Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874 – October 20, 1964) was the 31st president of the United States, serving from 1929 to 1933. As a member of the Republican Party, he served as the third United States secretary of commerce from 1921 to 1928 before being elected president in 1928. His presidency was dominated by the Great Depression, and his policies and methods to combat it were seen as inadequate and overly conservative. Amid his unpopularity, he decisively lost re-election to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932.
Born to a Quaker family in West Branch, Iowa, Hoover grew up in Oregon. He was one of the first graduates of the new Stanford University in 1895. Hoover took a position with a London-based mining company working in Australia and China. He rapidly became a wealthy mining engineer and businessman. In 1914, the outbreak of World War I, he organized and headed the Commission for Relief in Belgium, an international relief organization that provided food to occupied Belgium. When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Hoover to lead the U.S. Food Administration. He became famous as his country's "food dictator". After the war, Hoover led the American Relief Administration, which provided food to the starving millions in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Russia. His wartime service made him a favorite of many progressives, and he unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination in the 1920 United States presidential election.
Hoover served as Secretary of Commerce under presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Hoover was an unusually active and visible Cabinet member, becoming known as "Secretary of Commerce and Under-Secretary of all other departments." He was influential in the development of air travel and radio. Hoover led the federal response to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. He won the Republican nomination in the 1928 presidential election and defeated Democratic candidate Al Smith in a landslide. In 1929, Hoover assumed the presidency. However, during his first year in office, the stock market crashed, signaling the onset of the Great Depression. Hoover supported the Mexican Repatriation and his response to the Great Depression was widely seen as lackluster.
In the midst of the Great Depression, he lost in a landslide to Democratic nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election. Hoover's retirement was over 31 years long, one of the longest presidential retirements. He authored numerous works and became increasingly conservative in retirement. He strongly criticized Roosevelt's foreign policy and the New Deal. In the 1940s and 1950s, public opinion of Hoover improved, largely due to his service in various assignments for presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, including chairing the influential Hoover Commission. Critical assessments of his presidency by historians and political scientists generally rank him as amongst the worst presidents in American history, although Hoover has received praise for his actions as a humanitarian and public official.
Early life and education
Herbert Clark Hoover was born on August 10, 1874, in West Branch, Iowa. His father, Jesse Hoover, was a blacksmith and farm implement store owner of German, Swiss, and English ancestry. Hoover's mother, Hulda Randall Minthorn, was raised in Norwich, Ontario, Canada, before moving to Iowa in 1859. Like most other citizens of West Branch, Jesse and Hulda were Quakers. Around age two "Bertie", as he was called during that time, contracted a serious bout of croup, and was momentarily thought to have died until resuscitated by his uncle, John Minthorn. As a young child he was often referred to by his father as "my little stick in the mud" when he repeatedly got trapped in the mud crossing the unpaved street. Herbert's family figured prominently in the town's public prayer life, due almost entirely to mother Hulda's role in the church. As a child, Hoover consistently attended schools, but he did little reading on his own aside from the Bible. Hoover's father, noted by the local paper for his "pleasant, sunshiny disposition", died in 1880 at the age of 34 of a sudden heart attack. Hoover's mother died in 1884 of typhoid, leaving Hoover, his older brother, Theodore, and his younger sister, May, as orphans. Hoover lived the next 18 months with his uncle Allen Hoover at a nearby farm.
In November 1885, Hoover was sent to Newberg, Oregon, to live with his uncle John Minthorn, a Quaker physician and businessman whose own son had died the year before. The Minthorn household was considered cultured and educational, and imparted a strong work ethic. Much like West Branch, Newberg was a frontier town settled largely by Midwestern Quakers. Minthorn ensured that Hoover received an education, but Hoover disliked the many chores assigned to him and often resented Minthorn. One observer described Hoover as "an orphan [who] seemed to be neglected in many ways". Hoover attended Friends Pacific Academy (now George Fox University), but dropped out at the age of thirteen to become an office assistant for his uncle's real estate office (Oregon Land Company) in Salem, Oregon. Though he did not attend high school, Hoover learned bookkeeping, typing, and mathematics at a night school.
Hoover was a member of the inaugural "Pioneer Class" of Stanford University, entering in 1891 despite failing all the entrance exams except mathematics. During his freshman year, he switched his major from mechanical engineering to geology after working for John Casper Branner, the chairman of Stanford's geology department. During his sophomore year, Sam Collins proposed founding, Romero Hall Boarding Club, the first student cooperative boarding house at Romero Hall, for "sociability and economy", which Hoover and William Foster Hidden co-founded. Hoover was a mediocre student, and he spent much of his time working in various part-time jobs or participating in campus activities. Though he was initially shy among fellow students, Hoover won election as student treasurer and became known for his distaste for fraternities and sororities. He served as student manager of both the baseball and football teams, and helped organize the inaugural Big Game versus the University of California. During the summers before and after his senior year, Hoover interned under economic geologist Waldemar Lindgren of the United States Geological Survey; these experiences convinced Hoover to pursue a career as a mining geologist.
Engineering and business careers
Bewick, Moreing & Co.
When Hoover graduated from Stanford in 1895, the country was in the midst of the Panic of 1893 and he initially struggled to find a job. He worked in various low-level mining jobs in the Sierra Nevada Mountains until persuading prominent mining engineer Louis Janin to hire him. After working as a mine scout for a year, Hoover was hired by Bewick, Moreing & Co. ("Bewick"), a London-based company that operated gold mines in Western Australia. He first went to Coolgardie, then the center of the Eastern Goldfields, which was actually in Western Australia, receiving a $5,000 salary (equivalent to $193,500 in 2025). Conditions were harsh in the goldfields; Hoover described the Coolgardie and Murchison rangelands on the edge of the Great Victoria Desert as a land of "black flies, red dust and white heat".
Hoover traveled constantly across the Outback to evaluate and manage the company's mines. He convinced Bewick to purchase the Sons of Gwalia gold mine, which proved to be one of the most successful mines in the region. Partly due to Hoover's efforts, the company eventually controlled approximately 50 percent of gold production in Western Australia. Hoover brought in many Italian immigrants to cut costs and counter the labour movement of the Australian miners. During his time with the mining company, Hoover became opposed to measures such as a minimum wage and workers' compensation, feeling that they were unfair to owners. Hoover's work impressed his employers, and in 1898 he was promoted to junior partner. An open feud developed between Hoover and his boss, Ernest Williams, but Bewick's leaders defused the situation by offering Hoover a compelling position in China.
Upon arriving in China, Hoover developed gold mines near Tianjin on behalf of Bewick and the Chinese-owned Chinese Engineering and Mining Company. He became deeply interested in Chinese history, but gave up on learning the language to a fluent level. He publicly warned that Chinese workers were inefficient and racially inferior. He made recommendations to improve the lot of the Chinese worker, seeking to end the practice of imposing long-term servitude contracts and to institute reforms for workers based on merit. The Boxer Rebellion broke out shortly after the Hoovers arrived in China, trapping them and numerous other foreign nationals until a multi-national military force defeated Boxer forces in the Battle of Tientsin. Fearing the imminent collapse of the Chinese government, the director of the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company agreed to establish a new Sino-British venture with Bewick. After they established effective control over the new Chinese mining company, Hoover became the operating partner in late 1901.
In this role, Hoover continually traveled the world on behalf of Bewick, visiting mines operated by the company on different continents. Beginning in December 1902, the company faced mounting legal and financial issues after one of the partners admitted to having fraudulently sold stock in a mine. More issues arose in 1904 after the British government formed two separate royal commissions to investigate Bewick's labor practices and financial dealings in Western Australia. After the company lost a lawsuit Hoover began looking for a way to get out of the partnership, and he sold his shares in mid-1908.
Sole proprietor
After leaving Bewick, Moreing, Hoover worked as a London-based independent mining consultant and financier. Though he had risen to prominence as a geologist and mine operator, Hoover focused much of his attention on raising money, restructuring corporate organizations, and financing new ventures. He specialized in rejuvenating troubled mining operations, taking a share of the profits in exchange for his technical and financial expertise. Hoover thought of himself and his associates as "engineering doctors to sick concerns", and he earned a reputation as a "doctor of sick mines". He made investments on every continent and had offices in San Francisco; London; New York City; Paris; Petrograd; and Mandalay, British Burma. By 1914, Hoover was a very wealthy man, with an estimated personal fortune of $4 million (equivalent to $128.57 million in 2025).
Hoover co-founded the Zinc Corporation to extract zinc near the Australian city of Broken Hill, New South Wales. The Zinc Corporation developed the froth flotation process to extract zinc from lead-silver ore and operated the world's first selective ore differential flotation plant. Hoover worked with the Burma Corporation, a British firm that produced silver, lead, and zinc in large quantities at the Namtu Bawdwin Mine. He also helped increase copper production in Kyshtym, Russia, through the use of pyritic smelting. He also agreed to manage a separate mine in the Altai Mountains that, according to Hoover, "developed probably the greatest and richest single body of ore known in the world".
In his spare time, Hoover wrote. His lectures at Columbia and Stanford universities were published in 1909 as Principles of Mining, which became a standard textbook. The book reflects his move towards progressive ideals, as Hoover came to endorse eight-hour workdays and organized labor. Hoover became deeply interested in the history of science, and he was especially drawn to the De re metallica, an influential 16th century work on mining and metallurgy by Georgius Agricola. In 1912, Hoover and his wife published the first English translation of De re metallica. Hoover also joined the board of trustees at Stanford, and led a successful campaign to appoint John Branner as the university's president.
Early political career
Committee chairmen of the Commission for Relief in Belgium (1914–1919)
World War I broke out in August 1914, pitting Germany and its allies against France and its allies. The German Schlieffen plan was to achieve a quick victory by marching through neutral Belgium to envelop the French Army east of Paris. The maneuver failed to reach Paris, but the Germans were successful in taking nearly all of Belgium and would occupy most of the nation for the remainder of the war. Hoover and other London-based American businessmen established a committee to organize the return of the roughly 100,000 Americans stranded in Europe. Hoover was appointed as the committee's chairman and, with the assent of Congress and the Wilson administration, took charge of the distribution of relief to Americans in Europe. Hoover later stated, "I did not realize it at the moment, but on August 3, 1914, my career was over forever. I was on the slippery road of public life." By early October 1914, Hoover's organization had distributed relief to at least 40,000 Americans.
The German invasion of Belgium in August 1914 set a food crisis into motion in Belgium, a nation which relied heavily on food imports. The Germans refused to take responsibility for feeding Belgian citizens in captured territory, and the British refused to lift their blockade of German-occupied Belgium unless the U.S. government supervised Belgian food imports as a neutral party in the war. With the cooperation of the Wilson administration and the Comité National de Secours et d'Alimentation (CNSA), a Belgian relief organization, Hoover established the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB). The CRB obtained and imported millions of tons of foodstuffs for the CNSA to distribute, and helped ensure that the German army did not appropriate the food. Private donations and government grants supplied the majority of its $11-million-a-month budget, and the CRB became a veritable independent republic of relief, with its own flag, navy, factories, mills, and railroads.
Hoover worked 14-hour days from London, administering the distribution of over two million tons of food to nine million war victims. In an early form of shuttle diplomacy, he crossed the North Sea forty times to meet with German authorities and persuade them to allow food shipments. He also convinced British Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George to allow individuals to send money to the people of Belgium, thereby lessening workload of the CRB. At the request of the French government, the CRB began delivering supplies to the people of German-occupied Northern France in 1915. In 1926, American diplomat Walter Page described Hoover as "probably the only man living who has privately (i.e., without holding office) negotiated understandings with the British, French, German, Dutch, and Belgian governments".
Director of the U.S. Food Administration (1917–1918)
War upon Germany was declared in April 1917, and American food was essential to Allied victory. With the U.S. mobilizing for war, President Wilson appointed Hoover to head the U.S. Food Administration, which was charged with ensuring the nation's food needs during the war. Hoover had hoped to join the administration in some capacity since at least 1916, and he obtained the position after lobbying several members of Congress and Wilson's confidant, Edward M. House. Earning the appellation of "food czar", Hoover recruited a volunteer force of hundreds of thousands of women and deployed propaganda in movie theaters, schools, and churches. He carefully selected men to assist in the agency leadership—Alonzo E. Taylor (technical abilities), Robert Taft (political associations), Gifford Pinchot (agricultural influence), and Julius Barnes (business acumen).
World War I had created a global food crisis that dramatically increased food prices and caused food riots and starvation in the countries at war. Hoover's chief goal as food czar was to provide supplies to the Allied Powers, but he also sought to stabilize domestic prices and to prevent domestic shortages. Under the broad powers granted by the Food and Fuel Control Act, the Food Administration supervised food production throughout the United States, and the administration made use of its authority to buy, import, store, and sell food. Determined to avoid rationing, Hoover established set days for people to avoid eating specified foods and save them for soldiers' rations: meatless Mondays, wheatless Wednesdays, and "when in doubt, eat potatoes". These policies were dubbed "Hooverizing" by government publicists, in spite of Hoover's continual orders that publicity should not mention him by name. The Food Administration shipped 23 million metric tons of food to the Allied Powers, preventing their collapse and earning Hoover great acclaim. As head of the Food Administration, Hoover gained a following in the United States, especially among progressives who saw in Hoover an expert administrator and symbol of efficiency. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society during his tenure.
Director of the American Relief Administration (1919–1923)
World War I came to an end in November 1918, but Europe continued to face a critical food situation; Hoover estimated that as many as 400 million people faced the possibility of starvation. The United States Food Administration became the American Relief Administration (ARA), and Hoover was charged with providing food to Central and Eastern Europe. In addition to providing relief, the ARA rebuilt infrastructure in an effort to rejuvenate the economy of Europe. Throughout the Paris Peace Conference, Hoover served as a close adviser to President Wilson, and he largely shared Wilson's goals of establishing the League of Nations, settling borders on the basis of self-determination, and refraining from inflicting a harsh punishment on the defeated Central Powers. The following year, the famed British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in The Economic Consequences of the Peace that if Hoover's realism, "knowledge, magnanimity and disinterestedness" had found wider play in the councils of Paris, the world would have had "the Good Peace". After U.S. government funding for the ARA expired in mid-1919, Hoover transformed the ARA into a private organization, raising millions of dollars from private donors. He also established the European Children's Fund, which provided relief to fifteen million children across fourteen countries.
Despite the opposition of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and other Republicans, Hoover provided aid to the defeated German nation after the war, as well as relief to famine-stricken Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Hoover condemned the Bolsheviks but warned President Wilson against an intervention in the Russian Civil War, as he viewed the White Russian forces as little better than the Bolsheviks and feared the possibility of a protracted U.S. involvement. The Russian famine of 1921–22 claimed six million people, but the intervention of the ARA likely saved millions of lives. When asked if he was not helping Bolshevism by providing relief, Hoover stated, "twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!" Reflecting the gratitude of many Europeans, in July 1922, Soviet author Maxim Gorky told Hoover that "your help will enter history as a unique, gigantic achievement, worthy of the greatest glory, which will long remain in the memory of millions of Russians whom you have saved from death".
In 1919, Hoover established the Hoover War Collection at Stanford University. He donated all the files of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, the U.S. Food Administration, and the American Relief Administration, and pledged $50,000 as an endowment (equivalent to $928,503 in 2025). Scholars were sent to Europe to collect pamphlets, society publications, government documents, newspapers, posters, proclamations, and other ephemeral materials related to the war and the revolutions that followed it. The collection was renamed the Hoover War Library in 1922 and is now known as the Hoover Institution Library and Archives. During the post-war period, Hoover also served as the president of the Federated American Engineering Societies.
1920 presidential election
Hoover had been little known among the American public before 1914, but his service in the Wilson administration established him as a contender in the 1920 presidential election. Hoover's wartime push for higher taxes, criticism of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's actions during the First Red Scare, and his advocacy for measures such as the minimum wage, forty-eight-hour workweek, and elimination of child labor made him appealing to progressives of both parties. Despite his service in the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson, Hoover had never been closely affiliated with either the Democrats or the Republicans. He initially sought to avoid committing to any party in the 1920 election, hoping that either of the two major parties would draft him for president at their national conventions. In March 1920, he changed strategy and declared himself a Republican; he was motivated in large part by the belief that the Democrats had little chance of winning. Despite his national renown, Hoover's service in the Wilson administration had alienated farmers and the conservative Old Guard of the GOP, and his presidential candidacy fizzled out after his defeat in the California primary by favorite son Hiram Johnson. At the 1920 Republican National Convention, Warren G. Harding emerged as a compromise candidate after the convention became deadlocked among supporters of Johnson, Leonard Wood, and Frank Orren Lowden. Hoover backed Harding's successful campaign in the general election, and he began laying the groundwork for a future presidential run by building a base of strong supporters in the Republican Party.
Secretary of Commerce (1921–1928)
After his election as president in 1920, Harding rewarded Hoover for his support, offering to appoint him as either Secretary of the Interior or Secretary of Commerce. Secretary of Commerce was considered a minor Cabinet post, with limited and vaguely defined responsibilities, but Hoover decided to accept the position. Hoover's progressive stances, continuing support for the League of Nations, and recent conversion to the Republican Party aroused opposition to his appointment from many Senate Republicans. To overcome this opposition, Harding paired Hoover's nomination with that of conservative favorite Andrew Mellon as Secretary of the Treasury, and the nominations of both Hoover and Mellon were confirmed by the Senate. Hoover would serve as Secretary of Commerce from 1921 to 1928, serving under Harding and, after Harding's death in 1923, President Calvin Coolidge. While some of the most prominent members of the Harding administration, including Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty and Secretary of Interior Albert B. Fall, were implicated in major scandals, Hoover emerged largely unscathed from investigations into the Harding administration.
Hoover envisioned the Commerce Department as the hub of the nation's growth and stability. His experience mobilizing the war-time economy convinced him that the federal government could promote efficiency by eliminating waste, increasing production, encouraging the adoption of data-based practices, investing in infrastructure, and conserving natural resources. He promoted the scheme of "Super Power" for electrical utility interconnection, and accepted the first ceremonial Picturephone call in Washington in April 1927 from Walter Gifford, the Chairman of AT&T in New York City.
Contemporaries described Hoover's approach as a "third alternative" between "unrestrained capitalism" and socialism, which was becoming increasingly popular in Europe. Hoover sought to foster a balance among labor, capital, and the government, and for this, he has been variously labeled a corporatist or an associationalist. A high priority was economic diplomacy, including promoting the growth of exports, as well as protection against monopolistic practices of foreign governments, especially regarding rubber and coffee.
Hoover endorsed much of Mellon's tax reduction program but favored a more progressive tax system and opposed the treasury secretary's efforts to eliminate the estate tax. He also demanded, and received, authority to coordinate economic affairs throughout the government. He created many sub-departments and committees, overseeing and regulating everything from manufacturing statistics to air travel. In some instances, he "seized" control of responsibilities from other Cabinet departments when he deemed that they were not carrying out their responsibilities well; some began referring to him as the "Secretary of Commerce and Under-Secretary of all other departments". In response to the Depression of 1920–21, he convinced Harding to assemble a presidential commission on unemployment, which encouraged local governments to engage in countercyclical infrastructure spending. A conference was held to discuss the unemployment situation in 1921, with Hoover arguing that there "is no economic failure so terrible in its import as that of a country possessing a surplus of every necessity of life in which members, willing and anxious to work are deprived of these necessities." Nevertheless, Hoover argued that the solution to the nation's unemployment situation lay not in federal intervention but in voluntary and local action. He also opposed government payments to unemployed individuals, believing that this would not only lead to large deficit spending but also make people dependent on the government.
As Hoover put it during the conference:
It is not consonant with the spirit or institutions of the American people that a demand should be made upon the public treasury for the solution of every difficulty. The Administration has felt that a large degree of solution could be expected through the mobilization of the fine cooperative action of our manufacturers and employers and of our public bodies and local authorities. And that if a solution could be found in these directions we should accomplish even more than the care of our unemployed-that we will again demonstrate that independence and ability of action amongst our own people which saves our Government from that ultimate paternalism that would undermine our whole political system. In the other countries that have been primarily affected by the War, solution has been had by doles to individuals by their Governments. We have so far escaped this most vicious of solutions, and I am hopeful, and I believe you will be, that it is within the intelligence and initiative of our people that we may find remedies against hardship and bitterness that do not, except in exceptional cases, come within the range of charity.
Regulation of radio and transportation
Between 1923 and 1929, the number of families with radios grew from 300,000 to 10 million, and Hoover's tenure as Secretary of Commerce heavily influenced radio use in the United States. Between 1922 and 1925, Hoover organized conferences among radio manufacturers, news agencies, and government organizations which played a key role in the organization, development, and regulation of radio broadcasting. Hoover also helped pass the Radio Act of 1927, which allowed the government to intervene and abolish radio stations that were deemed "non-useful" to the public. Hoover's attempts at regulating radio were not supported by all congressmen, and he received much opposition from the Senate and from radio station owners.
Hoover was also influential in the early development of air travel, and he sought to create a thriving private industry boosted by government subsidies. He encouraged the development of emergency landing fields, required all runways to be equipped with lights and radio beams, and encouraged farmers to make use of planes for crop dusting. Hoover also established the federal government's power to inspect planes and license pilots, setting a precedent for the later Federal Aviation Administration.
As Commerce Secretary, he hosted national conferences on street traffic collectively known as the National Conference on Street and Highway Safety. His chief objective was to address the growing casualty toll of traffic accidents, but the scope of the conferences grew and soon embraced motor vehicle standards, rules of the road, and urban traffic control. He left the invited interest groups to negotiate agreements among themselves, which were then presented for adoption by states and localities. Because automotive trade associations were the best organized, many of the positions taken by the conferences reflected their interests. The conferences issued a model Uniform Vehicle Code for adoption by the states and a Model Municipal Traffic Ordinance for adoption by cities. Both were widely influential, promoting greater uniformity among jurisdictions and tending to promote the automobile's priority in city streets.
Hoover's image building
Phillips Payson O'Brien argues that Hoover had a British problem. He had spent so many years living in Great Britain and Australia, as an employee of British companies, there was a risk that he would be labeled a British tool. There were three solutions, all of which he tried in close collaboration with the media, which greatly admired him. First came the image of the dispassionate scientist, emotionally uninvolved but always committed to finding and implementing the best possible solution. The second solution was to gain the reputation of a humanitarian, deeply concerned with the world's troubles, such as famine in Belgium, as well as specific American problems which he had solved as food commissioner during the world war. The third solution was to fall back on the old tactic of twisting the British tail, which he employed during the 1925–1926 worldwide rubber crisis. The American auto industry consumed 70% of the world's output, but British investors controlled much of the supply. Their plan was to drastically cut back on output from British Malaya, which had the effect of tripling rubber prices. Hoover energetically gave a series of speeches and interviews denouncing the monopolistic practice and demanding that it be ended. The American State Department wanted no such crisis and compromised the issue in 1926. By then Hoover had solved his image problem, and during his 1928 campaign he successfully squelched attacks that alleged he was too close to British interests.
Mississippi flood
The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 broke the banks and levees of the lower Mississippi River in early 1927, resulting in the flooding of millions of acres and leaving 1.5 million people displaced from their homes. Although disaster response did not fall under the duties of the Commerce Department, the governors of six states along the Mississippi River specifically asked President Coolidge to appoint Hoover to coordinate the response to the flood. Believing that disaster response was not the domain of the federal government, Coolidge initially refused to become involved, but he eventually acceded to political pressure and appointed Hoover to chair a special committee to help the region. Hoover established over one hundred tent cities and a fleet of more than six hundred vessels and raised $17 million (equivalent to $315.09 million in 2025). In large part due to his leadership during the flood crisis, by 1928, Hoover had begun to overshadow President Coolidge himself. Though Hoover received wide acclaim for his role in the crisis, he ordered the suppression of reports of mistreatment of African Americans in refugee camps. He did so with the cooperation of black American leader Robert Russa Moton, who was promised unprecedented influence once Hoover became president.
Other initiatives
With the goal of encouraging wise business investments, Hoover made the Commerce Department a clearinghouse of information. He recruited numerous academics from various fields and tasked them with publishing reports on different aspects of the economy, including steel production and films. To eliminate waste, he encouraged standardization of products like automobile tires and baby bottle nipples. Other efforts at eliminating waste included reducing labor losses from trade disputes and seasonal fluctuations, reducing industrial losses from accident and injury, and reducing the amount of crude oil spilled during extraction and shipping. He promoted international trade by opening overseas offices to advise businessmen. Hoover was especially eager to promote Hollywood films overseas. His "Own Your Own Home" campaign was a collaboration to promote ownership of single-family dwellings, with groups such as the Better Houses in America movement, the Architects' Small House Service Bureau, and the Home Modernizing Bureau. He worked with bankers and the savings and loan industry to promote the new long-term home mortgage, which dramatically stimulated home construction. Other accomplishments included winning the agreement of U.S. Steel to adopt an eight-hour workday, and the fostering of the Colorado River Compact, a water rights compact among Southwestern states.
1928 presidential election
Hoover quietly gathered support for a future presidential bid throughout the 1920s, but he carefully avoided alienating Coolidge, who possibly could have run for another term in the 1928 presidential election. Along with the rest of the nation, he was surprised when Coolidge in August 1927 declared "I do not choose to run" for another term. With the impending retirement of Coolidge, Hoover immediately emerged as the front-runner for the 1928 Republican nomination, and he quickly put together a strong campaign team led by Hubert Work, Will H. Hays, and Reed Smoot. Coolidge was unwilling to anoint Hoover as his successor, and once remarked "for six years that man has given me unsolicited advice—all of it bad". Despite his lukewarm feelings towards Hoover, Coolidge had no desire to split the party by publicly opposing the popular Commerce Secretary's candidacy.
One public figure who endorsed Hoover for the Republican presidential candidacy was William Randolph Hearst, who argued that "The present situation demands conservatism, and Secretary Hoover's conservatism is of the constructive and not the reactionary type."
Many wary Republican leaders cast about for an alternative candidate, such as Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon or former secretary of state Charles Evans Hughes. However, Hughes and Mellon declined to run, and other potential contenders like Frank Orren Lowden and Vice President Charles G. Dawes failed to garner widespread support. Hoover won the presidential nomination on the first ballot of the 1928 Republican National Convention. Convention delegates considered re-nominating Vice President Charles Dawes to be Hoover's running mate, but Coolidge, who hated Dawes, remarked that this would be "a personal affront" to him. The convention instead selected Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas. Hoover accepted the nomination at Stanford Stadium, telling a huge crowd that he would continue the policies of the Harding and Coolidge administrations. The Democrats nominated New York governor Al Smith, who became the first Catholic major party nominee for president.
Hoover submitted his resignation as Commerce Secretary on July 7, but Coolidge kept him on until August 21 to wind up pending business. Hoover centered his campaign around the Republican record of peace and prosperity, as well as his own reputation as a successful engineer and public official. Averse to giving political speeches, Hoover largely stayed out of the fray and left the campaigning to Curtis and other Republicans. Smith was more charismatic and gregarious than Hoover, but his campaign was damaged by anti-Catholicism and his overt opposition to Prohibition. Hoover had never been a strong proponent of Prohibition, but he accepted the Republican Party's plank in favor of it and issued an ambivalent statement calling Prohibition "a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose". In the South, Hoover and the national party pursued a "lily-white" strategy, removing black Republicans from leadership positions in an attempt to curry favor with white Southerners.
During the election campaign, Hoover denounced Democratic proposals for public control of water power, the modification of prohibition and farm relief as "state socialism" and also compared what he called American "rugged individualism" to what he regarded negatively as European state socialism and paternalism:
When the war closed, the most vital of all issues, both in our own country and throughout the world, was whether governments should continue their wartime ownership and operation of many instrumentalities of production and distribution. We were challenged with a peace-time choice between the American system of rugged individualism and a European philosophy of diametrically opposed doctrines- doctrines of paternalism and state socialism. The acceptance of these ideas would have meant the destruction of self-government through centralization of government. It would have meant the undermining of the individual initiative and enterprise through which our people have grown to unparalleled greatness.'
Hoover maintained polling leads throughout the 1928 campaign, and he decisively defeated Smith on election day, taking 58 percent of the popular vote and 444 of the 531 electoral votes. Historians agree that Hoover's national reputation and the booming economy, combined with deep splits in the Democratic Party over religion and Prohibition, guaranteed his landslide victory. Hoover's appeal to Southern white voters succeeded in cracking the "Solid South", and he won five Southern states. Hoover's victory was positively received by newspapers; one wrote that Hoover would "drive so forcefully at the tasks now before the nation that the end of his eight years as president will find us looking back on an era of prodigious achievement".
Hoover's detractors wondered why he did not do anything to reapportion congress after the 1920 United States census which saw an increase in urban and immigrant populations. The 1920 census was the first and only decennial census where the results were not used to reapportion Congress, which ultimately influenced the 1928 Electoral College and impacted the presidential election.
Presidency (1929–1933)
Hoover saw the presidency as a vehicle for improving the conditions of all Americans by encouraging public-private cooperation—what he termed "volunteerism". He tended to oppose governmental coercion or intervention, as he thought they infringed on American ideals of individualism and self-reliance. Hoover did, however, advocate government-funded pensions for those over the age of 65, although this proposal was not acted on during his presidency. The first major bill that he signed, the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929, established the Federal Farm Board in order to stabilize farm prices. Hoover made extensive use of commissions to study issues and propose solutions, and many of those commissions were sponsored by private donors rather than by the government. One of the commissions started by Hoover, the Research Committee on Social Trends, was tasked with surveying the entirety of American society. He appointed a Cabinet consisting largely of wealthy, business-oriented conservatives, including Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon. Lou Henry Hoover was an activist First Lady. She typified the new woman of the post–World War I era: intelligent, robust, and aware of multiple female possibilities.