dynamics of this retrenchment strategy, its strengths, and its limitations. Born into the relative poverty and communal strength of a Quaker society in 1874, Hoover was orphaned before the age of 10. Accepted into the “Pioneer” class of the newly established
Stan-ford University at the age of 21, he studied geology and mining. He worked on the U.S. Geological Sur-vey during the summers, helping to map out parts of Sierras around Lake Tahoe. After graduating in 1895, Hoover spent a few months pulling ore carts for an American mining firm before convincing a San Fran-cisco law firm specializing in mining disputes to take him on as the equivalent of a research assistant. At the age of 23, Hoover was technically 13 years too young for his first major post as an “Inspecting Engineer” for the distinguished London firm of Bewick, Moreing &
Co. Hoover concealed his youth and embarked upon his assignment to Western Australia and to China, where he evaluated, managed, and reorganized a variety of mining enterprises with great success and even greater profit. Within 5 years, he was made a partner of the firm and rapidly moved into the spe-cialty of mining finance. Hoover subsequently opened one of the largest silver mines of the 20th century in Bawdwin, Burma. He started an Australian zinc min-ing operation, which later became a major portion of the modern firm, Rio Tinto, one of the largest mining enterprises in the world. He also advised on a rich mining and industrial cooperative enterprise at Kysh-tim, Russia, all before his 40th birthday.26
Having reached a point of uncontested financial and professional success, Hoover turned his attention toward public service. With the outbreak of World War I, he won his first public role as Head of the Com-mittee for the Relief of Belgium (CRB). After over-seeing food relief to German-occupied Belgium and France for 3 long and brutal years, Hoover returned to Washington to take up the role as Food Administra-tor when the United States finally entered the conflict.
When the Armistice was signed, Hoover
accompa-nied the U.S. delegation to head the American Relief Administration (ARA), which coordinated relief and reconstruction operations throughout Europe in the wake of the unexpected peace. Hoover subsequently helped to organize a massive food relief program to Russia in response to the civil-war spawned famine there. By 1921, there was no private citizen better known across the globe for his competence, energy, and achievements in the face of humanitarian crisis.27
Hoover announced himself to be a Republican during the 1920 presidential campaign. As a former member of Woodrow Wilson’s war cabinet and a vo-cal supporter of the League of Nations (with reserva-tions), it had not been clear on which side of the politi-cal spectrum Hoover would ultimately come down.
Despite his vaunted humanitarian credentials and international business reputation, many in the Repub-lican Party remained perennially concerned about his political views. Hoover represented a new generation of Republicanism, one that embraced a number of progressive values and ideas about government’s role in society, and one that discomfited the older laissez-faire elite, such as President Coolidge and Secretary Andrew Mellon.28 Hoover served on presidential cabi-nets from 1917 until his accession to the presidency, and spent 8 years as one of the most influential and energetic Secretaries of Commerce in U.S. history. He was bound up with and reflected many of the main planks of the Republican retrenchment policies of the era. His personal political philosophy, however, in many ways also exemplified the most appealing aspects of the Republican retrenchment strategy of the 1920s.29
Hoover’s own approach to retrenchment evolved from his personal and professional experiences.
Hoover’s philosophy finds its clearest public expres-sion in a pamphlet he published in 1922 entitled
“American Individualism.” Articulating the objec-tives of Hoover’s approach, Hoover described what he saw as the unique character of America’s society:
Our individualism differs from all others because it embraces these great ideals: that while we build our attainment on the individual, we shall safeguard to every individual an equality of opportunity to take that position in the community to which his intelli-gence, character, ability, and ambition entitle him; that we keep the social solution free from frozen strata of classes; that we shall stimulate effort of each individu-al to achievement; that through an enlarging sense of responsibility and understanding we shall assist him to this attainment, while he in turn must stand up to the emery wheel of competition.30
Moving beyond simple negative injunctions on the preservation of liberty, Hoover tried to characterize the deeper purpose and positive vision enabled by that same liberty.
Hoover then described how this objective was to be realized in daily life in terms that the ordinary American could understand:
We have long since realized that the basis of an ad-vancing civilization must be a high and growing standard of living for all the people, not for a single class; that education, food, clothing, housing, and the spreading use of what we so often term non-essentials, are the real fertilizers of the soil from which spring the finer flowers of life.31
At the heart of this vision was the engine of private voluntarism and cooperative organization. Hoover argued that:
there are in the cooperative great hopes that we can even gain in individuality, equality of opportunity, and an enlarged field for initiative, and at the same time reduce many of the great wastes of over-reckless competition in production and distribution.32
It was through this cooperative mechanism that Hoover increasingly sought to find a third way be-tween unfettered capitalism and state socialism, to build the bridge between self-interest and the public interest, between the individual and the state. Hoover hoped that the promotion of close cooperation be-tween capital and labor, bebe-tween government and business, would enable the realization of their mutual interests and the elimination of conflict.33
This spirit of private voluntarism and cooperative organization dominated both his domestic and foreign policy approaches, respectively termed “cooperative individualism” and “independent internationalism.”34 In both spheres, Hoover also believed that the influ-ence of professional experiinflu-ence and academic exper-tise would help to depoliticize intractable problems and make them more amenable to solution. Hoover saw the role of the federal government in American society as primarily one of coordinating and sup-porting the independent actions of individuals and groups. The federal government ought to provide reli-able information and advice, to support public educa-tion and the advancement of science, and to enable the more efficient conduct of business and society. As one scholar has put it:
The invisible hand of the marketplace would be com-plemented, but not supplanted, by the ‘visible hand’
of cooperative planning to control the business cycle, increase efficiency, and raise living standards.35
In a presidential campaign speech, Hoover de-scribed it as follows:
It is as if we set a race. We, through free and universal education provide the training of the runners; we give to them an equal start; we provide in the government the umpire of fairness in the race. The winner is he who shows the most conscientious training, the great-est ability, and the greatgreat-est character.36
Politically and professionally moderate, Hoover viewed his strategy as a positive map to the middle course between the tyranny and bloated bureaucracy of statism and the injustices of laissez-faire capitalism.
Yet, as with so many “middle ways,” it was not al-ways clear where the boundaries of appropriate ac-tion lay. For example, a state-owned warehouse for marketing agricultural commodities was an example of unacceptable state intervention, but a private, or even public-private, board could lend public funds to a farming cooperative to build that same warehouse.37 To others, it was not always obvious where the accept-able midwife state ended and the unacceptaccept-able nanny state began. His view of foreign relations similarly suggested that the government should play a limited role of guidance over the wider diversity of coopera-tive efforts in the international community. Critically, the U.S. Government should avoid political commit-ments and entanglecommit-ments that might destroy the natu-ral fruits of voluntary international cooperation and commerce. “Independent,” however, did not mean to-tal disengagement. Hoover once described America’s international position as that of being enmeshed in a
“. . . great but delicate cobweb on which each radius and spiral must maintain its precise relation to every
other one in order that the whole complex structure may hold.”38
Hoover’s conception of international economic engagement tended to prioritize self-sufficiency over free-market efficiency. With the objective of a better-controlled economic expansion, Hoover tried to march the line between interdependence and independence.
He encouraged U.S. businesses to seek markets out-side of Europe, hoping to reduce America’s commer-cial dependency on Europe. He supported the mo-nopolistic practices of American companies in their foreign endeavors to give them an edge against Eu-ropean competition. He also sought to guarantee sup-plies of certain strategic materials like tin and rubber in the interest of lessening the potential for future eco-nomic conflict. Finally, Hoover believed that prioritiz-ing the health of America’s domestic economy would, of itself, benefit global economic growth and trade. He firmly believed that protecting the standard of living of Americans through tariffs would enable them to demand more global imports in the future and help to stimulate the growth of global trade.39
Hoover had a complicated attitude toward coer-cion. His general attitude toward the use of force is perhaps best expressed in a pre-war radio broadcast:
“We cannot slay an idea or an ideology with machine guns. Ideas live in men’s minds in spite of military defeat. They live until they have proved themselves right or wrong.”40 Yet he was not a pacifist, despite his Quaker upbringing. While working in China dur-ing the Boxer rebellion, Hoover volunteered with the European forces sent to relieve the international settlement of Tientsin. Nonetheless, Hoover remained staunchly opposed to the use of economic sanctions.
Hoover’s experience of World War I had taught him
that sanctions were far more aggressive than most people realized and often produced unintended ef-fects. He argued that the Allied embargo of Germany during World War I had been a mistake. It had uni-fied the German people and given them financial re-lief from an otherwise deeply unfavorable trade bal-ance. It had forced a radical overhaul of the German economy, which, in his view, had the unintended con-sequence of producing a greater level of efficiency and potential post-war strength.41
Hoover, whatever his philosophical views on the role of government, was a very active individual. As one scholar has commented:
Hoover strewed around phrases about individuality, but he could not control his own sense of agency. He was by personality an intervener; he liked to jump in, and find a moral justification for doing so later.42
Despite the Republican administration’s emphasis on economy and restraint, Hoover and those sympathet-ic to his outlook were busily building a very active, cooperative community with public finances.
These additions outweighed retrenchment elsewhere, and many Americans accepted them as a superior kind of national progressivism meeting social needs that could not be satisfied by the bureaucratic and ‘class legislation’ proposals emanating from Congress.43
HOOVER AND THE CRISIS ON A