Religion: The Red Horseman

Who are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? Scholars have given St. John’s symbols of strife and destruction various names, though the sixth chapter of Revelations, through which they ride, names only one—Death (“and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him”). The current issue of Saturday Review presents a new theory by an old student. His name: Herbert Hoover.

Ex-President Hoover, 84, concurs with the generally accepted designations of the rider on the white horse as War (“a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer”). He also agrees with the majority that the rider on the black horse was Famine (“and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. And I heard a voice . . . say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine”). Hoover has something to add from his experience as food administrator in famine-stricken Europe after World War I: “Some modernist might surmise from his ‘pair of scales’ fixing the prices of barley and his conserving of ‘oil and wine’ that, in addition to being a symbol of famine, he also might have been a symbol of either a profiteer or a food administrator . . one of the torments of war.”

Where Quaker Hoover takes issue with tradition is the designation of the rider on the red horse as Pestilence (“and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword”). Hoover points out that in more than 20 different kinds of disasters and punishments mentioned in Revelation, pestilence does not occur once. St. John, he thinks, “had some other idea in mind” for the red horseman −”the name which we know in modern times as Revolution.”

Hoover admits that revolutions may be good or bad, “but St. John’s horseman had no good purpose … We do not allow our imaginations to extend to the idea that St. John was prophesying Communism, even though one is tempted, partly because of the prophetic statement that power was given to the horseman ‘to take peace from the world.’ “