Undoubtedly, the Hoover presidency suffered from the economic problems well advanced (but little recognized) before he took office. Descent into serious depression came rapidly. Although the Hoovers moved into the White House in March 1929, confident and optimistic about their chances for success, the president lost his halo within months. The stock market crash in October 1929, multiple business failures, and rising unemployment all added to his problems. Before his term ended, the Bureau of Labor Statistics would report that one in four Americans was jobless, lending credence to the judgment that this was the most devastating depression in the country’s history. While its causes were numerous, its solution appeared unclear, and the president reluctantly reexamined his own views about the role of government.
“It is not the function of government,” he liked to say, “to relieve individuals of their responsibilities to their neighbors or relieve institutions of their responsibilities to the public,”92 but in his first year in office he set up the Federal Farm Board with half a billion dollars at its disposal to assist farmers with their surpluses. Later he approved creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend money to banks and businesses. When asked about her own interests and accomplishments, Lou’s pronouncements were just as puzzling and incomplete: “My chief hobbies are my husband and my children,” she explained in 1921,93 failing to note that she had given speeches on two continents in behalf of a long list of causes and that her translation into English of a Latin mining text had won an important professional award.
The remarkably parallel lives of Lou Henry and Herbert Hoover began the same year (1874) in small Iowa towns less than one hundred miles apart but did not intersect until twenty years later when they met in California. Lou’s youthful interests had run closer to those of boys than of most girls. With only one sister, eight years younger than she, and a sickly mother, Lou’s energy drew her to her father who introduced her to the pleasures of camping, horseback riding, and hiking. When time came for college, she chose first a normal school that boasted “the best gymnasium west of the Mississippi”94 and then switched to a teacher’s college from which she earned a certificate in 1893. Neither of those schools nor a clerking job in her father’s bank satisfied Lou, and not until she had a chance encounter with geology did she find her direction. A public lecture by a Stanford professor led her to enroll in the university as the only woman majoring in geology.
Herbert Hoover’s route to the same department in the same university had been more direct, and during Lou’s freshman term, he was already a senior. Shy and awkward, he had a reputation as a minor campus leader—a reputation resulting more from diligence than from charisma. That tenacity paid off when he looked for employment. He started out at the Reward Mine Company in Nevada City, California, pushing a cart for $2.00 a day, ten hours a day, seven days a week, but never felt, he later wrote, “like a downtrodden wage slave.”95 Perhaps he understood, even at twenty-one, that his Stanford degree would soon separate him from his co-workers who were mostly unschooled foreigners. Carefully saving some of his earnings, he returned to San Francisco and took an office job where he surprised his employers by demonstrating modest typing skills. When an offer came to supervise an Australian mine for $600 a month, he took it, and by the time he was twenty-four, he was earning, by his own calculation, about $40,000 a year.96
Lou Henry learned that a Stanford degree in geology, when earned by a woman, got fewer job offers, and she taught school for a few months before Herbert wired his proposal from Australia. He wanted to accept an invitation to head China’s mine program if she would go along as his wife. Almost from their first meeting, the Hoover partnership had a particularly international and ecumenical quality. In order to catch a ship for China the next day, they rushed their marriage ceremony, and because they could locate neither a Quaker minister (Herbert’s religion) nor an Episcopalian (Lou’s faith), they settled for a civil ceremony performed by a family friend who happened to be a Catholic priest.97 With little time to pack for their honeymoon, they filled their suitcases with books on Chinese history and culture, so that they had plenty to read on the long trip to Tientsin.
Within months of arriving in China, the Hoovers found themselves in the middle of an attack, supported by the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, to rid the country of all foreigners. In late 1899, a secret society, called I Ho Chuan [literally, The Harmonious Fists but always referred to by Westerners as the “Boxers”], began to launch violent attacks on the parts of the international community that had an influence on the local economy and culture, such as railroad construction, missionary work, and mining. The Hoovers quickly decided that expeditions into the country’s interior were too perilous for Lou, although she had originally intended to go, and by June 1900, Herbert called in all his workers.
To protect themselves, Tientsin’s foreigners barricaded themselves in their homes along the edge of the city behind a wall fashioned out of bags of sugar and grain. Then they watched their numbers multiply as Chinese nationals, who had aligned with outsiders by converting to Christianity or taking jobs with international companies, asked for refuge. Supplies became scarce as days stretched into weeks. A herd of dairy cattle furnished milk and meat, but the closest water source lay outside the barricade and residents had to sneak out at night with buckets. With only two physicians to tend the wounded, Lou Hoover volunteered to help, even though that required dodging bullets to ride her bicycle to the makeshift hospital.98
Because their own house at the edge of the settlement seemed particularly vulnerable, the Hoovers moved to a friend’s residence at the center of the compound but then returned just before their area came under attack. An American journalist, who had taken refuge in the Hoovers’ house, told how Lou had run to the door at the first shelling to see where it had hit. A big hole in the backyard told her the answer. Expecting other shellings to follow, she sat down in the living room and dealt herself a game of solitaire. Even though a Japanese soldier in front of her house was blown to bits and the post of the stairway behind her splintered, she continued turning over the cards.99
Although she lived in Tientsin for less than two years, Lou developed a lifelong interest in China, particularly in porcelains of the Ming and K’ang Hsi periods. She added Mandarin to the other languages she spoke fluently—an achievement her husband never matched—and after they left China she kept his very limited Chinese vocabulary usable by relying on Mandarin whenever she needed to communicate privately with him in the presence of others.
With their usefulness in China ended, the Hoovers moved to London, the world’s mining capital during what Herbert called “the golden age of mining.” Herbert became a partner in Bewick, Moreing and Company and until 1908, when the partnership ended, their “Red Roof” house served as home base for their family and as a gathering place for London’s foreign community. Herbert had undergone no social metamorphosis since college. Conversational awkwardness still marked him in all discussions but those of mining—one woman described him as “the rudest man in London”100—but his wife’s charm compensated and drew guests to their table.
Lou’s balancing of household management and travel in the first decade of her marriage invites comparison with Louisa Adams a century earlier. When two sons were born to the Hoovers (1903 and 1907), Lou took them on the road almost immediately: Herbert, Jr., left London to go to Australia when he was five weeks old and his brother, Allan, began his first trip to Burma at the same young age. The parents, after circling the globe more than once with their sons, insisted that infants traveled more easily than adults. After 1908, the family moved less, but Herbert still ran mining consulting offices around the world from San Francisco to Petrograd. In one year (1910) his wife and sons joined him in the British Isles, France, Russia, Burma, Korea, and Japan.101
While her children were still toddlers, Lou Hoover undertook her one enduring intellectual achievement—the translation into English of a sixteenth-century text on metals. Agricola’s De
Re Metallica offered a significant challenge because its German author, George Bauer, had coined some of the terms when he published the work in Latin in 1556. Finding English equivalents required extensive knowledge of both science and language—an unlikely combination in one person, as reviewers pointed out when the Hoovers finally finished the task after five years.102 When the work was privately printed in 1912, with both Hoovers sharing equal billing in its translation, it won the Mining and Metallurgical Society’s gold award and considerable attention from the scholarly community.103
When war broke out in Europe in the summer of 1914, the Hoovers were in London preparing to return to California, but Herbert delayed his trip to assist stranded Americans find sailings home.104 Just a week before he was finally scheduled to leave, he undertook the job of overseeing food distribution to Belgium and northern France. Under German occupation, most Belgian cities were near starvation, and farmers, who made up only about one-fifth of the population, fared almost as poorly. Herbert Hoover accepted the job without pay, a generosity he could well afford, because, as he later wrote, “My aggregate income from professional activities in various countries probably exceeded that of any other American engineer.”105 In any case, he did not expect the job to last long. The knowledge that it would extend to “four years … a billion dollars, [and] five million tons of concentrated food … was mercifully hidden from us,” he wrote after the war was over.106
While her husband earned a reputation as an efficient food administrator in Europe, Lou Hoover traveled with less fanfare back and forth between England and the United States. In London she worked with the American Women’s Committee to set up canteens, maintain a war hospital, and operate a fleet of Red Cross ambulances.107 She even helped start a knitting factory to assist unemployed women.108 In the United States, she gave speeches to attract money for her European activities, raising $100,000 in the San Francisco Bay area alone.109 At the invitation of the Stanford faculty, she spoke to them about unrestricted German submarine warfare.110
When the United States entered the war in the spring of 1917, Herbert returned to Washington to serve as Food Administrator, and Lou complemented his role by publicizing strategies for food conservation. She invited reporters into her home to show how she achieved “wheatless and meatless days” and cut sugar consumption below the suggested limits. The same woman who would later cringe and refuse when reporters sought interviews with her in the White House allowed the Ladies’ Home Journal to publish “Dining with the Hoovers” in March 1918 and include information on what she fed her family.111 Besides acting the part of public model housewife, Lou helped start a club, a cafeteria,112 and a residence, all for young women who had come to Washington to work during the war.113
After 1921 when her husband entered President Harding’s Cabinet as secretary of commerce, Lou Hoover continued her public, activist role. The time seemed right to finish what Elizabeth Monroe and Louisa Adams had begun a century earlier, and Lou resolved to stop the mindless “leaving of cards” that had been traditional for cabinet wives since the beginning of the republic. She “rebelled at spending four or five afternoons a week at this fruitless job,” Herbert explained, and “secured an agreement among the Cabinet Ladies to an announcement that it would not be done any more.” Herbert may have exaggerated Lou’s role, but the visits ended.114
Nothing about Lou Hoover in the early 1920s suggests she would retreat from active leadership, especially of women and young people. In 1924, in the wake of revelations about the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration, she called a special conference to emphasize women’s responsibility to speak out on the dangers of dishonesty in government.115 She persuaded the National Amateur Athletic Association, on whose board she served as the only woman, to form an advisory council of athletic directors to encourage physical education for women “in every institution” in the country.116 When invited to speak to a convention of teenagers, she used the opportunity to exhort the girls to plan to combine marriage with a career, and she volunteered her own opinion that anyone who fell back on children as an excuse for not working outside the home was “lazy.”117
Lou, who had started married life with a staff of six and worked her way up, might easily have underestimated the hours of work needed to run a household, even with the new appliances available in the 1920s. But she was not unique in expecting that wives could have careers, too. More married women were working outside their homes than ever before, the percentage rising from twenty-three to twenty-nine in the 1920s.118 Although “glamorous” new jobs in decorating and copywriting were opening up to women, most women still found their jobs in low-paid drudgery—laundry, domestic, and agricultural sectors—but they were not the focus of Lou Hoover’s discussion. For her, work had brought personal satisfaction, and she seemed to assume that other wives and mothers would profit as she had done. Just how they would balance cooking, cleaning, laundry, and child care with their jobs remained unclear.
Increased discussion of wives’ roles in general may explain why the candidates’ spouses received so much attention in the 1928 contest between Herbert Hoover and Al Smith. The cosmopolitan Lou Hoover, in her subdued blues and grays and her crown of queenly white hair, contrasted sharply with Catherine (Katie) Smith, a product, like her husband, of New York’s Lower East Side. Katie’s Roman Catholicism, her city speech, and reputed weakness for excessive imbibing reinforced her husband’s unpopularity in areas of the country intolerant of such habits and beliefs. Jokes spread that if she got to Washington, she would present a vulgar model of American womanhood to the rest of the world.119 “Can you imagine,” one Texas Republican woman reportedly asked a public meeting, “Mrs. Smith dealing with foreign dignitaries? One of them might say, ‘That’s a nice hat,’ and she would answer, ‘You said a mouthful.’”120
The Democrats became so concerned with Catherine Smith’s effect on votes that the party’s Women’s Division organized speaking trips through the South. Frances Perkins paired with the wife of Charles Dana Gibson on one such assignment, and the two of them went from luncheon to tea, insisting that their good friend Katie would do perfectly well running the White House. She had a natural dignity, they argued, that would appeal to anyone who met her. As for the rumors about her drinking, they had never seen her touch a drop “even in her own house.”121
In spite of the work of Perkins and other Democratic women, some national periodicals reported the Hoover victory with sighs of relief. Finally the sophistication that had disappeared under the untraveled Florence Harding and Grace Coolidge could be restored, one magazine suggested. Frederick Collins, writing in Woman’s Home Companion the month of Herbert Hoover’s inauguration, stressed Lou’s “serenity … and … cosmopolitan background,”122 while novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart, in World’s Work, pointed to Lou’s strength. Recent First Ladies had suffered under the pressures of the job—Ellen Wilson and Florence Harding had collapsed—but the athletic Lou would prove stronger, Rinehart predicted.123
Between 1992 and 2008, the popular First Ladies exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of American History highlighted the women’s roles in the nation’s political history and social reform movements. Courtesy of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
Regal Edith Roosevelt reportedly never made a mistake. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Helen Taft (also seen below) raised many eyebrows when she broke precedent and rode with her husband to the White House after his inauguration. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Painter Ellen Wilson kept a low profile in her own work and in her efforts to improve Washington’s slums. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Edith Wilson showed none of her predecessor’s reticence. She thrived on the attention she received as First Lady. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Although one of the oldest First Ladies, Florence Harding made every effort to appear vital and energetic as she greeted White House visitors. Courtesy of the
Library of Congress.
Popular Grace Coolidge kept several pets and was often photographed with her dogs or her raccoon, Rebecca. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Lou Hoover, flanked by two Girl Scouts, appears in this, the first photograph ever made of either a president or a First Lady broadcasting from the White House. AP/Wide World.
Called “Our Flying First Lady,” Eleanor Roosevelt chose air travel when most Americans refused to try it. Here she is pictured in Dallas, Texas, just weeks after becoming First Lady. Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
Before her marriage, Bess Truman (shown fourth from left) was considered one of the best tennis players in Independence. Courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library.
Mamie Eisenhower made hostessing and fashion her chief White House interests and, in doing so, reflected the predominant American view of femininity in the 1950s. Source unknown, provided by the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library.
Sizing up the White House as though it were just another of the many residences where she would make a “backdrop for Bertie,” Lou pronounced it “as bleak as a New England barn.”124 She quickly rearranged virtually every piece of furniture in it and added some of her own things from California. Within three months, nothing moveable remained where the Coolidges had left it, causing one house employee to quip that Lou would next reverse the positions of the elevator and the spiral staircase. Of more permanent importance, Lou organized a systematic cataloging of the mansion’s furnishings and assigned her friend and secretary, Dare Stark, to write a book about the White House. Although Stark did not complete that project, she did publish articles calling attention to the dearth of reliable information about the house and its furnishings.125
First Ladies Page 27