Books: Iowa Boy Meets the World

THE MEMOIRS OF HERBERT HOOVER.

1874-1920 (496 pp.)—Herbert Hoover—Macmillan ($4).

For a boy on an Iowa farm in the 1870s, life was hard but wondrously uncomplicated. “The farm families were their own lawyers, labor leaders, engineers, doctors, tailors . . . That economic system avoided strikes, lockouts, class conflicts, labor boards and arbitration. It absolutely denied collective bargaining to small boys. The prevailing rate for picking potato bugs was one cent a hundred and if you wanted firecrackers on the Fourth of July you took it or left it.”

A boy felt few vibrations from life on the great outside—one of the few was the assassination of President Garfield. The flag was lowered to half-staff over the town’s main store and people talked in hushes as Garfield lay dying. “It was thus,” writes Herbert Hoover, “that I learned that some great man was at the helm of our country.”

The Dirty Mountains. Between 1915 and 1924, before he stepped to the helm himself, Herbert Hoover composed this first volume of his memoirs. He tells, in a style as stiff and formal as the old Hoover collar and without much seeming premonition of the momentous events still before him, of his first 45 years. They were the years when he was called The Great Engineer and savior of the hungry—and years of travel, discoveries, successes and adventures. Some future biographer may make a better story of it all, but Autobiographer Hoover has a pretty good memory for significant detail.

He was still only ten when he took his first long trip (to Oregon to live with an uncle) and met his first traveler’s disappointment. “The Rocky Mountains,” he noted with disillusionment, “were made mostly of dirt.” From his uncle he learned a modification of Quakerism: “Turn your other cheek once, but if he smites it, then punch him!” From Cornishmen in the Southwest goldfields he learned fine points that had been neglected at Stanford engineering school. (To sleep warm in a wet mine, curl up in a steel wheelbarrow heated by several candles underneath.) At 23, he was helping a British mining firm claw gold out of western Australia; at 25, he had traveled around the world twice, was earning $20,000 a year as the firm’s China representative.

Of his numerous expeditions into Asiatic places few Westerners had seen, he writes: “Hundreds of travelers have reported the interesting incidentals . . . They are perhaps more interesting to [sightseers] than to engineers who want to get there and find something worthwhile.”

The Shell Game. In his profession, he soon found what he was looking for. Before he was 40 he was one of the world’s foremost mining engineers (“My aggregate income . . . probably exceeded that of any other American engineer”), an operator of rich ore and gem mines in almost every corner of the earth, a multimillionaire whose viscera felt the first gentle urgings of philanthropy. When World War I came, Hoover, summering in England, became by accident the founder of a committee to get stranded Americans back home.

“I did not realize it at the moment but … I was [then] on the slippery road of public life.” Out of that grew Belgian Relief, and out of that the great Hoover relief & reconstruction program after the war. Refusing always to take a penny for salary or expenses, he fed and helped mend the lives of millions of Europeans, fought the European Allies’ attempts to use food as a political lever (Winston Churchill’s Admiralty strongly suggested to the Foreign Office that Hoover was spying for the Germans). Before Americans had come to know the stolid, moonfaced man in the high collar, he was a hero to Poles, Frenchmen, Baits, Russians, Hungarians.

“The Austrians wanted to express their gratitude,” he records. “Their astronomers discovered a new planet and named it Hooveria. That ought to have placed me among the Greek gods, for names of planets had been . . . previously reserved for them. However, some member of a world astronomical committee on nomenclature subsequently protested, and I was put off Olympus.”* He dealt on his own terms with Lloyd George (“He was as nimble as the pea in a shell game”) and Clemenceau (“He never did understand Mr. Wilson. I don’t think he tried to”), and played a bigger role at Versailles than most histories accord him.

“I came out of all these experiences,” Hoover notes, “with one absolute conviction, which was: America, with its skill in organization and the valor of its sons, could win great wars. But it could not make lasting peace. I was convinced we must keep out of Old World wars, lend ourselves to measures preventing war, maintaining peace and healing the wounds of war.” There is no reason today, Herbert Hoover implies, to change that judgment of the ’20s.

*Protests or not, the name actually stuck. Mr. Hoover may be glad to learn that he is still on Olympus—and that Hooveria, usually called an asteroid, still circles in the sky, about midway between Jupiter and Mars.