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  • Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times by Kenneth Whyte
  • Ellis W. Hawley
Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. 728 pp. $35.00.

Since the opening of the Herbert Hoover papers in the 1960s, a number of scholars have worked to revise a negative image still deeply entrenched in American popular culture. While rejecting much of Hoover’s own efforts at vindication, they have drawn on newly available evidence to credit him with major humanitarian, administrative, and intellectual achievements, [End Page 204] give him a more complex and attractive character, recognize him as the embodiment of a rising managerial class, and see him as a transitional, prophetic, and still relevant historical figure. In addition, they have found significant roles for him not only in the progressive and conservative interpretations of modern America but also in the organizational, associational, and “corporate liberal” syntheses that some historians have seen as making more sense of American political development.

In the book under review, Kenneth Whyte builds on, adds to, and occasionally quarrels with this ongoing revisionism. He draws heavily on recent biographies, particularly those by George Nash, David Burner, Kendrick Clements, and Glen Jeansonne. He adds significant insights gleaned from previously unutilized accounts by Hoover’s associates. And while his Hoover clearly resembles the one portrayed in recent revisionism, he sees himself as breaking away from using the Great Depression as a biographical lens and providing a context grounded in Hoover’s full life. In addition, he is skeptical of revisionist efforts to whitewash Hoover’s business dealings. He goes farther than most revisionists toward accepting Hoover’s account of depression-recovery efforts. And he is more concerned than most with bringing out Hoover’s conflicting impulses and what resulted from his efforts to reconcile them. Featured in particular are the clashes between Hoover’s modesty and his ambition, his ruthlessness and his generosity and do-goodism, his defense of freedom and his search for order, his sense of vulnerability and his faith in controls.

In his first seventeen chapters, organized in three books, Whyte traces in engaging detail a life that rose from birth in a midwestern Quaker village to immense successes as a mining engineer, business organizer, wartime administrator, secretary of commerce, and presidential candidate. Shaping Hoover, as Whyte sees it, were the times in which he lived and more specifically such things as his mother’s Quakerism, his uncle’s household, his new sense of belonging at Stanford, and his eventual embrace of scientific management, Republican progressivism, and critiques of statist bureaucracy. As he entered the presidency, he was widely regarded as a “superman.” But in Whyte’s view, he had actually become a kind of embodiment of the nation’s major conflicts, particularly those between tradition and modernity, rural and urban, individual and collective, and rich and poor.

In the remaining ten chapters, Whyte deals with the presidency and Hoover’s post-presidential activities. The presidency, as he sees it, did have its successes, notably in such areas as conservation, social studies, and prison [End Page 205] reform. And against the Depression, it did have an interventionist program that seemed to produce economic upticks, or “false dawns,” on no less than six occasions. Like Hoover, moreover, Whyte sees the last uptick as having the potential to continue had it not been undercut by Roosevelt and his New Dealers. In Hoover’s mind, a program that really built on some of his initiatives become one of a “challenge to liberty,” of “freedom betrayed,” and of un-American excursions into “Europeanization.” And while his post-presidential years were marked by new achievements in famine relief, executive reorganization, and historical documentation, he spent most of his time helping to develop a new conservatism that could serve as an antidote to the New Deal. Ironically, Whyte concludes, he can be seen both as a progenitor of New Deal liberalism and a father of modern conservatism.

In a variety of respects, Whyte furthers our understanding of Hoover. But other revisionists are unlikely to accept his book as the “definitive” work it claims to be. His positive view of Hoover’s 1932 recovery program...

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