we are really honored to have

two of the foremost historians and biographers of herbert hoover with us today, george h. nash is a historian, lecturer and authority on the life of herbert hoover. his publications include three volumes of a comprehensive scholarly biography of hoover, and the monograph herbert hoover and stanford university. he edited the previously unpublished tome freedom betrayed herbert hoover secret history of the second world war and its aftermath and its companion volume, the crusade years 1933 to 1955. herbert hoover sloss memoir of the new deal era and its aftermath. nash is also author of the conservative intellectual movement in america since 1945 and reappraising the write the past and future of american conservatism among many other works.

his a graduate of amherst college and holder of a page in history from harvard university. he received the richard m weaver prize in scholarly letters in 2008. he lives in south hadley, massachusetts. which he fondly refers to as east branch. kenneth whyte. is the author of hoover an extraordinary life and extraordinary times, published by op in 2017. it was a finalist for the national book critics circle award. he has previously published the uncrowned king, a biography of william randolph hearst, which was the washington post and los angeles times book of the year in 2008. his third, the sack of detroit, published by knopf and 2021, was a finalist for the hayek prize. after a distinguished career in

canadian journalism. mr. white launched the nonfiction book publishing firm southern house in 2018. he lives with his family in toronto. i have really had the great pleasure of knowing both of them. they don't send researchers to do their legwork for them. they have come they have spent literally weeks over many years sitting in our research from kind of going page by page. so they're the real deal after this session. you'll be able to purchase their books and they'll be happy to, as i'm sure, sign them for you. so. why don't you give us a brief

background about why you chose your career path? ken, let's start with you. well, i, i went into journal lizard mostly because i wasn't really fit for anything else. i was a failed scholar or dropped out of school a couple of times. love to read. loved to learn. but, you know, to be a scholar, you need to be able to hold to a disciplined course of inquiry. and i had none of that discipline. i was interested in what i was interested in. when i was interested in it. and and that's kind of how my head worked. and i was lucky enough to find journalism where not being able to hold to a disciplined course of inquiry is seen as a virtue because you have to just deal

with whatever's news on a given day and whatever's most interesting. you know, in terms of the stories in front of you. so i was delighted to find that there was somewhere i could go where my inability to concentrate would be seen as, you know, something i could get paid for and just just work on one story after another and journalism. led me through newspapers, weekly magazines, monthly magazines. i ran a magazine company in canada for a while and but all along kept writing. and as time went on, concentrated more on political writing, history and biography.

and i did develop an ability to finally concentrate on one subject for long enough to get a book done. and that's. i should mention as well, it's a bit odd to some people that all three of the books you mentioned are american subjects. and i'm a canadian. but part of the reason for that is i you know, i was. canada was my day job. i was talking about thinking about writing about canadian current affairs all the time. the last thing you want to do after you've done that all day is go home and write about it again at night. when you grow up in canada, it's like living next door to a circus. you know, the united states is bigger and grander and crazier than anything we have. and so much, you know, more interesting so that's why i always wrote my books about

american subjects. what also struck me, though, you know, when i read your first biography, but it's also true of the hoover. you actually read hearst newspapers and realized that a lot of what had been written about hearst and yellow journalism just didn't stack up. if you actually read it. no, that's true. one of the great things about, you know, the work that tom does is. people keep these archives and you can go and fact check just about anything. and so, yeah, i was writing about hearst and his early career in the spanish american war, which he was supposedly, you know, responsible for driving america into against

america's will. and when you go back and you look at what was happening at the time, you go through how the story unfolded day by day, you see quite another story. theodore roosevelt has a lot to answer for, but yes, that's that's one of the fun things about writing any book is that process of discovery. when you go back and look at the archives, you know, and you know, george has done a lot more of it than than i have and to great effect as well. and i really appreciate, you know, all the work he's done in the hoover archive and what he's put on record for the benefit of all of us who you know, have come a long enjoying the story, as it were. you know, with hoover and i just i don't want to correct you,

tom, but when you introduced george, you said he was one of the great hoover authority is to my mind, he is the hoover authority. and i don't think there's anyone else even close yet. so we got to get that on the record. so george went. when you were a young man, was it your ambition to become a professional historian? go to harvard and i know. and before i answer that, i just want to thank you for those very kind words. both of you. how about that? yes. okay. again, thank you again for those very kind, gracious words. and tom as well. looking back on how i became a historian, i really think that my boyhood influences had much to do with studying me on the

path that i took. i can remember that when i was about ten years old, my grandfather gave me a mostly pictorial, ten volume history of world war two and that excited me greatly. it was fast invading and before long i was just going all the time to the town library and pick, choosing and reading more books about the subject. i was only about ten or 11 at the time, but that was a kind of an imprinting experience, i suppose you could say. and it showed that i liked history and it was relatively current history as well. recent history in 1956, and i'm old enough to remember this, i was just only in grade school. i vividly recall listening to radio reports and reading about the hungarian rebel revolt in october and november of 1956 against the soviet occupiers of hungary. and that had something to do with my emerging political

consciousness. and i was no aware of the wider world and of the cold war that was ongoing, which i then, as boys might do, followed as events unfolded in the years just ahead. now jumping up to high school, i was a member for four years of the debating team. and in those days there was a national topic selected by some organization which all the debaters in the country studied and prepared for a one year it was federal age education. should it be expanded another year? as i recall, it was the united nations should be significantly strength and well, those were current events, topics. but to prepare for them to prepare our cases as debaters, one had to do research. and those topics had, of course, a historical dimension. and i discovered rather fondly that my school subscribed to the congressional record. so i found myself reading the congressional record, especially the appendix, where the members

of congress could put all sorts of editorials from hometown newspapers and so on, and all sorts of interesting stuff. and that i found i enjoyed. and then in my senior year, i guess it was in high school, i had a somewhat experimental american history course which did not teach by a by a textbook, but by looking at problems in american history, such as the cherokee removal under andrew johnson, a jackson. that's one that i vividly recall. we studied primary sources. so in a sense i was being conditioned without knowing it to become to become a historian. when i entered college, i had vague thoughts that maybe i would be going a go would go into the law by soon decided that law school would probably be pretty boring. oh, except for constitutional law, which is intellectual history in disguise, you see. okay. and i became a history major and. and and flourished in that role.

i thought i did. and so in that came time to think about what to do with my life after college, i applied to graduate school in history with a thought that i would become an academic historian of which i have, and in a way, but without the usual career route. so that's kind of how it came about. all those childhood impressions and one that just occurred to me. my father started calling me professor as a at some point. i don't know exactly when. i guess he thought that i had these inclinations towards scholarship and that turned out to be true. so george, who then? how did that translate it from becoming a historian and getting to know herbert hoover? well, in 1975? and can you still hear me with this? i wasn't quite sure. with us on all right. in 1975. i was recently a ph.d. in history from harvard. i was on the academic job market

and i was in the process of preparing my dissertation to be published as my first book on the conservative intellectual movement in america. and it was well, i was in flux, as it were, that i was approached by someone on behalf of what is now called the hoover presidential library foundation here in iowa. they had recently celebrated the centennial of hoover's birth in 1974 and had decided in the wake of that, that it was time to commission some serious scholarship of systematic scholarship on herbert hoover. there wasn't much of it at that time. there were some journalistic biographies and so forth, but nothing that was would be thought of is likely to be of enduring value. and it was all rather hit or miss or to speak. there was some, but not much, and they had learned about my book in progress and were curious to know whether i might be interested in exploring the possibility of undertaking a

commissioned book or set of books really under their sponsorship. now, i have to tell you, i had never thought of my life of writing a biography of herbert hoover until that came in out of the blue that alpert's unity, it wasn't a definitive act yet. so i started to study hoover more. i had little about him, mostly about the presidency through graduate study in all of that. but i realize that hoover was a friend of many of the people about whom i had written my dissertation turning into my first book. he was a kind of patron of conservative causes in his later years, even a patron saint in the eyes of many people on the right, he helped william buckley a bit in founding buckley's national review magazine and 1955. so i thought, well, it's kind of a logical step to to go from studying the conservative intellectuals to someone who, at least in his older age of a was thought of as a patron of that

philosophy. and then i also realized that is the association, as they call themselves in the foundation today, realized that herbert hoover was an understudied and underappreciated president. so before we came to any definitive arrangement, i came out here to west branch and spent several days meeting the archivists, learning about the breadth of the holdings and so forth, and inwardly asking myself the question of my interested enough in this man to want to commit for an indeterminate period of time to study, to study his life. and i also went to the hoover institution at stanford for the same purpose, and i very quickly realized that there was far, far more to herbert hoover than the rather superficial stereotypes that even then were still around all the way through graduate school. so i decided that it was worth exploring, and we came to a contract, an arrangement under

which i would write a definitive scholarly biography, quote unquote, meaning something very comprehensive and in-depth and requiring a lot of turning of pages, of documents of which there are many millions. right here. and we came to an arrangement. and so at a later that year, i undertook what became known as the herbert hoover biography project. and i have to say that i'm still writing about hoover at this point in my life, not in that series, but in another project, which i might mention later. and i have not gotten bored by him over all these years such was the immense range of his interests and talents before we get to you, can i just want to take a moment to recognize this. the archivist in the room that helped both of you, dwight miller, who was the first archivist, hired here at the hoover library and hand-picked by president hoover.

we have former supervisory archivist craig wright, who recently retired his successor, patrick osborne, and then len smith, the archivist. they're kind of the the unknown, the hidden hands behind all of these research projects. so can go out. i mean, i'm sure hoover is not a revered figure in canada that you felt you needed to. now know nobody. nobody talks about him on the streets in canada. no, the but you know, of course, he has the canadian connection. his mother was born in canada and but i didn't know that until i was well into it. i wound up writing in biog fee of hoover mostly because i couldn't write the book. i wanted to write.

i, i had been reading about quite deeply in the first world war and hoover kept pop up all over the place as this increase oblique, competent figure was doing amazing things and, you know, london and belgium and all over the continent after the fighting stopped and it was such a. such a different portrayal of hoover in materi else from that time, from the war then the portrayal that i read. about in the usual american history is that it caught my attention and it led me to read deeper into the commission for relief of belgium, which i thought was probably the greatest thing i'd ever heard

about any individual for doing as a private citizen anywhere at any time. you know, the fact that he started, you know, on this proud object of feeding the belgian people who were occupied by the germans and blockaded by the british for the duration of the war, you know, it wasn't his job. no one hired him to do it. he wasn't paid for it. it was just something he felt very urgently that he needed to do. and the enormous capacities that he displayed, getting the food, the ships, the money at a time when all of these things were in really short supply because there was a war going on. i wanted to tell that story. i wanted to write a book about the belgian relief. and so i, you know, did what you usually do in these situations. you make an outline, you send it to your agent, your agent, you know, shops it around, sees if he can get you publisher.

and they all came back and said, no, we're not interested. if you can do hoover, you have to do the presidency. and i didn't want to write a presidential biography. i just i'm not really a fan of presidential biography as a reader. a lot of the you know, there's a lot of good scholarship in presidential biographies, especially, you know, the big multi-volume projects, the kind of stuff that george does. but a lot of the one volume presidential biographies for for for the general reader just tend to be why my favorite president is the best president of all time. and, and it's almost an exercise in fandom rather than in, you know, real biographical scrutiny. and i just didn't know much about hoover at the time, but

with all the rejections of the original proposal to do the commission of relief for belgium, i, i thought, okay, well, maybe i should look a little bit deeper into hoover and see if there is enough there to do a biography. and that's when my real education on hoover started. and you see the boyhood, you see the stanford years, you see the business career, which i found particularly fascinating, his time in commerce and laying the foundations for, you know, the opening of the american southwest and for, you know, the start of broadcast media through his work with radio, through, you know, the foundation of the aeronautic industry. there's just so many dimensions to it. then the presidency and and all

the things he did in his afterlife, when you laid it all out that way, as i had to do in proposing to write a biography about try and convince a publisher to take it, it was just spectacular. it was just one huge undertaking, one huge event after another all through the course of his life. and as somebody once said about him, he was something to whom the incredible was always happening. and so eventually dawned on me that he was, you know, an ideal subject for a biography. and that's that's how i got into it. was there anything particularly that surprised you that, you know, you found really incredibly eye opening during, you know, this research?

it there was a lot of things the real tension that i found in his life was that he was he was somebody who was not suited for politics. you know, if you if you went to central casting and asked for somebody to run for president, they would not show you a herbert hoover. you know, he he was he was not a conventional politician. he was an engineer. he believed in data. he believed in hard, hard work, had a very empirical cast of mind. he was not a performer in the least. he wasn't very comfortable around strangers all of those things that you're required to do as a politician that are part of your job as a politician. he had no real affinity for ability at and he had actually a bit of contempt for people who

were good at it. he thought politics were to a certain extent beneath him, yet so much of the momentum of his life was towards politics, public office, towards the presidency, and he very much wanted it. and so that was, you know, to me, one of the really interesting puzzles, one of many about hoover that i found compelling george and what what are some of the most surprising things you discovered? well, i think what surprised me most early on and i think a common reaction of anyone who goes through the museum here is it's the sheer scope and duration, magnitude of hoover's accomplishment. as you know, he was born in 1874, died in 1964. he was 90 years old. and 50 of those years were in public service or at least the public spotlight. and i don't think that that is

that that has any precedent or parallel, really, in american history. so that is repeatedly affected me and made it an interesting figure to study because it's been just mentioned and was mentioned in the other panel. he really had a succession of careers, the mining engineering career during which he went around the world five times before world war one, that is to say before the advent of commercial aviation. he became a humanitarian with, of course, this remarkable, truly remarkable belgian relief, a commission that he founded in 1914. i think they expected that the war would end quickly and it would be a temporary expedient. instead, it grew and grew and lasted throughout the war, expanded almost $1,000,000,000 in the currency of that time, saved nine over 9 million belgian and french lives. and that was only the first chapter. and that became the humanitarian

work of 1919, which was involved him in feeding, i think, 4 million tons of food for distribute it around europe in about 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 and i don't know that this has been mentioned yet today, hoover's american relief administration, which was then a private entity, having initially been a government entity during 1919, but it kind of morphed into a private endeavor with woodrow wilson's official permission, the american relief administration of 1921 responded to the call from russia for relief in what was considered to be the greatest famine in europe since the middle ages. in the volga river region, primarily of russia, hoover did not go there personally, but he sent staff there and enormous, i

think something something like 768,000 tons of food distributed in over 100,000 locations by mainly russians staff. but with americans there to supervise this, his staff, that is a topic that very few americans know about. i suspect most in this room do, but it's it is a chapter in hoover's life that is, again, extraordinary. so if you add it all up between 1914 and 1923, he had he supervised or assisted facility aided relief efforts that saved tens of millions of lives. and it has been said of his and i believe correctly in this, in the sense of dealing with relief in this of this nature, that he was responsive for saving more lives than anyone who has ever lived. then comes the commerce department, and we've heard can just mention some of the highlights of that. secretary of commerce, he was called and undersecretary of every other department. that was kind of a double edged

because some of the other departments didn't appreciate hoover's attempts to consolidate more agencies or sub agencies in his domain. but he was one of the three or four dominant figures in american public life in the 1920s. so he got to be elected president of the united states without ever having held elective public office. now, a few generals managed to do that, like elysees grant, an eisenhower, but for a civilian to do that, i think is all the more remarkable. and then we come to this long period as an ex-president elder statesman, and to use his term crusader against collectivism, along with being a philanthropist and doing many other things as well. so i think that is what most impressed me was that just the sheer scope and duration of it. the man was was very intense and that's just it's marvelous.

many people were awed by his ability to work so hard to stay so focused, and to be in intellectual command and not just physical command of people working for him. it was a truly an astonishing thing and that got him a long way. it also of course, led to a dip in the great depression, which i suppose we'll talk about as we go along. yeah. so because you spent so many years studying him and i'm sure things have come to the fore, i mean, has anything if you had to revisit your your work, is there anything that you would change or any reevaluations you have now that have of kind of characterization you had earlier or not? not fundamentally. i did write the first volume before mrs. hoover's papers became available to scholars. herbert hoover, and requested that his wife's papers be kept closed until 20 years after his

death. and i finished my first volume and published it in 83. so the papers did not become legally accessible, so to speak, under that arrangement until october of 84 and then in early 85, the archivists here had worked on processing the materials. so from that point on. so if i were to go back, i think i might find some extra anecdotes to insert or quotations from lou henry, things like that. it wouldn't, i don't think change the fundamental outline of what i said, but it would make for maybe an improvement on some pages to have fresher material. but that kind of this kind of happenstance really reflects what someone has said about historians. history is a conversation without end. and when new sources come through, then we have fresh opportunities to to reexamine a figure or when the world changes and someone goes out of fashion, comes back into fashion so that we have that perpetual conversation, has historians.

so that would be my answer to your question. okay, ken, same question. i no, not really. i don't think i change anything. i but i could could it's it's a difficult question. tom. both of my other books, i, i think i could rewrite both of them and make them better. i was really happy with the way hoover turned out, but there is so much material on hoover, and if any of you have had the opportunity to go back there and see just how many boxes of material, how many walls of boxes of material there is in this library, it's just phenomenal. and i've often thought that if i had were to start over again today, i could write another

biography of herbert hoover that would be 80% different in content from the one that i wrote, and b probably as good and just as interesting there is just so much there in his life in so many different ways to get at his story so many different sources that you know, you could you could really tell the story through a number of different ways. and while i don't think i'd change anything in the book as i wrote it, there are things that i wonder about. you know, i tried to keep everything to 600 pages. i didn't want it to become, you know, a doorstop and and there were a couple of angles that i wish i could have explored a little deeper.

one was the fact that hoover spent his formative years, his early adult years out of the country and really came to his maturity and his place in the world in england, which a very different system of government, very different political environment. and i always wanted to kind of tease out the ways in which the politicians there, the ideas he picked up there, he brought back with him into the united states and how they shaped his thinking. i think one of the reasons he appealed to a lot of progressive intellectuals in washington at the time he showed up in the early twenties because he was in touch with a lot of progressive ideas. then current in the u.k. so you

know that was one angle that i thought, you know, would have been fun to do more on. and i also probably could have spent a lot more time on his later career. one of the problems, you know, in a narrative biography, you want to keep the reader going, turning pages. and once you get through the presidency, you know, you've kind of hit the climax of hoover's life and you feel just a need for, you know, dramatic purposes to get off stage after that as expeditiously as you can. and you know, he had, what, half of his adult life almost after the presidency. and i did that. and about 15% of the book and that to me doesn't seem in totally fair, but there's, you

know, a lot of other books george has done great work on on, you know, the latter part of his career and so on, so, you know, as and as he said, you know, history is an ongoing conversation nation. and there will be many other biographies to be written about hoover and hopefully all of these things will be thoroughly addressed. by, as you indicated earlier. and that, you know, a lot of presidential biographies almost fall under the category of hagiography. and you both talked about very very kind of admirable and outstanding traits that hoover had that kind of set him apart from others. but what about kind of finding a

troublesome faults like, we all have faults and herbert hoover had at least his share. you know, to me. i mentioned earlier one of the interesting parts of his career to me was his business career. and and and what was fascinating is just how driven he was and how determined he was to succeed. and nothing was going to get in his way of him succeeding as a mining engineer and making a fortune as a mining engineer, he cut a lot of corners, you know, and he was, you know, times in his life desperately. concerned that his activities not come to public notice,

particularly his dealings in china. you know, i think it's pretty hard to defend his behavior in the mining deals he did there for mooring and his attitude towards the chinese people generally was often wanting so, you know, he was a young man on the make in those years and and some of his behavior was not at all attractive and, you know, his other fault to my mind, the one that's sort of more relevant to his career as a politician, was what i mentioned earlier. he had a certain arrogance towards the practice of politics, which i find unattractive even in somebody who wants to be a politician, he didn't think that he had to learn the the trade.

he knew he was smart. the man was brilliant. you know, we've we've talked a lot about how smart he was, but he had probably the greatest or one of the greatest intellects, all the presidents to hold office. but he he didn't put in the work to learn politics. he didn't learn his party. he didn't learn congress. and it would have been i think, far. to his advantage to have put in that effort and he might have had a different career as president had he done that. george. well, i would point to something that his friends often worried about, and that was they thought he was overly sensitive to criticism or he is his friend, william marcus junior, who was

undersecretary of state, said in his diary in 1932 that he thought that that was one of hoover's faults, the sensitivity to criticism and hoover would get very easily rattled by the politicians whom he he thought were often rather ordinary creatures at best, and he was also rattled by william randolph hearst. and it was that particular episode or one of them, that castle was alluding to in the diary entry. hoover was afraid that hearst, with his national chain of newspapers, would do hoover a great political damage, as i think he did in supporting roosevelt and criticizing hoover so extensively in the campaign of 1932. so that is something that that others who again, i'm reporting not what friends thought that that it was said he had the thinnest skin in washington and he could not sort of let some of this slide by some of the slings

and arrows he would go out and demand retraction or send surrogates out or send rebuttals or do various things. he he didn't he just he in fact, he he had said of himself that he had a naturally combative disposition and he probably could have ignored more than he did. and that would have made some difference, because he spent so much time being worried about that. i'm again, i'm thinking mostly of the of the twenties and in the early thirties, the periods in as someone said, he had one term and as president and three terms in the white house, otherwise known as the harding and coolidge administrations. so hoover was an outsider and he was feeling this way along and a just would would become very upset by what what we today

would think was rather mild criticism or what he sometimes called and with justice misrepresentations. so that i think that was an inhibiting factor. now, the politicians thought of hoover that he was too much of an outsider, not on party man, a man who had made a career outside of politics and who had women and professional class people and others who thought of politics more in non and less partizan. i had them in his corner in 1928, so there was a lot of distrust of him and he referred to congress, which was still in existence in those days, or rather prohibition in existence in those days. and he called it that beer garden on the hill. and i don't know whether that got back to the members of congress. but again, you see there was a gap there. and then hoover famously said, or is quoted as saying there ought to be a law allowing the president to hang two men a year without being required to give any reason.

and i was sure he had some political figures in mind. and one thing i've never been able to to resolve in my inquiries or research, which senator he was referring to when he referred to him, is the only verified case of a negative iq. so. so it worked both ways. i do think that hoover got better at it in his second half of his term. the first year. he was so deferential that he allowed the smoot-hawley tariff go through and he didn't effectively handle that. i don't think as effectively as he could. he did have. that's a long story, maybe longer than i should try to tell here, but by the time he was getting moving forward in late 31 and 32 with the reconstruction finance corporation proposal and many other reforms as a depression lingered and so on, he became more effective as a leader. but it wasn't always a comradely kind of dealing with with the

congress. i mean, there were some bitter debate disputes that he had with speaker of the house. gardner for example, and so forth. so hoover did not get along, and yet he was more effective in bringing people in to consult and was one of his strengths. he tended to be not good at political behavior of the kind you described. ken you know, going out and backslapping, you know, kissing babies and so on. he hated all that. but if you put him in a room or a conference room with the captains of industry, of labor, leading bankers, others, he could dominate the room because of his intellect, his idealism. and they could see that. so he could often have effective communication. and with politicians in that way. but in terms of broader, broader political maneuvering, it wasn't so easy for him to navigate that way. and then he came up against a man was a charmer.

franklin roosevelt and hoover suffered by comparison in terms of just political effectiveness. so i think those are some points maybe that i would just say to elaborate on what you have correctly said already. so both of you talked about the fact that loose papers didn't become available till very late. and so you don't have good biog. office of her available role and she's in many of the biographies of hoover she's not really a prominent figure so how would you both kind of now that you've had access to the papers, evaluate the marriage and her role, starting with, well, george. yeah? why don't you count? yeah, i think it's become clear. she was. oh, you need to put the microphone up by your mouth. oh, sorry. okay, mrs. hoover was a very

independent and intelligent woman that's become very clear, i think, to any who study her. she was the first woman, i believe, at stanford to major in geology and graduate with a major she may have been the first woman in the united states. it was obviously not a woman's field, unquote, in 1898, the year of her graduation from stanford and i picked up stories in my research on the hoover's mining career. one of them was that when they were living in china for a couple of years through the boxer rebellion, she went down into a mine with him, and that was as a heresy by the superstitious chinese. so what did they do? they went down in the mine afterward with firecrackers to expel all the demons that she might have allowed in. and i interviewed, a very elderly australian mining man when i visited australia back in the late seventies for research on hoover, and he said he

remembered that mrs. hoover accompanied herbert around 1906 and she went down into a mine and she just did it naturally, you know, and she knew something about mining and geology, obviously, and the underground miners, i guess he was a witness to this. they were flabbergasted at the idea of a woman underground in a mine, let alone knowing anything about the subject was just amazing. i think one of the bonds that they had between them was intellectual curiosity. it showed up in different ways. mrs. hoover's collection, which collecting which hoover also did of ming vases, chinese porcelain, but famously the the debris metallic a volume, which they spent about five years translating from the latin as it was written by a german scholar in in the 1500s coining terms that were available in the old latin. and it was a giant puzzle to be solved. and it's a beautiful, remarkable book. mrs. hoover did probably more

work on it than he do did on a day to day basis, but it was a collaboration and that was a, i think, a sign of their intellectual curiosity. and that's the impression i have of her. she was very alert. no, she wasn't one to to step into the limelight with him. she was supportive of him. but she had her own interests, such as the girl scouts, as has has been noted. but i think that that was something that that bonded them and they i've read a lot of her letters. they're rather different from his in style, his tend to be very concise precise to the point she would write to her son, allen, in particular her long letters, but very interesting. and in her way, she was an administrator of a household, an entourage, as he was. and so she had a kind of administrative talent as well i would say. and what final thing that strikes me about their marriage is, my goodness, how busy it was.

they were always moving, especially in the early years and back and forth, back and forth and and had maids and servants and chauffeurs and so on and london and so on to kind of live that style. i think that's one way that the london may have affected him and it was it was it was said of hoover not close with this. it was said of hoover once that he was too progressive for the conservatives and too conservative for the radicals. and in a way, i think you might say something analogous about mrs. hoover and the hoover marriage. it was a modern marriage. it was somewhat unconventional in ways, and yet it was not so unconventional as to put her in the vanguard of of of people who were activist suffragettes and so forth. she believed in women's suffrage, but she wasn't going to go out and be arrested for it in demonstrations unlike one of her friends that he had to bail out in london. so she also and maybe you'd want to see something more.

and the she had a very close tie with mrs. coolidge. they became close friends. and i think that one thing that bonded them was i think they were both slightly amused by their husbands. you know, activities with their husbands had to do in politics. so she's a very interesting person, a very capable person. and well, i think the marriage has to be considered a success. i mean, it lasted till death did them part. and they were still on speaking terms. so it's, you know, better than half of them right there. and. and i think lose in many ways an ideal companion for him. when you think about how they got married. and in california, for him coming in from australia and landing and you know, from getting off a ship, they arrange

the wedding hasty in within 48 hours. they're on a ship to china where neither them have ever been before. and not not every young woman would have been up for an adventure like that. lew absolutely was. and as george mentioned, went down in the mines. and during the boxer rebellion was out on patrol with a with a firearm strapped to her hip. so, you know, she was she was an adventurous lady. and and they they did have a very busy life. i finally found it kind of hilarious the way they ran their their household, everything seemed to be a bit of a mess or a muddle all the time. you know, when they came back from england to america, they just left. they had a house, a huge, beautiful house in england. they just left it there, left the staff in place.

and, you know, the staff was running the place. as it saw fit. one of the servants sold the piano on their behalf and pocketed the proceeds. and, you know, there was all kinds things like that going on. and it translated to washington when they came to 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. and and and all kinds of miskin actions in there correspond this back and forth. there are frequently misunderstandings and and disputes about who was supposed to look after whatever spot, be responsible for what. so it's just a normal marriage in many respects.

i think she was also very advantageous to to hoover socially in that she was much better at a dinner party than he was any kind of social occasion. she was better at small talk and more charming personality and and she was very useful to, in his ambitions to meet the right people in london and to entertain the right people in washington. she played quite an important role in that regard. i think he would have struggled with without her. he probably benefited more if he had to weigh the relationship from what she brought to it than in terms of, you know, support.

and and, you know, he was not always there for her when she was having she had some difficult times in her life and some health problems from time to time. and he just continued to work per usual. and i think there were probably lonely times for for lew given all the work that he took on, how much he was away. but on the whole as i say, i think it was a successful relationship up and they both benefited from it considerably. so the last question i have before i open it up to 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. or not? no. it's history is complicated. and you really have to look at this carefully for a long time. herbert hoover was dismissed as a presidential failure because obviously the depression didn't end and therefore, the what the assumption was that he could have ended it if he had done something differently. i'll get back to that. but the general charge was that hoover did too little. he was too stuck in the mud to, let's say, fair to graham. and so forth or that think stereotype has pretty much been dismissed by historians. but there's another stereotype recent coming more from the libertarian side, which is hoover did too much. that is to say he made policy decisions that exacerbated the depression. they blame the signing. the smoot-hawley tariff of

raising taxes in 32 and and a couple of things. when i talk to the different audiences depending on which one it might be, i'll tell the libertarians that they don't understand the conservative side of hoover. he would go so far, but no further. and he said in in this climactic one of his climactic campaign addresses in 1932, he said this election is more than a contest between two men or two parties. it's a contest, the philosophies of government, and it's going to determine the course of the nation for over a century to come. and he later said that that was one of his most prophetic audiences. so i don't think failure is quite the way to look at it. i think what you should do is examine the the efforts that hoover made that almost succeeded ed in particular. in 1931 when he signed the the

the what is the word the the not the referendum, but the the the moratorium. thank you. thank you. had a little lapse a moratorium that probably saved central european banks from collapse. so why was that important? because america and banks, including large ones, had poured lots of money into germany as loans in the 1920s, and they would have been exposed if the german banking system had collapsed, as it nearly did, that would have brought a calamity to the united states much sooner than the last days of hoover's term. that's one case where i think hoover took an action that at least averted disaster. the second one i would point to was into play the reconstruct from finance corporation, which gave out or delivered several thousand loans to needy banks, other businesses, and between

february and the summer of 1932, a few billion dollars worth that was able they were able thereby to put out many brushfires, particularly in chicago, which came with the largest bank came within minutes really an hours of closing with 120,000 depositors and no deposit insurance to rescue them. there was none until 1934. we must remember that hoover managed to engineer that in the nick of time if that bank had collapse. it is widely believed that many, many other banks in the midwest would have collapsed and that might have detonated a national banking collapse. that's a summer of 32. so in two occasions hoover did something that was helpful. it didn't solve the depression. but that leads to my final point, and that is i think that we need to stop being quite so hoover centric in analyzing the depression. the depression, one of its major

measurements, and this is alluded to earlier in the day, was the decline of the nation's money supply by about 30% in four years, utterly staggering. that was the responsibility of the federal reserve board. and as milton friedman and more recently, alan meltzer, the historian, a principal historian of the federal board, argued in a magisterial book, the federal reserve board, with good intentions, made many policy errors and mistakes, 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 acceptance, individual cases, but as a man who tried like successive us, 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 josephus, who almost turned the corner on several cases. i think ken has mentioned this in his volume, but the key was the undertow was such from the federal board that i think much of what he did is in his anxiety and attempts to get people together and so much of it was rather airbrush event. 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. think of hoover as a sufi and 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 so. i think hoover was far more successful than he's given credit for and i and i agree what george said about, you know, both people on. 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 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. and i don't think that. really 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. and, you know, 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 the houser, which was a piece of public

opinion research done three weeks 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 and the really interesting thing about the poll 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 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. more thought wall street was primarily to blame for the great depression and also most people thought the great depression was over. going into the election of 1932, they things were turning up in the economy that employment was coming back, that 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 overstated the degree to which the economy was issue in 1932. but regardless he failed to to get his party lined up behind him in energy ized 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. the party behind him, not a lot of funds behind him. and it was a very difficult road. and roosevelt, roosevelt, if hoover. underrated to my mind. hoover, roosevelt is a bit more than a bit overrated. there's a lot of things in in his presidencies that i think we really haven't dealt with adequately i think his you know the packing of the the the court the use of the justice department to pursue his political and. and just general overreach in

the office of the presidency are things that are really on often disturbing behavior and so i would i would argue that yes. hoover is underrated and roosevelt is a bit overrated, too. but roosevelt was a brilliant politician and, managed to find constituency, a new constituency in america for the democrat party and it held together for two decades. and and he was, in a very difficult time in the american economy during great depression, i think a more effective leader of the american public than than hoover was hoover, i think, was

administratively had a better understanding of the problems, what needed to be done, but part of the job of the president is to lead the nation and to shape public opinion. tell people where we're going and why. and roosevelt was particularly brilliant at that. and and that's where to my mind, hoover was especially challenged. at this time. again, on if you have a question raised. oh, they're already lined up at the microphone. so. well, it please say your name and indicate to whom the question is directed. jay wideman, i guess. i mean, i would address this question to the entire panel, particularly doctor nash, first of all, thank you to the panel and thank you to the library and the 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 this out is trying to restore hoover's reputation and to share his story fairly. well, you know not sugarcoating 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 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 did harding select because of his popularity more than anything else or just speak about that? thank you, harding hoover. the smartest guy i know. have you ever heard the word inc used in any other context?

i was a kid. i did senility. yeah, it's an old slang, i guess. a harding and hoover. a hoover was a more progressive republican. harding was a conservative republican. hoover wanted the league of nations to to be united states to join or 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 of information and. so on very useful cabinet secretary and hoover think he and hoover became close that way and hoover didn't go to the the parties to where they were playing gambling and so on in the white house playing cards harding and all of that. so hoover was not that that i'll share an anecdote comes to my head hiram johnson from california was a bitter opponent of hoover. they were rivals in that state.

and johnson was a bitter enter opponent of the league of nation. and he thought hoover, an internationalist. and there were all sorts of disagreement just between them. i came across in my research, johnson's evaluation, harding's new cabinet. he said well, he wants hoover and he was the secretary of state in there for respectability. and the rest of them are essentially his cronies. and so hoover did bring respect, nobility to the cabinet, and he took he paid he insisted that harding give him a broad interpretation of the of the sphere of influence that the commerce department could have. and that was very, very i have sometimes wondered whether harding would wanted hoover to be his running mate in 1924. i have no evidence for that. but if i were to go back and look at the records and knew i might want to see whether there were any hints of hoover, harding and part of that trip

westward, harding became ill and died. so i think hoover hoover saw harding not as the smartest kid he knew, but as a man who had considerable ability and a a good soul, you might say, with his weaknesses. and among those weaknesses was allowing cronies to take 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 denounced harding's, the men who let him down, the crooks and it was rather, i thought, rather perceptive, fair toward harding himself. i'll just add that i thought was really interesting point you made about harding and hoover and their reputational difficulties and how both of

them are under rated too, 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 noncommunist meant in the last year or two of his term. demobilization was botched. there were general strikes and riots and all kinds problems throughout the country. and in a very short period of harding put things back on an even keel and laid the foundations for the prosperity that american and america enjoyed through the 1920s. and i think coolidge up getting a lot of credit for much you know, the great work that harding so i'm glad you went to

marion and and and glad you noticed the connection between the two. i'm a little nervous that i might kicking a beehive in this question but it's kind of a dream to have of you here to grapple with it, because i have wondered, 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 hoover and written about herbert hoover, how how you respond to that chapter of hoover's life. so there's a sort of a question to george about it, asking for a response to the chapters that ken wrote about hoover and china because it is a different sort of picture of of 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 or i'd love to understand how you understand it. and ken, also to have your response. i guess i would refer you to something i haven't read in a while in name only gets the china chapters of my first volume which go oh, you're speaking to i'm sorry. okay, so my response to ken's interpretation of hoover china. well, i think that hoover was amongst a den of thieves. i don't know that there was a decent an honest one and a bunch. i'm not talking about hoover now, but the people he dealt with, chang the mandarin to bring his advisor and so forth. and hoover is a guy of 25 years old and living by his wits. you might say. and i so i think that. well it does seem that hoover really put pressure on trying

sign a memorandum which his british and hoover's british bosses did not honor or. 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 reproach in that. now, he was very sensitive about it because the democrats got wind of it in 1920 and again in 1928, and they sent people they actually went over and interviewed, if not chang at least someone like him and hoover to great lengths to 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 hoover since it was sore spot or a potential dangerous point for him. i think what we have to say in hoover's defense that he was in a in a crowd where there was no

particular ethical or bearing for some of them. and he tried in a way to be, i think, fair to chiang because there was a contract that was of the was given over to the british and there was also a memorandum and the british and their belgian colleagues are 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 chiang to sign that document. and he put pressure on. i mean, he says hoover himself that he used main force to do it. and we don't know what that meant. but it certainly didn't sound like was a pleasant confrontation. and the battle between them went on for, if i recall, about three days or so, you know, getting chiang because chiang was being asked to give up chinese title or he thought to go to chinese property, which he was responsible for, and letting these western thai types,

perhaps exploit the whole situation. so chiang got in such trouble at home that he went to london to to charge be with moring, which hoover was a partner with with failure, carry out the terms of the deal and chiang won his case. but it was it didn't turn to be a very effective victory and for for reasons of details that i don't remember at the moment but the chinese did something curious. they created a parallel shell company, which i think eventually consolidated it 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 hoover's reputation is he's one of the four foreign thieves. he was an agent of all these imperialist sites 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 chiang it up to a point, but also say a service serve his british boss and he was trying to get something that he could consider acceptable. but it was a it was a rough moment for him. i would have to say that you might want to elaborate on that. i don't know. oh, i know. i. i don't think we're very far apart, george. the and i think your point about him being young is valid. he was 25. he a junior player in in the company. 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 in newspapers to the effect of the only way to negotiate the chinese is at the point of a gun, you know, and so there's no don't think any getting around the fact that that herbert hoover was not blameless in every aspect of his life. i mean, these all of a president has been very much a human being and they have good moments and have bad moments. and i don't think it should take away from the fact that he did magnify innocent things. and with the rest of his life. and and i think a lot of the things that he did afterwards you can actually read an effort to make amends for some of the he made as a young man. i'm not sure he would have been so determined at the of 40 to turn himself off to his humanitarian had he not embarrassed a bit in his

business career and had produced a legacy that he wanted to correct some extent. so you know, i think it's all of a piece and and it's really important for an understanding of history and an understanding of the man to to to accept that he was not infallible and there were times that, you know, he he even by his own values, i think, led himself down. so just to real quick kind of footnote what you've been saying the last few there have been several chinese delegations, one that went to iowa city. they're looking to set up a sister relationship.

and i was invited and hubei province, where the coping minds were located. so they know about hoover. and if you go online, the provincial museum him recreates his office when he was in china. and you know, i was expecting kind of a negative but but actually they seem rather proud the fact that an american was familiar with china and had stayed there, the keeping minds are now have a different name. but the fact they're still in operation again is a kind of credit to hoover's ability to. look at the reports and figure out the profitability of mine and its operations. the second visitor was the council 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 museum and both delegations seem more interested in kind of a cultural exchange for americans. go to learn more about china just hoover did you know when he was running the mines and so it's it was completely different than what i might have anticipate painted would be the party line and of course premier xi jinping is from hubei and his with governor 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. they just had one footnote. sure. the the reason the mines weren't into british control was was right after the boxer rebellion and china was in a state of anarchy and chang the 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 turned out to be unable to raise all the capital was supposed to raise. and he turned 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, franky, emil, was somebody who had met hoover in china and they hadn't gotten

along and hoover thought that the belgians, represented by franky, were exploiting and mistreating the chinese. so was indignant at what the belgians were up to and then 13 or so years later, hoover and francie meet and have to cooperate in the relief of belgium. and they didn't always cooperate 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 francie even visited hoover when he was president. and hoover sent mrs. francie, the widow food relief packages during world war two. so all these angles over here did have a point, though, that a well-fed francie was not a good public image. what about starving people? now? 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 between that and 50 years later of jimmy carter being followed by ronald reagan 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 enjoyed statistics and managed ment, 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 think there's another comparison to be made. carter had a one i'd happy one term and spent still living is almost 100. he much of the rest of his life doing humanitarian work 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 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 careers. you can make a kind of a comparison between them. but hoover was in the carter camp. hello, i'm linda. proud to be a native iowan and i believe 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. and do you have any have you come across any correspondence about that event. i didn't see any correspond. it's about the event in particular, but it was, you

know, noted at the time and well covered at the time, you know, certainly something that she deserves to be remembered for. and, you know, it's it's hard to appreciate now just what an impressive and progressive move that was at the time. simple invitation into tea, but it was 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. so i think if you go on our website, we have a lesson plan on the depressed which might have some primary sources. i mean, know and if you go in the it permanent galleries and the lu gallery there is of the

correspondence critical and supportive that we've reproduced that that's in the cases of craig say everything we have on it has been scanned so you get a hold of one of the active archivist can get you copies of anything that bears your answer. one last thing is really to attention by a history student, iowa, who actually contacted the descendants of the dupree's family who then loaned her photographs that we that we have on. yeah. yes. so it's actually a lot of this comes at i believe it was a middle school student who started this. and we've all benefited from that since. we have a thank you. last question, perhaps i'm jay cassina. i've been in iowa and since january. 1939, and i believe that the

solution to many of america's problems today is existing. president hoover's little book, the american individual liberty and. i see to it that my children and my grandchildren have copies of that book. and i wonder if you can identify a another top a selection of his publications that i might go to next. well, if you haven't read his book about wilson in paris it's 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. and i'm glad you mentioned american individualism, because it's it's probably of everything

he wrote my favorite and i you know there the political test he poses is 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 to work hard and contribute to society. i think, you know, is 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 in. george has edited and an edition of that. having you didn't introduction

to an edition that's available so highly recommended. we haven't talked much about hoover's political philosophy today, but not much in this panel, but i think that exemplifies it. and i agree with what it kind of said so. well, he also wrote a book called the challenge to liberty, published in 1934, for 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 ideology that he felt were were an assault on true and what he considered be true liberalism or historic liberalism. and that's an important part of the hoover legacy, in my view. the philosophical explanation, notion of the american system. if you will, broadly speaking, that he 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 the you mentioned, mr. white, the. the idea of a book or of what we could write about the presidency. so the question i have is actually two questions, which is having read the book, the presidents club by duffy and gibbs, he mentions the relationship but there seems to be a little bit of on the fence ness in the first chapter regard were truman and hoover friends 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 slipping in bathtubs in telegram. could you comment on that as well as, let's say, for instance and i don't like to do the hypotheticals, hypothetically speaking, you're giving carte blanche to write a book about the power of the ex-presidents. what would be the kind of theme that you would want to if you were given that kind of free

rein. my recollection, george, correct me if i'm wrong in this, but my recollection is that true. me and hoover did not really have a relationship when truman reached out 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 correspond. and you the. in a nutshell, the narrative of hoover's post presidency is a guy who is just frankly wrecked after he lost the election in 1932 and embarrassed even to be seen in public, but eventually

regained his bearings and carving out a new role himself as as a sort of a senior statesman within the republican party and going on to do a great service for truman after the first world war and then his work with eisenhower, the presidential. in the fifties, where they essentially reviewed and and reconceive the whole of the operations of the federal government, 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 to including eisenhower, you 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 in then his ongoing support for other republic can leaders, his close relationship with robert taft, for instance, and and then up to the end of his life, he's still advising, you know, both the the kennedys and nixon at the end of his life. so it's you know, there's there's so much to talk there. there really anything that didn't happen through the rest of the great depression, through the second world war, through cold war, that hoover wasn't, you know, and to some extent in and deeply interested in and had really important to say about. around 1920, around world war. warner right after hoover wrote a little essay called

information for biographers. i think it was that signy 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 says in that same passage that for him that the most easily measured form of such of such accomplishment is to use his words in the origination or administration of tangible instant solutions. so hoover in his way and mrs. hoover to some degree and her way with the girl scouts and so forth, were institution builders and 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 entirely. i would like to think that the enjoyment of life along the way has importance, and we ought to totally focus on just getting things done. we have to be as well to do but so to speak. but but i do think it's it's an admirable statement and a very provocative one. and think it tells us a lot about what drove herbert hoover, through this truly extraordinary life and just quickly build on to things that george said there. we haven't talked about stanford. and you mention, you know, institution buildings. and hoover's role at stanford was enormous. george written a book about it. i mean. that the we talked about how big his life is how much he's involved in we can talk for hours about him it doesn't even come up that he you know, more or less was one of the probably

the most important person in. the history of stanford university know and 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, had a lot of fun along the way. you know, i reading about their early relationship, you know, when they're young, in love and in china in their matching pajamas and, you know, traveling around, seeing things and in, you know, when they're in england, they have put all of their winnings into a seeing cairo fund so they can just take off at a moment's notice and 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 eight foot net for an hour or going out into a stream and moving boulders

around or sitting under a hot florida sun 8 hours looking for bonefish. you know, he had a singular idea of fun, but he knew what he liked to do. and he he always took some in his life, enjoy himself and. i think that's an important part of his personality to remember. let's think our speaker is. and just a reminder of 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. good morning, everyone. i have peter carmichael. i am a member