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primary source for apitol hill. >> we are really honored to have two former historian s about herbert hoover today. george h. nash is a historian on the life of herbert hoover. his publications include three volumes of a scholarly biography of hoover and "herbert hoover and stanford university." he added the column freedom betrayed, herbert hoover's history of the second world war ands it aftermath, and the crusade years, 1933-1955. herbert hoover's lost memoir of the new deal era ands it aftermath. nash is the author of the conservative intellectual

movement in america since 1945. reappraising the right, the past and the future of american conservatism. a graduate of amherst college and ph.d. from harvard university and received the richard m. weaver prize in scholarly letters in 2008. kenneth white is the author of "hoover." it was a finalist for the national book critic circle award.

his third published in 2021 was a finalist for the hayoc prize. after a distinguished career in canadian journalism he launched the nonfiction book publishing firm southern house in 2018 he lives with his family in toronto. i have had the great pleasure of knowing both of them. they don't send researchers to do their leg work for them. they have spent weeks and many years sitting in our research room and kind of going page by page. they are the real deal. after this session you will be able to purchase their books and

they will be able to, i'm sure, sign them for you. so why don't you give us a background of why you chose your career path. ken, let's start with you. >> i went in to journalism mostly because i wasn't fit for anything else. i was a failed scholar. i dropped out of school a couple of times. i loved to read and learn. i had none of the discipline. i was interested in what i was interested in when i was interested in it and that is

kind oof how my head worked. i was lucky enough to final journalism where not being able to hold to a disciplined course of inquiry is a virtue. you have to deal with whatever is most interesting in terms of the stories in front of you. i was delighted to find there was somewhere i could go where my inability to concentrate would be seen as, you know, something i could get paid for. just work on one story after another. journalism led me through newspapers, weekly and monthly magazine magazines. i ran a magazine company in canada for a while.

all along i kept writing. as time went on i concentrated more on political writing and history and biography. i did develop an ability to finally concentrate on one subject long enough to get a book deal done. it is odd to people that all three of the books that you mentioned are american subjects and i'm a canadian. part of the reason for that sis can was my day job. i was talking about and thinking about and writing about canadian current affairs all of the time. the last thing you want to do is write about it again at night.

the united states was bigger and grand grander and so much more interesting. that is why i always wrote my books about american subjects. >> what struck me is that you read hearst newspapers. you realized a lot of what had been written just did not stack up if you read it. >> that is true. one of the great things about the work that tom does is people keep the archives. i was writing about hearst in

his early career and the hannish-american war which he was supposedly responsible for driving america into you go through it and you see quite another story. theodore roosevelt has a lot to answer for. yes. that is one of the fun things about writing any look, the process of discovery. george has done more than i have and to great effect as well. i appreciate all of the work he has done in the hoover archive and what he has put on record for the benefit of all of us who

have utcome along and joined th story as it were, you know, with hoover. i don't want to correct you, tom. but when you introduced george you said he was the one of the great hoover authorities and to my mind he is the hoover authority and i don't think there is anybody close. >> so george, when you were a young man was it your ambition to become a professional historian and go to harvard? no. and before i answer that i want to thank you for your very kind words. how about that. okay. again, thank you again for those

very kind and gracious words as well. looking back on how i became a historian, i really think my boyhood influences had much to do with setting me on the path that i took. i remember when i was about ten years old my grandfather gave me a mostly pictorial ten volume history of the world war ii and that excited me greatly. that was fascinating. before long i was going all of the time to the town library and choosing and reading more books about the subject.or i was only 10 or 11 at the time. it showed i liked history and recent history. i was old enough to remember this. i vividly recall listening to radio reports and reading about the hungarian revolt in october

and november of 1956 against the soviet occupiers in ar that had something to do with my emerging political consciousness. i was aware of the wider world and of the cold war which was ongoing and as boys might do followed as events unfolded in the years ahead. jumping up to high school i was a member of the debating team and there was a national topic selected by an organization. one year. it was fitness education. it expanded another year if i recall and the united nations should be significantly strengthened. to prepare there are cases as debaters. one had to do with research. those had a historical dimension.

i discovered rather fondly that my school subscribed to the congressional records. i found myself reading the congressional record, and especially the appendix where the members of congress could put editorials from hometown newspapers and all sorts of interesting stuff. i found i enjoyed that. in my senior year in high school i had a experimental american history course that didn't teach by a textbook but by looking at problems in american history. when i entered college i had thoughts i would go into the law but i decided law school would be boring, expect for

constitutional law which is intellectual history in disguise you see. okay. i became a history major. i flourished in that role. i thought i did. when it came time to think about what to do with my life after college i applied to graduate school in history with the thought i would become an academic historian, which i have in a way but without the usual career route. that is how it came about. all of those childhood impressions and one that just occurred to me. >> so, george, how did that translate from becoming a historian and getting to herbert

hoover. >> well, in 1975 i was recently a ph.d. in history from harvard and i was on the academic job market, and i was in the process of preparing my dissertation to nbe published as my first bookn the conservative intellectual movement in america. it was there flux that i was approached by someone on behalf of what is now called the hoover presidential library foundation here in iowa.sc they recently celebrated the centennial of hoover's birth in 1974. it was time to commission serious systematic scholarships on herbert hoover. there wasn't much of it at that time, nothing that would be thought firefighter as likely to be of enduring value and it was hit or miss so to speak. there was some but not much.

now, i have to tell you i have never thought in my life of writing a biography of herbert hoover until that came in out of the blue. i started to study hoover more. i realized hoover was a friend of many of the people about whom who i had written by dissertation turning into my first book. a patron of conservative causes

i thought it is a logical step to go from someone who was thought to be a patron of that philosophy and i always realized as the association realized that herbert hoover was an under studied and under appreciated president. so, before we came to a definitive arrangement, i came out here and spent several days meeting them and asking the question am i interested enough to study his life. i also went to the hoover institution at stanford for the same purpose. i realized there is far, far more than the stereotypes that

grwere around all the way to graduate school. we came to an arrangement where i would write something comprehensive and in-depth and we came to an arrangement where later that year i undertook the herbert hoover biography project. i am still writing about herbert hoover to this point, and i have not gotten bored of him in all of these years. >> before we get to you, i want to take a moment to recognize the archvist in the room that

helped both of you. dwight miller was the first hired here at the hoover library. and he was hand-picked by president hoover. we have the former supervisor craig wright who recently retired. his successor, patrick osborne. lin smith, the av. they are kind of the unknown hidden hands behind all of the research projects. >> i am sure hoover is not the figure in canada. >> nobody talks about him on the streets in canada. you course he has got the canadian connection. his mother was born in canada.

i didn't know that until i was well into it. i wound up writing a biography of hoover because i couldn't write the book that i wanted to write. i ready about the first world war and hoover kept popping up all over the place as this ndincredibly competent figure w was doing amazing things. it was such a different portrayal of hoover in the materials from nthat time, from the war than the portrayal that i read about in the usual american histories that caught my attention. and that led me to read deeper

into the commission for relief of belgium. i thought that was probably the greatest thing that i ever heard about any individual doing as a private citizen anywhere at any time. you know, the fact that he started on this project of feeding the belgian people that were blockaded by the british. it wasn't his job. nobody hired him to do it. getting the food, the ships and the money at a time all of the things were in short supply , because there was a war going

on. i wanted to tell that story. you make an outline. you send it to the agent. the agent shops it around. they all came back and they said no. we are not interested. if you are going to do hoover, you have to do the presidency. i am not a fan of presidential biography as a reader. there is a lot of good t scholarship. the multivolume scholarships. a lot of the one volume biographies for the general reader to tend to be why am i the favorite president, the best president of all-time. it is almost an exercise of

fandom rather than real biographical scrutiny. i just did not know much about hoover at the time. with all of the rejections of the original proposal to do the commission of relief for belgium, i thought, okay. maybe i should look a little bit deeper into hoover and see if there is enough there to do a biography. that is when my real education on hoover started. you see the boyhood. you see the stanford years. you see the business career which i found fascinating. his time in commerce. laying the foundation for, you know, the opening of the american southwest and for the start of the broadcast media,

through his work with radio. through, you know, the foundations. there are so many dimensions to it and then the presidency. all of the things in the after life. when you lay it all out that way as i had to do in proposing to wright the biography, it is just one huge event after another all throughout the course of his life. he was something to whom the incredible was always happening. it dawned on me that he was an ideal subject for a biography.

>> anything in particular that surprised you that you found, you know, really incredibly eye-opening during the research? >> there were a lot of things. the real tension that i found in his life was that he was somebody who is not suited for politics, you know. if you went to central casting and if you asked for someone to run for president they would not show you herbert hoover. he was not a conventional politician. he was an engineer. he believed in data. he believed in hard work. he had a very impers cal mind. he was not a performer in the least. he wasn't comfortable around strangers. all of those things you are required to do as a politician that are part of your job as a h

politician. he had no real affinity for or ability at, and he had a bit of contempt for people that were good at it. politics to a certain extent were beneath him. to me that was an interesting puzzle. one of many that i found compelling. >> what are the most surprising things that you discovered? >> what surprised me the most early on and i thought it was a common reaction is the shear scope and duration and the magnitude of hoover's

accomplishments. he was 90 years old. 50 of those years were in public service or the public spotlight. i don't think that has any precedent d or parallel in american history. that has made it an interesting figure to study. a succession of careers. he went around the world five times. before the advent of commercial aviation. he became a suman tarean with a truly remarkable belgian relief commission he founded. it grew and grew.

spent almost a billion dollars in the currency of that time. that was only the first chapter in what became the humanitarian work of 1919. involved in feeding 4 million tons of food that were distributed around europe in 20 countries. notably poland and austria, but many, many others. all of that resulted in saving many more millions of lives, and then in 1921. i don't know if it is mentioned yet today. hoover's american relief administration which is a private entity having been a government entity in 1919 but it morphed into a private endeavor with woodrow wilson's permission. the american relief administration of 1921 responded to the call to russia for relief

in what was considered the greatest famine in europe since the middle ages. 768,000 tons of food. that is a topic few americans know about. it is a chapter in hoover's life that is kpekd. if you add it up between 1914 and 1923 he supervised relief efforts saving tens of millions hoof lives. he was responsible for saving more lives than anyone that ever

lived. in comes the commerce on department. the secretary of commerce. it was kind of a double edge. he was one of the three or the four dominant figures in american public life in the 1920s. he got to be elected president of the united states without holding public office. a few generals were able to do that but for a civilian it is all the more remarkable. and then we come to a long period as an ex president and takes his crusader along with doing many other things as well.

>> it was very intense. you know, it is marked on by his ability to work hard and stay focused and to be in intellectual command and not just physical command. it was truly an astonishing thing. that got them a long way and that led to a dip in the great depression which i suppose we will talk about as we go along. >> so, because you spent so many years studying him, and i am sure things have come to the floor. is there anything that you would change or reevaluations that you have now? >> not fundamentally.le

herbert hoover requested that his wife's papers stay closed until 20 years after his death. the papers did not become accessible until 1984. from that point on, if i were to go back i think i might have extra anecdotes or things to insert. maybe improvement on some pages ento have some fresher material. it really reflects what they say about historians. when those sources come through

we have fresh opportunities to re-examine a figure or make changes when someone goes out of fashion qand comes back into fashion so that we have that conversation. >> okay. the same question. >> i don't think i would change anything. that is a difficult question, tom. both of my other books, i think that i could rewrite both of them and make them better. i was really happy with the way that hoover turned out. but there is so much material on hoover. if any of you have had the opportunity to go back there and see just how many boxes of material, and how many walls of boxes of materials there are in

this library it is phenomenal. i often thought if i were to start over today i could write another biography that would be 80% different in content and probably as good and just as interesting. there is just so much more in his life in so many different ways to get at his story. there are so many different sources. you could really tell the story through a number of ways. why i don't think i would change anything in the book there are things. i tried to keep everything to 600 pages. i didn't want it to be a door

stop. there are a couple of angles i wish i could have explored deeper. rione, hoover spent his formati years and early adult years out of the country. he really came to his maturity and place in the world in england. they have a very system of government and different political environment. i always wanted to kind of tease out the ways in which politicians there and the ideas that he picked up there he brought back with him into the united states and how they shaped his thinking. i think that one of the reasons that he appealed to a lot of the

progressive intellectuals in washington at the time he showed up in the early 1920s is because he was in touch with a lot of progressive ideas that were current in the uk. you know, that was one angle where i thought that, you know, it would have been fun to do more on. i also probably could have spent a lot more time on his later career. once you get through the presidency, you know, you have kind of hit the climax of hoover's life. you get off stage off of that expeditiously as you can. he had half of his adult life

almost after the presidency. i did that in 15% of the book. to me it does not seem entirely fair. there are a lot of other books. georgia has done great work on the latter part of his career and so on. history is an on going conversation. there will be many other biographies to be written about hoover, and hopefully everything will be thoroughly addressed. a lot of presidential biographies almost fall under the categories, and you both

talked aboutadmirable and outstanding traits hoover had. what about finding any troublesome faults? >> look, we all have faults. herbert hoover has his share. you know, to me i mentioned earlier one of the interesting parts of his career to me is his business career. how determined he was to succeed. he cut a lot of corners. you know, at times in his life

he was desperately concerned at his activities. not coming to public notice. particularly his dealings in nd china. you know, i think that it is pretty hard to defend his behavior in the mining deals a that he did there. you know, his attitude towards the chinese people generally was often wanting. you know, he was a young man on the make in those years. some of his behavior is not at all attractive. to my mind the fault that is more relevant to his career as a politician, he had a certain

arrogance towards the practice of politics which i find unattractive in someone that wants to be a politician. he did not think that he would have to learn the trade. he knew he was smart. the man was brilliant. we talked a lot about how smart that he was. he probably had the greatest or one of the greatest intellects of all of the presidents to hold office. but he didn't put in the work to learn politics or learn congress. it would have been far to his advantage to ethave put in that effort, and he might have had a different career as president had he done that. >> george. >> i would point to something that his friends often worry

about. they thought he was overly sensitive to criticism. his friend was under the secretary of state and said in his diary in 1932. he thought it was one of tu hoover's faults. hoover would get easily rattled by the politicians whom he thought were ordinary creatures at best. he was rattled by william randolph hurst. it was one of those episodes alluded to in the diary. hoover was afraid that hurst with his national chain of newspapers would do hoover great political damage, as i think he did in supporting roosevelt and criticizing hoover in the campaign of 1932.

again, i am reporting what friends thought. it was said he had the thinnest skin in washington. and he could not sort of let some of it slide by with some of the slings and arrows. he would demand retraction or send surrogates out or do various things. he said of himself he had a naturally combative disposition and could have ignored more than he did. he spent so much time being worried about that. i am thinking of the 20s and the 30s. as president and three terms in the white house otherwise known as the harding and coolidge administration. hoover was an outsider.

he was feeling his way along. he would become very upset about the mild criticism or what he sometimes called justice and misrepresentation. i think that was an inhibiting factor. the politicians thought of hoover he was too much of an outsider. not a party man. a man that made a career outside of politics and who had women and professional class people and others who thought of politics in less partisan terms and had them in his corner in 1928. there was a lot of distrust of him. he referred to congress, which was still in existence in those days or pro hi hibition was in existence and he called it the beer garden on the hill.

hoover was quoted as saying there ought to be a law allowing the president to hang two men a year without giving any reason. i am sure he had political figures in mind. one thing i haven't resolved which senator he was referring to when he referred to him as the only verified case of a negative iq.d it worked both ways. i do think that hoover got better at it in the second half of his term. the first half he was so deferential he allowed the tariff to go through and did not effectively handle that as effectively as he could. that is a long story and longer than i should try to tell here. by the time he was moving forward in late 1931 and 1932 with the reconstruction finance corporation proposal and many

other reforms as the depression lingered and so on, he became more effective as a leader. it wasn't always a comradely type of dealing with the congress. there were bitter disputes that he had with the speaker of the house garner for example. hoover did not get along, but he was more effective in bringing people in to consult. that was one of his strengths. he wasn't good at political behavior of the kind that you described, ken. you know, going out and back slapping and kissing babies. he hated all of that. if you put him in a room, a conference room with the captains of industry, the heads of labor and leading bankers he could dominate the room because of his intellect and idealism, and they could see that. he could often have effective communication with politicians in that way, but in terms of

broader political maneuvering it wasn't so easy for him to navigate that way, and he came up against a man who was a charmer, franklin roosevelt, and hoover suffered in terms of political effectiveness. i think those are some points to elaborate on what you correctly said already. >> both of you talked about the fact that papers didn't become available until very late. you don't have good biographies of her available. in many of the biographies of hoover he is not a prominent figure. how do you both, now you had access to the papers, evaluate the marriage and her role?

>> mrs. hoover was a very independent and intelligent woman. that has become very clear to those that study her. i believe she was the first woman at stanford to graduate with a major and might have been the first ngwoman in the united states. it wasn't a woman's field in 1898, the year of her graduation from stanford. i picked up stories in my research. one of them, when they were living in china for a couple of years she went down into a mine with him. and that was regarded as ed by

chinese -- i interviewed a very elderly australian mining man when i visited australia in the late 1970s for research on hoover. he remembered that mrs. hoover accompanied herbert around 1906. she went down into a mine. she did it naturally. she knew something about mining and geology obviously. the underground miners were flabbergasted, the idea of a woman underground in a mine and knowing anything about the subject is amazing. i think one of the bonds they had between them is intellectual curiosity. it showed up in different ways.a mrs. hoover's collection,. the metallic volume which they spent five years translating from the latin as written by a

german scholar in the 1500s, coining terms not available in the old latin and it was a giant puzzle to be solved. mrs. hoover did more work on it than he did. i think that is a sign of intellectual curiosity. she is very alert. she wasn't one to step into the limelight with him. she was supportive of him but had her own interest, such as the girl scouts which has been noted. i think that is something that bonded them. she would write to her son, allen, long letters. very interesting. in her way she was the administrator of a household and

entourage as he was and she had an administrative talent as well. i would say. the final thing that strikes me about their marriage is how busy it was. they were always moving back and forth. they had maids and servants in london and so on and lived that style. that is one way london might have been affected him. it was said of hoover, and i will close with this, that he was too progressive for the conservatives and too conservative for the radicals. in a way you could say the same about mrs. hoover and the hoover marriage. it was a modern marriage and somewhat unconventional in ways, but it wasn't so unconventional to put her in the vanguard of people that are activists and so forth. she wasn't going to go out and

be arrested for it in demonstrations, unlike one of her friends he had to bail out in london. clearly you want to say something more. she had a close tie with mrs. rs coolidge. i think they were slightly a mused by their husbands activities with the husbands and what they had to do in politics. she is a very interesting and capable person. >> i think that the marriage has to be considered a success. it lasted until death did them part, and they were still on speaking terms. better than half of them right there, hey. and i think that she is an ideal companion for him. when you think of how they got

married in california with him coming in from australia. he landed on the ship. you know, getting off of the ship. they arrange the wedding and within 48 hours they are on a ship to china where neither of them have been before. not every young woman would have been up for an advantage like that but she went down in the mines, the rebellion was out on patrol with the firearm strapped to the hip. you liknow, she was an adventurs lady, and they did have a very busy life. i found it hilarious with the way they ran their household. everything seemed to be a mess or muddled all of the time. when they came back from england

to america they just left. they had a house, a huge p beautiful house in england.w they left it there. they left the staff in place. you know, the staff was running the place as it saw fit. one of the servants sold the piano and pocketed the proceeds. all kinds of things like that were going on, and it translated to washington when they came to live there. there would be guests coming to stay with the hoovers. invited guests. we would arrive to find neither of the hoovers home. all kinds of missed connections in their correspondence back and forth. fothere are frequently misunderstandings and disputes

about who is supposed to look after water and be responsible for what. it is a normal marriage in many respects. i think that she was also very advantage us -- to hoover socially. she was much better at a dinner party than he was or any kind of social occasion. she was better at small talk and a more charming personality. she was very useful to him in eghis ambitions to meet the rig people in london and to entertain the right people in washington. she played quite an important role in that regard. i think that he would have struggled without her. he probably benefitted more if you had to weigh the

relationship from what she brought to it than in terms of support. you know, he wasn't always there for her when she had difficult times in her life. she had health problems from time to time. he would continue to work as per usual. i think that there were probably lonely times for her given all of the work that he took on and how much he was away, but on the whole i think it was a successful relationship and they both benefitted from it considerably. >> the last question that i have before opening it up for the audience, you know. the popular notion is that the hoover presidency is a failure

and that franklin roosevelt's presidency is a success. does that comport with what you found? >> no. history is complicated. you really have to look at this carefully. for a long time herbert hoover was dismissed as a presidential failure because obviously the depression did not end and the assumption is that he could have ended it if he could have done something differently. i will get back to that. but the general charge is that hoover did too little. he was too stuck in the mud. he was too grim. that has been dismissed by

historians. there is another one from the libertarian side. that is hoover did too much and made policy decisions that exacerbated things. when i talk to the different audiences i will tell the libertarians they don't understand the conservative side of hoover. he would go so far but no further. he said in one of his climatic campaigns, this is more than two parties but a contest of philosophies of the government and will determine the nation for over a century to come. he later said that is one of his most prosthetic audiences. i don't think failure is the way to look at it. i think that what you should do

is examine the efforts hoover maded that almost succeeded, and in particular 193 11 when he signed the moratorium. that probably saved central european banks from collapse. why is that important? american banks had poured large ones into germany as loans in the 1920s that would have brought a calamity to the united states much sooner than the last days of hoover's term. that is one case where i think that hoover took an action that a least averted disaster.

the second one is the finance corporation that delivered thousands of loans to needy banks and other businesses between february and summer of 1932. a few billion dollars worth. they were able to put out many brush fires, particularly in chicago which came with the largest banking within minutes really or hours of closing with 120,000 depositors and no deposit insurance to rescue them. there was none until 1934. hoover managed to engineer that in the nick of time. if that bank collapsed it is widely believed that many other banks in the midwest might have the collapsed and that might have detonated a national banking collapse in the summer of 1932. in those two occasions hoover did something that was helpful. it did not solve the depression. but that leads to my final

point. that is that i think that we need to stop being quite so hoover centric in analyzing the depression. the depression, one of the major measurements and this is alluded to earlier in the day is the decline of the nation's money supply by 30% in four years. utterly staggering. that is the responsibility of the federal reserve board. as the historian of the federal reserve board has argued in the book, historian of the federal reserve board, argued in a magisterial book, the federal we reserve board with good intentions, made many policy errors and mistakes and was operating under doctrines and judgments that we now know to have been mistaken. so i would say that we should think of hoover, not as a success or failure, except in individual cases, but as a man who tried like sisyphus to push

that rock up the hill, the ancient greek mythological figure sisyphus, he pushed the boulder up the hill and just as he is about to succeed, it would roll back down again and he'd have to start all over again. i think hoover was our modern sisyphus who almost turned the corner on several cases. i think kenneth mentioned this in his volume, but the undertow was such from the federal reserve board that i think much of what he did in his anxiety and attempts to get people together. and so much of it was rather irrelevant to the underlying problem. because at that point in time, i don't think hoover or the fed or anybody practically quite understood the centrality of the monetary contraction in making the recession turned into the catastrophe that it became. so i would leave you with that thought. hoover as a sisyphean figure, that's noble and he did much good in many ways and other things we could mention.

but that is the kind of obstacle that he faced. and i don't think any other president in his place could have done much better as long as the fed had the mindset that it did. can i agree with all of that. i would add a couple of things. i think hoover was far more successful than he's given credit for and. and i agree with what george said about, you know, both people on, um, a, the, on different sides of the debate thinking he did too much or did too little. i think he did an enormous amount. there's no way roosevelt can do what he did in the new deal without hoover.

you just can't get from calvin coolidge and total hands off, don't interfere with god's economy approach to governance, to roosevelt without a figure like hoover in between. but the question was relative to fdr was one man successful hoover, successful versus roosevelt. i don't think that uh um reallyd at the end of the day, there's much room for debate. hoover failed to win a second term, failed to carry the judgment of the american people into a second term. yes, the depression was a very difficult thing to deal with, but his term wasn't entirely

about the depression. one of the most interesting documents i found in tom's fabulous archive was this thing called the houser report. a piece of public opinion research done three week before the vote in 1932 when hoover's against roosevelt. and it was really the first scientific poll ever done in american presidential election. and it asked 5000 representative people across the country, what they thought was going on in the election and in the economy. and uh and the, the really interesting thing about the poll was that to the extent hoover was bleeding support going into '32 after winning a big victory in '28, prohibition

was the biggest issue that was causing people to abandon him and vote democrats because roosevelt had promised to end prohibition. when you ask people about the great depression at that time, about 65% of the people believed that hoover bore some responsibility. moore thought rewall street was primarily to blame for the great depression. also, most people thought the great the depression was over going into the election of 1932. they thought things were turning up in the economy, that employment was coming back, that the future was bright and rosy. so i think we all tend to overestimate to a certain extent how politically relevant the depression was in 1932. and it may be that hoover himself overestimated the degree to which the economy was an issue in 1932.

but regardless, he failed to get his party lined up behind him and energized going into that 1932 election, which was his job as leader of the republicans and president. and he fought the election, largely alone. he did not have a lot of support within the party behind him, not a lot of funds behind him. and it was a very difficult road and roosevelt, if hoover is underrated to my mind, roosevelt is a bit, more than a bit, overrated. there's a lot of things in his presidencies that i think we

really haven't dealt with adequately. i think his uh you know, the packing of the the supreme court, the use of the justice department to pursue his political enemies. and just general overreach in the office of the presidency are things that are really often disturbing behavior. and so i would argue that yes, hoover is underrated. yeah, and roosevelt meanwhile is um a bit overrated, but roosevelt was a brilliant politician and managed to find a constituency, a new constituency in america for the democratic party. and uh it held together for two decades. and and he was in a very

difficult time in the american economy during the great depression. i think a more effective leader of the american public than hoover, i think was administratively had a better understanding of the problems and what needed to be done. but part of the job of the president is to lead the nation and to shape public opinion and tell people where we're going and why. and roosevelt was particularly brilliant at that and that's where to my mind hoover was especially challenged. >> ok. at this time, again, if you have a question raise, oh, they're already lined up at the microphone. so it please say your name and indicate to whom the question is directed.

>> jay weideman, i guess, i mean, i would have addressed this question to the entire panel, particularly dr. nash. first of all, thank you to the panel and thank you to the library and the museum and thank you to the previous panel, the family panel. one of the things that i appreciate about this library museum and both of these panels have brought out is trying to restore hoover's reputation and to share his story fairly. you know, not sugar coating things, but also saying that there's good there. my wife and i recently went to the warren g harding museum that just opened in marion, ohio. and i found that that museum is trying to do something similar. and so i was wondering if the panel could comment on hoover's relationship with harding. did they share the same political philosophy, did rd

harding select hoover because of his popularity more than anything else or um just speak about that. thank you, >> harding called hoover, the smartest gink. i know. >> have you ever heard the word genk used in any other context? old slang? i guess a harding and hoover hoover was a more progressive republican. harding was a conservative republican. hoover wanted the league of nations to be the united states to join and harding was dancing all around it, but he basically was against it. but harding came to rely upon hoover as a great source of information and so on. very useful cabinet secretary. and hoover, i think he and hoover became close that way. and hoover didn't go to the parties to where they were gambling and so on in the white house playing cards. harding and all of that.

so hoover was not that. i'll share an anecdote. just comes to my head. hiram johnson, senator from california, was a bitter opponent of hoover. they were rivals in that state and johnson was a bitter end opponent of the league of nation and he thought hoover was an internationalist and there are all sorts of disagreements between them. i came across in my research, johnson's evaluation of harding's new cabinet. he said, well, he wants hoover and hughes, the secretary of state in there for respectability and the rest of them are essentially his cronies. and so hoover did bring respectability to the cabinet, and he insisted that harding give him a broad interpretation of the sphere of influence that the commerce erdepartment could have. and that was very, very important. i have sometimes wondered

whether harding would have wanted hoover to be his made in 1924. i have no evidence for that. but if i were to go back and look at the records, i might want to see whether there were any hints of that. hoover gojoined harding and par of that trip west where harding became ill and died. so i think hoover saw harding not as the smartest gink he knew, but as a man who had considerable ability and a good soul, you might say, but with his weaknesses and among those weaknesses was allowing cronies to take advantage of him. so you should look up hoover's address at the harding memorial in 1929, i think it was, or maybe 1930, when hoover essentially denounced men who let him down, the crooks, and

was rather, i thought rather perceptive and fair toward harding himself. >> i'll just add that. i thought it was a really interesting point you made about harding and hoover and their reputational difficulties and how both of them are underrated to my mind. harding was a hugely effective president. if you read what shape america was in after the first world war, you know, wilson was pretty much a non compassed the last year or two of his term. demobilization was completely botched. there were general strikes and riots and all kinds of problems throughout the country and in a very short period of time, harding put things back on an even keel and laid the foundations for the prosperity that american -- america enjoyed through the 19 20s and

i think coolidge ended up getting a lot of credit for much, you know, the great work that harding did. so i'm glad you noticed the connection between the two. >> i'm a little nervous that i might be kicking a beehive in this question. but it's kind of a dream to have both of you here to grapple with it because i have wondered since reading your book, ken, and especially the chapters on china and the research that you did on china. if george, how you understand or how you encountered, and frankly, just given how fastidiously george you have researched herbert hoover, and written about herbert hoover, how, you respond to that

chapter of hoover's life. so this is sort of a question to george asking for a response to the chapters that ken wrote about hoover in china. because it, it is a different sort of picture of hoover, which on some level feels completely unbelievable and then maybe a little believable, but it's maybe you can help us understand it. i'd love to understand how you understand it and, and can also to have your response, >> i guess i would refer you to something i haven't read in a while. and namely the china chapters of my first volume. oh, you're speaking to, i'm sorry. ok. so my response to ken's interpretation of hoover in china.

well, i think that hoover was amongst a den of thieves. i don't know that there was a dishonest one in the bunch. i'm not talking about hoover now, but the people he dealt with chang, the mandarin, the tring, his advisor mooring and so forth. and hoover is a guy of 25 years old and living by his wits, you might say. so, i think that, well, it does seem that hoover really put pressure on change to sign a memorandum which his british hoover's british bosses did not honor. it was, it's, it's an ambiguous situation. i would say that that it puts put hoover in. and so i don't know that he's without reproaching that. now, he was very sensitive about it because the democrats got wind of it in 1920 again in 1928 and they sent people over, they actually went over and interviewed if linot chang, at least someone like him, and hoover went to great lengths to prepare documents that could be used as retorts. and again, i think he thought the hearst was going to yield the great explosion. so if you look at it, it's

obviously in hoover's sense. it was a sore spot or a potential dangerous point for him. i tthink what we have to say i hoover's defense that he was in a crowd where there was no particular ethical bearing for some of them. and he tried in a way to be, i think, fair to chang because there was a contract that was, that was given over to the british. and ththere was also a memorand and the british and their belgian colleagues ignored the memorandum. and i think hoover was offended by that, that some of the deal wasn't kept. but hoover was in the position of having to get chang to sign that document. and he put pressure on chang. i mean, he says, hoover himself, that he used main force to do it and we don't know exactly what that meant, but it certainly didn't ansound like it was a pleasant confrontation. and the battle between them

went on if i recall about three days or so, you know, getting chang because chang was being asked to give up chinese title or he thought to chinese property, which he was responsible for and letting these western types perhaps exploit the whole situation. so chang got in such trouble at home that he went to london to charge bewick mooring, which hoover was a partner, with failure to carry out the terms of the deal. and chang won his case, but it was, it didn't turn out to be a very effective victory and for reasons and details that i don't remember at the moment but the chinese did something curious, they created a parallel company, which i think eventually consolidated with the one that hoover had, had been involved with.

and when that consolidation occurred in 1912, hoover was left off the board so that i know that in china today, there is a hoover's reputation is as he's one of the foreign thieves. he was an upagent of all these imperialists and so forth. i think that he was an agent, but he was trying to, he was dealing with people who were untrustworthy. he was trying to serve chang it up to a point, but also serve his british boss and he was trying to get something that he could consider acceptable. but it was a rough moment for him. i would have to say that you may want to elaborate on that. i don't know, you know, i don't know. >> i don't think we're very far apart. george and i think your point about him being young is valid. he was 25. he was a junior player in the company that he represented,

but he put himself in that situation and he did the deeds that he was accused of doing. and, you know, and he made comments in newspapers to the effect of the only way to negotiate with the chinese is at the point of a gun, you know. and so there's no, i don't think any getting around the fact that that herbert hoover was not doblameless in every aspect of his life. i mean, every president has been very much a human being and they have good moments and they have bad moments and i don't think it should take away from the fact that he did magnificent things. and with the rest of his life, and i think a lot of the things that he did afterwards you can actually read as an effort to make amends for some of the

errors he made as a young man. i'm not sure he would have been so determined at the age of 40 to turn himself to his humanitarian endeavors had he not embarrassed himself a bit in his business career and had produced a legacy that he wanted to correct to some extent. so, you know, i think it's all of a piece, and it's really important for an understanding of history and for an understanding of the man to accept that he was not infallible. and that there were times that, he even by his own values, i think let himself down. >> so just real quick kind of foot note to what you've been saying. the last few months, there have

been several chinese delegations. one that went to iowa city, they're looking to set up a sister city relationship. and i was invited and hebei province where the king mines are located, they know about hoover. and if you go online, the provincial museum recreates his office when he was in china. and you know, i was expecting kind of a negative, but actually they seem rather proud of the fact that an american president was familiar with china and had stayed there. the mines now have a different name, but the fact they're still in operation again is kind of credit to hoover's ability to look at the frore reports and figure out the

profitability of the mine and its operations. the second visitor was the consul general from chicago from china. and again, i think he brought his two sons. and he brought up the fact again that hoover oversaw the mines and that they have this exhibit in the museum. and both delegations seem more interested in kind of a cultural exchange for americans to go to learn more about china, just as hoover did when he was running the mines. and so it's, it was completely different than what i might have anticipated would be the party line. and of course, premier xi jinping is from and his relationship with governor and

and ambassador branstad has been long standing. so there is kind of this special relationship, you know, right now, with iowa, but which extends back to hoover. >> the reason the mines weren't in british control was that this was right after the boxer rebellion and china was in a state of anarchy. and chang, the mandarin who had supervision of those mines in that province was afraid that who would grab the mines, the russians or the japanese. so the british looked comparatively respectable. you see, but mooring turned out to be unable to raise all the capital he was supposed to raise and he turned to some belgians and some of them were people with whom hoover clashed. and greatly, ironically, you would know this, i'm sure the man who ran the belgian side of

the belgian relief inside belgium, louis sefranch. emile franch was somebody who had met hoover in china and they hadn't gotten along. and hoover thought that the belgians represented by franchise were exploiting and mistreating the chinese. so hoover was indignant at what the belgians were up to. and then 13 or so years later, hoover and he meet and have to co-operate in the relief of belgium and they didn't always co-operate in a friendly basis. i have to add, it became quite a feud although ultimately hoover won his points and then they settled down and fran, he even visited hoover when he was president and hoover sent mrs frankie the widow food relief packages during world war two. so all these angles, hoover did have a point though that a well fed fran key was not a good public image about starving people.

yeah, next question. >> this isn't. so much about political philosophy, but more about style. you have hoover being followed by roosevelt. do you see a similarity betwee that and 50 years later of jimmy carter being followed by ronald reagan? well, many people at the time compared carter to hoover, i think. unfortunately, carter was an engineer in a way and he was a person who kind of enjoyed statistics and management, but he didn't project well, whereas reagan was a great campaigner and so forth. so people made some superficial comparisons between the two of them. also, i think there's another comparison to be made. carter had a one term and spent he's still living.

he's almost 100 he spent much of the rest of his life doing humanitwork of various kinds. and hoover too, having lost office after one term, spent the rest of his career seeking vindication in various ways. so i think in both carter and hoover and nixon, by the way, who wrote a bunch of books in exile, so to speak, as an ex president, they all, they all had unsuccessful or unhappy experiences in the white house and they then strove to make something of the rest of their career. so you can make a kind of comparison between them. but hoover was not in the carter camp ideologically. >> hello, i'm linda. i'm proud to be a native iowan, and i believe that lou henry hoover was the first first lady to invite the wife of an african american congressman to tea and she persisted and that was awesome. re

and have you come across any correspondence about that event? >> i didn't see any correspondence about the event in particular, but it was, you know, noted at the time and well covered at the time and, you know, certainly something that she deserves to be remembered for, and, you know, it's hard to appreciate now just a what an impressive and progressive move that was at the time, a simple invitation to tea, but it was recognized as such at the time. >> and i also think she needs to be given credit for establishing a school in appalachia with camp rapidan. that's a wonderful place to visit as well. and thank you so much for your panel and your knowledge today. thank you. >> i think if you go on our website, we have a lesson plan

on the t which might have some primary sources. i know if you go, the permanent galleries, there is a some of the correspondence, medical and supportive, that we have reproduced in some cases. ed >> there is your answer. >> a student from iowa who contacted the family then loaned her photographs we have. actually a lot of this comes from a middle school student who started this. >> thank you. >> last question perhaps.

i have been an iowan since january 1939. i believe that the solution to many of america's problems today exists in president hoover's little book, american individuality. and i see to it that my children and grandchildren have copies of that book. i wonder if you can identify another selection of his publications that i might go to next. >> if you haven't read his book about wilson in paris, hoover wrote a lot, produced a lot of books. not all of them are great reading, but wilson in paris is a terrific book.

and a really interesting insight in what was going on then. i'm glad you mentioned american individualism, it is probably, of everything he wrote, my favorite. the political test he poses in there for any new policy that it has to do something to advance equality of opportunity , and at the same time to stimulate people to motivate people, to work hard, and contribute to society. it's a pithy, brilliant, little insight that i find very useful in looking at any kind of policy proposal. it's a terrific book.

and deserves to be more widely read. and george has edited and addition of that. an introduction to and addition that is available. so highly recommended. >> well, we haven't talked much about hoover's political philosophy today, but i think that llexemplifies it. and i agree with what ken has said so well, thhe also wrote a book called the challenge to liberty published in 1934 which was a critique of the new deal without ever mentioning it by name. he had a term for it, regimentation, but all sorts of collectivist ideologies that he felt were, were an assault on true on what he considered to be true liberalism or historic liberalism. and that's an important part of the hoover legacy in my view of the philosophical explanation

of the american system, if you will, broadly speaking that he made and i think can be still studied with profit at this point in time.>> and i think we have one last question. >> andy chandler, indianapolis, indiana. good afternoon gentlemen. and thank you for being here. my question is is that you mentioned mr. white, the idea of a book or of what we could write about the ex-presidency. so the question i have is actually two questions which is having read the book, the president's club by duffy and gibbs. he mentions asthe relationship, but there seems to be a little bit of on the fence in the first chapter regarding were truman and hoover friends at the time that they met at the white house. could you comment as to the nature of what you've

discovered in the resources? because i know they became very good friends if they're writing about slipping in bathtubs in telegrams. could you comment on that as well as let's say, for instance, and i, i don't like to do the hypotheticals. hypothetically speaking, you're giving carte blanche to write a book about the, the ex presidency. what would be the kind of theme that you would want to do if you were given that kind of free reign? >> my recollection, george correct me if i'm wrong, in f this. but my recollection is that truman and hoover did not really have a relationship when truman reached out to him and invited him to participate in some of the things that his government was doing and, but they did form quite a good and close relationship as is evident in their correspondence. you know, in a nutshell, the narrative of hoover's post- presidency is a guy who was just frankly wrecked after he lost the election in 1932.

and embarrassed even to be seen in public, but eventually regaining his bearings and carving out a new role for himself as a sort of a senior statesmen within the republican party. and going on to do great service for truman after the first world war. and then his work with eisenhower, the presidential commission, in the 1950s, where they essentially reviewed and reconstructed the whole of the operations of the federal government. it was just an enormous undertaking and probably something that no other american could have done or at least done anywhere as well as hoover, given his vast experience, the fact that he had, you know, directly worked

with five presidents including eisenhower, you know, he just had such a great understanding of how the government had evolved to what it was at that point, and what it needed to go forward. and then his ongoing support for other republican leaders, his close relationship with robert taft, for instance. andthen right up to the end of his life, he's still advising both the kennedys and nixon at the end of his life. there's, there's so much to talk about there, there wasn't really anything that didn't happen through the rest of the great depression, through the second world war, through the cold war that hoover wasn't, you know, to some extent involved in and deeply

interested in, and had something really important to rd say about. >> around 1920, around world war. i, right after hoover wrote a little essay called information for biographers, i think it was something that was asign he was contemplating higher office, but he has a very arresting opening. he says there is little importance to men's lives except the accomplishments they leave to posterity. then he adds, when all is said and done accomplishment is all that counts. i think he lived by that philosophy. and also he says in that same passage that for him, the most easily measured form of such of such accomplishment is to use his words, in the origination or administration of tangible institutions. so, hoover in his way, and mrs. hoover to some degree in her way with the girl scouts and so

forth, were institution builders. and hoover, i think that helps to kind of explain the focus of his life, that accomplishment was what mattered to him right down to the very end. he just never slowed down. so i think that is a remarkable philosophy. i'm not sure i share it entirely. i would like asto think that th enjoyment of life along way has importance and we won't totally focus on just getting things done. we have to be, as well to do, so to speak. but, but i do think it's a, it's an admirable statement and a very provocative one. and i think it tells us a lot about what drove herbert hoover through this truly extraordinary life. >> and to just quickly build on two things that george said there. we haven't talked about stanford and you mentioned, you know, institution buildings and hoover's role at stanford was enormous. george has written a book about

it. i mean, that was -- we talked about how big his life is how much he's involved in. we can talk for hours about him and it doesn't even come up that he, you know, more or less, one of the, probably the most important person in the history of stanford university, you know. and secondly, in terms of there being more to life, that's one of the things i think we forget about with both herbert and lou hoover. you know, they had a lot of fun along the way. you know, i was reading about their early relationship, you know, when they're young and in love and in china and they're matching pajamas and, you know, traveling around seeing things and, you know, when they're in england, they have put all of their winnings into seeing

cairo fund so they can just take off at a moment's notice and go to somewhere exotic in the world or interesting in the world. not all of hoover's ideas of fun were, you know, what most of us would consider fun, you know, throwing a medicine ball over an 8 foot net for an hour or going out into a stream and moving the boulders around or sitting under a hot florida sun for eight hours looking for bonefish. you know, he had a singular idea of fun, but he knew what he liked to do and he always took some time in his life to enjoy himself. and i think that's an important part of his personality to remember. >> let's thank our speakers and just a reminder that if you'd like to purchase their books and have them sign it, you can get them in our gift shop. thanks so much. thanks for coming, safe travels.

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