The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: 1874-1920: Years of Adventure (review)

Book Reviews67 The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: 1874-1920: Years of Adventure. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1951. xi, 496 pages. $4.00. J^ERBERT HOOVER'S memoir of his unique, eventful life divides into five periods: youth, engineering, war relief and reconstruction , political, and advisory. Originally written for his sons, the observations were jotted down (in later leisure rectified) while waiting for trains, boats, and officials, and in the hazards of high political activity. Volume one of the projected pair opens with an evocative photograph of the author, and covers the first three stages from Hoover's birth in West Branch, Iowa in 1874 to the signing of the Versailles Treaty, the development and net substance of which he so actively contested, and his appointment to President Harding's cabinet. "I prefer to think of Iowa," he says, "as I saw it through the eyes of a ten-year old boy—eyes filled with the wonders of Iowa's streams and woods, of the mystery of growing crops . . . days filled with adventure and great undertakings, with participation in good and comforting things . . . days of stern but kindly discipline" (p. 1). This paragraph indicates the basis of all of Hoover's later positive achievement. His contribution to the general welfare, which will endure in spite of the criticism which was to be expected in the case of so prominent a figure, took impetus from a firmly-fixed capacity for the direct appraisal of his own and others' situations, for rapid, concentrated work, and for appreciation of the values and requirements of healthy social growth. From the outset, we are conscious of powers in Herbert Hoover which were self-generated and self-directed, of vigor which breaks through—in descriptions of good days and of bad, of rural sports and work in Iowa, of early mineral finds in the ballast of the local Burlington track, of Quaker training, in his shift to Oregon relatives after the death of his young widowed mother, and his ingenious , energetic moves toward self-support and vocational preparation . Perhaps it is also fair to say that wherein Hoover has failed, his failures may in part be traceable to long-established limitation of view. College work with the first class at Stanford University and related vacation jobs in rough outdoor surroundings fixed the root of what became the two chief branches of Hoover's career—mineral and human dealings. Hard common labor in mining jobs with some privation, a fortunate friendship, and his own native talents secured for him at twenty-three his first big chance, a position with British international miners, as managing engineer of an Australian gold field. At twenty-five, as general manager of a big pioneer mining venture in China (and at twenty-seven, a partner in his firm), Hoover advanced to that phase of his profession which called for difficult independent decisions and large technical, financial, administrative, and political address. These faculties met and passed hard early tests during the Boxer Rebellion, the subsequent exploitations and expropriations (which Hoover resisted) by the Powers, the efforts to make the mines in 68Bulletin of Friends Historical Association China profitable. This was followed by seven years of continuous travel over the globe with his wife, Lou Henry, and two children, as general production engineer and manager for his firm. There was also some care-free fun, probably not enough for a more average human being. "International free-lance engineering," including a dozen heavy responsibilities, engaged the years 1908-1914. Then ended the mining phase of Herbert Hoover's adventure, the real prospect of his gaining "the largest engineering fees ever known to man," (p. 108n.), "the Golden Age of American engineers in foreign countries" (p. 116) , and what Hoover calls "the happiest period of all humanity in the Western World in ten centuries . . . the twenty-five years before the First World War" (p. 135) . "I saw that war in the raw," says Hoover, "together with some of its political and international phases, probably more intimately than any other American" (p. vi) . At forty, Hoover turned from private to public life, from personal gain in the current economic system to the relief and reconstruction of some...