Chapt Eighteen- Unseen Forces

Chapter 18

Unseen Forces

Herbert Hoover's wishes and visions for America and the world were noble turtles- headed into a busy freeway. They had no chance of survival. Like all of those cute little sea turtles who dig out of the sand and waddle to the sea, only to be devoured, Fate had aimed the Hoovers right into the jaws of political death.

Almost from the beginning, the Hoovers noticed how quickly the Press turned sour towards them, and quickly there was no benefit of doubt, for anything either of them said or did. Like a natural change in the weather, the turning of the season from summer to fall, out of nowhere an unspoken yet purposeful smear campaign began to sling irresponsible suspicions and baseless accusations. Herbert Hoover's wild popularity had to be answered with determined resistance, if Democrats ever wanted to put a man in the White House again. His perfect wife, handsome sons, his spectacular rise to power, had to be assaulted, had to be broken if possible.

So many ironies abound in the Hoover story. Amazingly qualified, popular, exemplary public servants took the helm of the country to insure the continuation prosperity and abolish poverty... by people who had come from disadvantaged social positions, who identified well with the common people, and would lovingly feed the “American dream.” Given their professional records, expectations from all sectors of society were never higher. But fear of their popularity was even stronger.

Lou Henry was an industrious woman who would make a great first lady, and make her own mark on history. Or she should have. She had already made a name for herself, always being the first to step forward to offer herself to assist in times of need or emergency. In China, in England... in her beloved homeland. Perhaps this trend had started long before, when she was the first intrepid female graduate of the male-dominated Stamford Geology Department. So even before she became the first lady, Lou Henry Hoover was a woman of firsts. As first lady, Lou was not only the first to speak publicly on behalf of a political candidate, but she took great risks to be the first to welcome a black guest to a social at the White House since Reconstruction, and she was the first first lady to make radio addresses to the American public. Her activism, her use of new technologies, her independence of thought, had never been seen in a first lady before. She was in many ways, the prototype of the modern first lady.

As one biographer noted, Lou Hoover was a woman of her time, but unfortunately one ahead of her time. And journalists soon realized that Mrs. Hoover was not the customary White House hostess and dependable society magazine filler. She abruptly cut off reporters, early on, refusing to provide them any journalistic nuggets, making her policy clear; NO quotes. Female reporters were outraged at her inaccessibility, and insensitivity to their needs... and challenged by her wisdom. Usually first ladies gave up a few tidbits before they learned to avoid the dastardly divas of distortion. It was war, from that day on, and soon there were those inevitable Freudian scoops, like the sensational and somewhat wishful newspaper report that saucy Mrs. Hoover, who insisted on writing her own speeches, doing her own shopping and driving her own car, had now careened through a guardrail, right into the Shenandoah River.

No less than the Washington Post headlined “Mrs Hoover Escapes Death in Auto Crash.” Actually Lou was driving a few friends in the country, and slowly, when her car spun  on some ice and she went out of control... and her car slid right into and on top of a low stone fence, not even near the Shenandoah Bridge. No one was hurt or even upset. No danger of injury, no accident worthy of the news. So a reporter sent confusing enough details to make the worst of it. The Post headline might have been more accurate if it had said, “Mrs Hoover Hits Fence, Too Bad It Was Not More Serious.”

Democrats were more careful then, and chose to lay low and hunt down Herbert Hoover's main weakness... and it presented itself about a year after his inauguration. It was a whopper. But before it came, the first lady had already incensed many Americans, by breaking the unspoken but fiercely enforced race barrier. Lou ignored fifty years of White House custom and invited Mrs. Oscar De Priest, an African American congressman's wife to attend a White House tea. The event went off nicely, quietly, but soon newspapers across the country were screaming the ruination of the country as they knew it.

Angry racist letters protested the practice of equality of the races, and accused them of using the White House social as “nigger vote-getter.” The Texas legislature passed a resolution condemning her, and The Houston Chronicle, The Montgomery Advertiser, The Jackson Daily News, The Memphis Commercial Appeal, The Mobile Press, and many others raised their indignant voices to the heavens, claiming that she had “defiled the White House,” and seriously harmed the presidency. One Texan even suggested that her misplaced hospitality would also “only bring harm to the Negroes of the South.”

Whether a threat or a wish, they were probably going to make sure of it.

“Shame on you forever!” They wrote, the White House “was for white people.” The Hoovers obviously did not really know the people whom they served. The Hoovers responded by inviting a stellar line up, never seen before, of black entertainers, Native American performers, and Jewish musicians to play at White House events. But it all turned out to be an ill-fated venue, a glorious, multi-cultural swan song. And more ammunition to inspire their enemies.

If ever a political party got its wish to destroy a political opponent, the Democrats did when the global economy, largely dependent on American stability, crashed a few months after the Hoovers celebrated their one-year anniversary.

The Stock Market crashed, businesses folded, and whole countries were thrown into chaos. President Hoover tried to reassure the public, but believed the answer was to put his head down, as he had always done, and work harder. The Hoover's naive public relations campaign failed, and Americans misinterpreted the President's preoccupied look as ineptitude or lack of concern.

Many less-informed Americans did not understand why the U. S. Government couldn't just start printing more “greenbacks,” so everyone would have some; Actually, the FED had been, and that was part of the problem. Many Americans could not understand why the government couldn't just subsidize failing banks and businesses. And some day it would... or at least guarantee them. But in those times there were no protections for small banks, and no protections of people's savings. It was a domino capitulation, as the FED called notes and big banks gobbled up little ones.

Making things worse, which is what politics is all about when a party is not in power, devious people spread rumors that the Hoovers were hoarding a huge cache of gold in the White House, which they supposedly planned to take with them... as they escaped to safety and luxury. As if there was some place they could go. And for decades, Americans could only say Hoover with disgust. Herbert Hoover was the Great Depression.

Blaming President Hoover for the Great Depression was about as sensible as blaming President Obama for the 2008 Global Financial crisis, or for Hurricane Harvey for that matter...

Perhaps stimulated by President Hoover's aura of positivism, unbounded confidence had driven stock prices beyond reasonable levels, as wild investor optimism and reckless speculation had led to runaway inflation and the greatest economic debacle in modern history. But there was no better man to be at the helm than Herbert Hoover. He was as able as they came, but there was no man on Earth who could have made much of a difference in such a worldwide, overdue resettling of the global economy. And the FED, supposedly created to prevent such crises, seemed satisfied to gaze dispassionately.

President Hoover had very little control over the Federal Reserve's policy of benign neglect, which led to doing nothing as banks failed and the wealth of many average Americans evaporated. He might have unintentionally inspired the unfounded confidence behind the Bull Market, but could never have predicted the fragility of American consumer confidence, and nobody could prevent the knee-jerk reaction as most Americans began to horde their money out of fear. It was this sudden and resolute freeze of cash flow, dictated from every home, which spelled ultimate financial disaster.

Students of the Great Depression have admitted many times that although Hoover did little to stop or mitigate the crash, it was several long-standing but dangerous American finance paradigms which led to the “Crash of '29.” What might have been a simple and relatively short-termed recession, considered by many as a healthy adjustment, was allowed by the Fed and fanned by the newspapers to explode into a runaway wildfire, and people reacted as they always will; they panicked. They withdrew their money from the banks, and stopped the one thing that could save the economy- spending and investing. The more they froze, the worse things got. Then, with encouragement from leftists in the Media, they blamed the president.

Desperate letters flowed into the White House, pleadings from all corners of the country, to the president and the first lady. Lou's staff diligently answered hers and even some of his. As times got worse, they came to be known as the “begging letters,” hopeless situations, yet hopeful individuals who wrote the letters as a last resort, to try to save their homes, feed their children, finish college, or even hold on to their furniture that might be repossessed. The government had no financial net for its citizens, and some people looked to the Hoovers for their personal salvation. Lou delegated some worthy needs to local organizations, where her confidence laid, and in some situations actually sent funds from her own purse, but always through an intermediary. She never wanted the recipients to know of her generosity, otherwise their would have been a larger mountain of mail. In most cases however, there just was no solution, as temporary assistance would only have put off the inevitable.

Secrets are hard to keep, and somehow some of her beneficiaries learned of her generosity, and many tried to pay her back. After Lou passed away, Bert found a wad of uncashed checks in her desk, coupled with thank you notes, from scores of thankful citizens. Lou had always cared, and gave what she had. But it was personal, and person to person. That was how everyone should live.

In the end, it's not who you knew, or what you made, it's how much you gave.

The real problem for the Hoovers was perspective. They had too much of it. They had both grown up in very hard times, had known the looming threat of poverty, and then seen the worst kinds of human suffering during WWI. They had seen the funeral pyres, the hospitals where the floors were covered with the bleeding wounded, the thousands of orphans wandering the streets in Europe. Americans did not want to hear that, unlike the pathetic Europeans, their suffering was surmountable, that they still had their health and strength and their loved ones to work together... to rebuild...

To some degree, although the Hoovers were sympathetic, they were not as afraid or demoralized as the general public. In their trained, logical, scientific minds, to a large degree outcomes for individuals, and collectively for the country, were decided by the most cruel of realities, what Darwin objectively called “the survival of the fittest.” Also something Americans did not want to hear.

The country had never envisioned, much less implemented an economic support system. It was as it had always been, “every man for himself.” Mrs. Hoover made pleas on the radio for everyone to take care of each other... neighbor to neighbor. There was plenty to go around, if those who had more than they needed shared with those who did not. This had been the way of the frontier... and all that Americans had ever practiced or expected before. But the American frontier had been conquered before the Bolsheviks in Russia abolished private property and introduced obligatory communal sharing. To some, this system was beginning to make sense. The Media sensationalized the dilemma, and became a powerful voice of discontent. Meanwhile the Hoovers put on a brave face and prayed for a miracle. Their calm and melancholy was misread as obliviousness.

After several years of massive lay offs, reduction in wages, decline in living standards, scarcity of money, losses of savings and investments, and a general hammering of national pride, anger and resentment demanded a focus of these collective hurts. And the portly, well-composed California Quakers in the White House were there to take on the sins of the world. The stoic Hoovers took it understandingly, even heroically. No persons or group of persons could have matched who they were, professionally, intellectually, or equaled what they had accomplished in their lives, and none could have matched their integrity and grace in times of calamity. Their continued diligence to do what they could, and in the end, their unmatched poise when they were voted out of office, were testimonies of rock-solid character and dignity.

And then their beloved America unfairly maligned them for decades. Starstruck with the infectious Hoover hubris, Hoover's proud biographer Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of author Laura Ingalls Wilder, had attached her fortunes to his rising star, and she also fell into stagnation and financial difficulty with his downfall. Some of these “lost” photographs may well have been part of Lane's publishing plans for Hoover's glowing after-presidency legacy, which never materialized...

They would both recover a considerable amount of their public image over time, and today the somewhat strained yet important relationship between these two accomplished Midwestern families is celebrated at the Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in Iowa.

The debonair, well-spoken Franklin Delano Roosevelt unseated Hoover, committed to enacting socialist-leaning policies, and was soon knighted as America's savior. End of story... His name and service were venerated by several generations, and every president has been compared to him since. He was the only U. S. President to be elected to office four times. Then Congress passed a law of term limits, suggesting at least that some Americans understood that whenever hard times met with soft ideology, a faithful public will always support a ruler, even elect a king.

Since then Americans have been quite vulnerable to any man who has won their confidence via effective Media support, regardless of their politics, or qualifications, or governing experience. In times of great distress, people need a focus to represent all of their frustration. It is a weakness of the human race. And since life is not fair, sometimes good people are framed by circumstances into public contempt, and become a kind of societal sacrifice. This was the story of Abraham Lincoln. And Sam Houston. And many of the prophets of old. If he was not already worshiped as the Son of God, Jesus would certainly be the patron saint of these stellar yet ill-fated individuals.

In ancient times, a goat was designated as the embodiment of a town's sins, and then kicked out of town and released to wander, ostracized with the town's burden symbolically, albeit unfairly placed on its head... until it died. This was the proverbial “scapegoat.” A transubstantiation which seemed to satisfy everyone but the poor goat, who had done nothing that other goats did not also do, only to become a condemned symbol of collective societal transgression! And the townspeople in question happily got past their troubles, as they attached to the goat all of their sins.

Historians, and even Eleanor Roosevelt admitted that Herbert Hoover was a good man, crushed by events outside of his influence, ultimately made into a scapegoat. And yet he did not run or hide, but rather was instrumental for the rest of his life in serving his country as much as he was allowed. But Americans were not historians, or as fair-minded as gentle Eleanor. They were mad about the Depression for many years. And to this day, Herbert Hoover is remembered as a national disgrace... because he was President when the hammer dropped.

Whatever the Hoover Administration might have taken from America, and it was not much, Herbert and Lou Hoover gave back in spades, for decades. In fact he never drew upon his salary, but gave it way. While others opined about what the government ought to do, or just criticized the youth of that day, as if it was a lost cause, or wrung their hands in helplessness, Mrs. Hoover helped create and lead one of the most effective and admired youth organizations in the world. And she did it all for free. She never sought publicity, always pointing towards the American girl as the focus of her efforts. She often exemplified her simple and selfless phrase, “The girl's the thing!” She saw the future generation as her focus, and was an impeccable, generous role-model, who enhanced the youth of our country in countless ways, and happened to have been the former first lady of the United States.

Somehow the Hoovers persevered as a couple, in spite of the lies and accusations. They knew better, their mettle had been forged and quenched into the most stubborn iron long before. In the face of disaster, they never shirked a task, never fainted, never stopped serving or loving their country. It was a time when Herbert Hoover might well have recited a popular poem by Rudyard Kipling...

                                                                    IF

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Certainly Kipling would have assumed that every character trait edified in this poem was applicable to both sexes. A female reading this poem could and should substitute “Man” with woman, and “son” with daughter. Even though those words artistically neutralize some of its poetic power, the thoughts and ideals are still there and in force. Even today outspoken Kipling would chafe at the suggestion, but it would serve future generations just as well, if the last sentence in the poem read:

And son or daughter- what is more-

you will have reached the greatness, the apex

of your gender.

As Hoover was unfairly blamed for the Great Depression, the next president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was equally unduly credited with “saving” the country, and the world, in several ways, especially American Capitalism and Democracy. But over time history has had an equalizing effect, and revealed that Hoover was not so bad, and Roosevelt was not quite so good.

In order to save Capitalism, many of FDR's solutions and policies were drawn from Socialism, proven eventually to be unconstitutional in our country, and were contested and thrown out by the courts.

When Lou Hoover heard that Roosevelt's presidential emissary had effectually insulted the Japanese during supposed peace talks, she announced flatly, “We are going to war...” Not that this possibility broke her heart, as the Hoovers were far more angry than most Americans about the Japanese invasion of China, a place they had lived and loved. But they also understood the formidable, indignant Japanese Empire, that would proudly fight to the death for their emperor. The theocratic Japanese were not to be trifled with.

Roosevelt's oversight and alleged bungling of negotiations with the Japanese led to their attack on Pearl Harbor and the loss of the rest of our Navy. The Hoovers had protested right along as President Roosevelt had shortsightedly traded half of the American Naval fleet to England, considered by him as expendable, in trade for use of British naval bases in Latin America, in 1940. Arrogantly violating the International Neutrality Acts, President Roosevelt used an “executive agreement” to exchange fifty, a colossal number of Naval Destroyers, for the use of a dozen or so British-held naval bases, mostly in Latin America and the Caribbean, just a year before America's best warships were to be sunk at Pearl Harbor. And then the U. S. was sucked into WWII, its navy either destroyed or outright squandered. Those ships traded off to the Brits would have been the back-up fleet we might have called upon when our flagship naval fleet was annihilated in Hawaii, and been some protection from further domestic attacks.

Whereas Herbert Hoover was vilified forever for abstract connections to important events, the Media and the American people chose to ignore Roosevelt's direct complicity in bad governance. It cannot be overemphasized the role the Media played then, and now in shaping of public perceptions, which seem to always favor the Liberals, no matter what they do.

It was during the Roosevelt Administration that numerous measures were taken which were diametrically opposite of the the freedoms and practices of our American way of life; Income Taxes at rates no free people had ever agreed to before; Crop and herd destruction, to prevent market gluts and price fluctuations... and thus hamstringing a free market economy; Surveillance and even imprisonment of “suspicious” persons considered dangerous to the state, such as Japanese Americans; The nationalizing of gold, making the owning of it in any form but jewelry a federal crime.

Americans chose to ignore these kinds of real mistakes, by a president they and the Media loved, while they relished in perpetuating false ones about former president Herbert Hoover. This hauntingly reminds of the current political storms.

But at the time, Lou Hoover never showed bitterness, or lost her poise as a world leader. She never indulged in personal attacks, and never publicly insulted her political adversaries. Understandably, she was constantly compared to Eleanor Roosevelt, and had they not been on “opposite sides of the isle,” they might well have been effective partners in effecting social change, from as female perspective. Lou's friendship with former first lady Grace Coolidge suggests that she could and would have done so had history and circumstances allowed it. One writer of the time observed that Mrs. Hoover and Mrs. Roosevelt were both remarkable and distinct yet patently similar to one another: with “greatness of heart, in quality of mind, in education, and spiritual independence,” they both had a “vivid approach to living” and shared a depth of experience which in effect, made them sisters in arms.

When Girl Scout leaders, loyal to Lou for her lifetime of service to the organization, and themselves hurt by her downfall, suggested that the GSA should curtail traditional inclusion of the first family in its annual activities, Lou quickly wiped out their vindictive leanings. This was where the water hit the mill wheel, where she and others must demonstrate the attributes of leadership to the girls. This political tolerance Mrs. Hoover committed to pattern what many future leaders would have to do, to exhibit respect for the American Democratic system, and bi-partisan acceptance of elections by our free people. 

When Mrs. Roosevelt appeared at the next GSA convention to be inducted as their honorary president, Lou Hoover met with her beforehand and the two made White House small talk... discussing the restoration and furnishings. Yes they were different... as night and day, but they were both Americans, and courtesy and patriotism trumped personal feelings.

After such nationwide humiliation and defeat, perpetrated upon such undeserving people, by an undeserving public, many people would have been glad to fade away to sunny California, and let the politicians in power fight the daunting global woes. But Herbert Hoover rented a New York apartment and continued his interest and investment in the American experiment. Lou returned more vigorously to her original love, the Girl Scouts, and provided leadership to them, and the Salvation Army, and continued her activities as a pioneer advocate of women's athletics, when many Americans still thought that women should avoid athletics because of possible health hazards and the scandalous dangers of being “unladylike.”

In private life Lou's firsts only multiplied. Lou Hoover was the only woman to serve on the founding board of the National Amateur Athletic Federation, serving as the president of the Women's Division for eighteen years. Even though she had never coached a sport, she had played sports in college, and her statuesque demeanor inspired confidence. Lou got funding and enacted the first adult training for the GSA, ultimately training 10,000 adult leaders in 42 states in five years, creating an explosion of the Girl Scouts around the country. She oversaw the creation of dozens of “Little Houses,” and waffle house cafes manned by the Girls Scouts, and helped to pioneer the production and marketing of a great American icon, the Girl Scout cookie.

Right before the Great depression, she and her girls had raised over half a million dollars with them. In the beginning the girls actually baked, boxed and then sold the cookies door to door, town by town, nationwide. Passion and efficiency like that comes from dynamic, action-based leadership, like that of Lou Hoover's.

It seemed that the Hoovers were ahead of their time, being kind and hospitable to black people, and thus being excoriated across the country for that; Preaching charity for those who were suffering around the world, and sadly finding provincialism and stinginess; Campaigning for nationwide physical education for our youth, and uncovering bias and backwardness; Fighting for Law and Order, encouraging optimism in the American Free Enterprise System, and meeting with America's darker nature and Socialist defeatism. They fought these demons lurking in the fringes of the American psyche as long as they had breath.

They never quit believing in America, at least the one created by our founding fathers, and continued serving the common goals of all Americans, in spite of pervasive dismissal and personal contempt of them. When they lost the war of words, and there was nothing left which they could do, they held each other up, continued their quiet battle to right the “Ship of State.” And as Bert wrote books and fussed over Roosevelt's mistakes, Lou threw herself into social change via activism and education. The Girl Scouts, American amateur female athletes, many mining engineers, male and female, and the social activism of every first lady since, are just examples of her lasting legacy.

When she died in 1944, the front rows of St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in New York City were reserved for her girls, who came in droves, hundreds of young followers in uniform, a blanket of veneration in green, saying goodbye and yet devoted to inspiring another whole generation. Perhaps in a desire for peace and privacy, former President Herbert Hoover sequestered all of Lou's papers, designating that they would not be perused until twenty years after his death. Any desire of anyone to do her justice would have to wait for decades... and this may explain why she was so quickly buried by history. But sequestered or not, the story and its truth still stands, and for eternity.

Leading from behind. Well, at least it worked for this one extraordinary woman, whose leadership and talent out-shined her own husband, once the popular President of the United States. Proving to some that behind every truly great woman, there is a great man.