as he wrote. Some were written for contemporaries, but most targeted posterity. He left a greater legacy in writing than any other president save Theodore Roosevelt. The Hoover books are fundamentally reliable as history. They are straightforward, and he tried to make them as objective as possible, though he was fallible. During this period, writing was not the ex-president’s sole occupation, but it was the dominant one, and he grew to enjoy what had once been an arduous task. Near the end of his life, the former president became obsessed with completing the books he had planned before he died. Involuntarily retired from politics, he attended congressional hearings and political rallies, held press conferences, and continued his activities in Republican Party circles. He never relinquished his old friendships; loyalty was the mainstay of his life.
Hoover’s first wartime book, America’s First Crusade, published only a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, was based on an earlier series of four articles that had recently appeared in The Saturday Evening Post. The ex-president had hoped the book would be published in time to show by historical analogy that it was folly for America to become involved in the quarrels of Europe. He demonstrated the high expectations and tragic culmination of Woodrow Wilson’s dream for a fair peace and a League of Nations. Hoover considered America and Europe fundamentally different, having grown apart over the centuries. He blamed the failure of the Treaty of Versailles and the League largely on the cynicism of European statesmanship but also in part on Wilson’s flawed idealism. The author’s major purpose was to avoid a repeat of the mistake of involvement in a European war. Unfortunately, the book did not appear until after Pearl Harbor, when its core message was no longer relevant. Some reviewers blamed Hoover for taking an overly defensive military posture.10
After Pearl Harbor, Hoover was no longer interested in debating the wisdom of war and turned to writing a second book, coauthored with his friend diplomat Hugh Gibson, that intended to outline the framework of an enduring peace at the war’s end. Again, he used the Versailles conference as an example of what to avoid. This book, The Problems of Lasting Peace, attempted to provide guidelines for a more successful treaty than Versailles. By early 1942, they had completed a draft. They were gratified by the decision of The Reader’s Digest to publish it in advance as one of their condensed books, which gave the study immediate exposure to 5 million readers. The authors began by succinctly summarizing centuries of European wars and peacemaking attempts. They portrayed Wilson as a sincere reformer outmaneuvered by the cunning tactics and sleight of hand of the self-seeking European leaders. The conferees sliced and diced the American president’s Fourteen Points, leaving them in shreds. The authors developed guidelines for tactics they hoped would ensure the fabric of a lasting peace at the war’s end. Some of the ideas were not original, yet the authors took a more systematic approach to negotiating a settlement than had been done at Versailles. The historical case study was a mixture of theory and practice.11
The authors assiduously spelled out their terms. The peace following the Second World War should be reasonable to
victors and vanquished rather than punitive. It should be formulated over time rather than at one enormous, pressure-packed conclave. A long armistice should provide an interlude between the end of the fighting and the signing of the final document, to permit passions to cool. America should commit to joining an international organization, but one without power to impose its decisions by force. There should be no international army, but the United States and Britain should collaborate in utilization of air and sea power to maintain stability. The peace should initially be negotiated at a set of regional conferences before a larger gathering convened, and rulings should be enforced at the regional level; the United States must be largely responsible for the Western Hemisphere. The international organization ought to resort to the leverage of world opinion before using force. Hoover also opposed the continuation of international imperialism. His model peace would be rational and not dictated by a handful of nations.12 The victors must disarm shortly after the disarming of the vanquished. Those who plotted aggression should be punished as war criminals, but ordinary conscripts were to be given the opportunity to rebuild their lives. As in America’s First Crusade, the authors used Versailles as a primer of mistakes to avoid. “When we got there we had high ideals, high aims, and great eloquence,” the authors wrote. For the future peace, “we must have something far more specific and definite.” The key to a successful treaty was meticulous planning over an extended period and a generous spirit. The writers wanted the book to reach average Americans as well as academicians. Hoover decided to invest time and money to ensure broad dissemination of the book, because he considered its message vital. It was published by Doubleday, Doran; the ex-president arranged for the Hoover Institution to subsidize it, which reduced the retail price to $2, and he purchased copies to donate to libraries. The Book-of-the-Month Club made the volume one of its selections, helping it to become a bestseller. The president-turned-historian raised money from friends to promote the volume.13