Hoover, Conservation, and Consumerism: Engineering the Good Life (review)

Hoover, Conservation, and Consumerism: Engineering the Good Life. By Kendrick A. Clements. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. Pp. xiii+332. $35.

"My recognition of the complex relationship between consumerism and the environment," explains Kendrick Clements in the preface to Hoover, Conservation, and Consumerism, "was the starting point for a reexamination of what I had envisioned originally to be mainly 'gap' history" (p. ix). The gap Clements sought to fill was the history of the conservation movement during the 1920s, but ultimately he addressed the environmental policies of the thirty-first president of the United States, Herbert Hoover. While his book may not appeal to all historians of technology, it will be of great interest to those who are concerned with the interaction of technology and the environment.

Like the engineer he writes about, Clements believes in building bridges, and he has succeeded in doing so with this book, which grew out of a 1984 article in the American Historical Review. He attempts to span two separate yet related literatures that have dominated the field of environmental history since its earliest years. One set of histories, sparked by Samuel Hays, examines in painstaking detail the Progressive Era conservation movement, which espoused a federal role in the efficient production and use of natural resources; the first chief of the United States Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, is often trotted out as the spokesperson for this movement. A second body of literature, again following Hays's lead, has focused on environmentalism, with its ideological origins in John Muir's wilderness aesthetic, which blossomed after World War II into a grassroots movement concerned with a host of consumer issues including outdoor recreation.

Clements tries to connect these two bodies of scholarship by asking how our country figuratively traveled from Pinchot to Muir, from an interest in production to a concern with consumption, from the conservation movement to environmentalism. The answer, he says, lies in Herbert Hoover's unique brand of conservation, which was rooted in both his conservative politics and his belief in laissez-faire economics. Politically, Hoover rejected the idea that conservation should be mandated from Washington, D.C., and instead promoted what he called "centralized ideas with decentralized execution"—meaning a voluntary and local conservation program that drew on guidance from experts, especially engineers, at the national level (p. 5). On the economic front, Hoover's notion of conservation was influenced by the rise during the 1920s of consumer culture. Not only did he embrace this kind of economy, he tried to buttress it through voluntary conservation measures aimed at eliminating waste at every stage of the production process.

Such conservation policies would render more efficient the use of natural resources in manufacturing while decreasing production costs, which in turn would lower prices for consumers. Hoover even took this consumeristic approach to conservation one step further by linking many of his conservation efforts, such as his support of the Izaak Walton League, to the promotion of healthful outdoor recreation. "Hoover was one of the first American leaders to recognize that nature's commodity value included its recreational as well as its extractive uses," writes Clements. "If Americans learned to use leisure well, they would reaffirm the spiritual and cultural values that were, [Hoover] feared, in danger of being subverted by affluence" (p. 58).

While an elucidation of Hoover's desire to marry conservation and consumerism is one of the most important contributions of this book, Clements unfortunately treats the second and more interesting half of this relationship as a poor stepchild. Only in the introduction and third chapter does the reader encounter a full discussion of how the rising consumer economy of the 1920s influenced the concerns of the American conservation movement; consumerism simply drops out of most of the book. In many respects this criticism is part of a larger concern about Clements's organizational approach, which by emphasizing the chronology of Hoover's life tends to overwhelm the...