Summer 2004, Vol. 36, No. 2 The Ordeal of Herbert Hoover By
Richard Norton Smith and Timothy Walch Few Americans have known
greater acclaim or more bitter criticism than Herbert Hoover.
The son of a Quaker blacksmith, Hoover was orphaned at the age
of nine and sent to live with relatives in Oregon. Few expected
the boy to amount to much, yet he defied those expectations and
achieved international success as a mining engineer and
worldwide gratitude as the "Great Humanitarian" who fed war-torn
Europe during and after World War I. In the process, he
developed a unique philosophy—one balancing responsibility for
the welfare of others with an unshakable faith in free
enterprise and dynamic individualism. In time this would lead
him to feed more than a billion people in fifty-seven countries.
He was elected thirty-first President of the United States in a
1928 landslide, but within a few short months he had become a
scapegoat in his own land. Even today, Herbert Hoover remains
indelibly linked to an economic crisi