Passed Presidents - # 31 – Herbert Hoover

Herbert Hoover was elected our 31st president in 1928. The Republican won in a landslide the only elected office he ever held. He was enormously popular...a self-made millionaire, an organizational genius, a Quaker whose humanitarian works gained him world-wide acclaim. He continued his party’s hold on the White House at a time of unprecedented prosperity. It was Boom Time in the country and he was the perfect guy for the job.

Four years later, he was a bust. The Market crashed. The Great Depression was here and we had 25 percent unemployment. FDR beat Hoover by a wider margin than Hoover beat Al Smith. When he left office, he was grayer, thinner and quite beaten.

While he directed federal resources to banks, farm bureaus and other entities that could address the recovery, he did not support federal aid to the people most affected by the tanked economy. He was totally ineffective and tone deaf to the needs of the masses. Shanty towns and tent cities sprang up all across the country. They were called “Hoovervilles”.

“Hooverville” In Seattle
(From Google Images)

Herbert Hoover was born in West Branch, Iowa in 1874, the first president from west of the Mississippi River. One of two Quakers who became president, his faith stressed the values of hard work, peace and charity. Orphaned at 11, he moved to the west coast and was raised by an uncle. He entered Stanford University in its very first class and graduated with a degree in geology. He worked all over the world and became a renowned mining engineer with his own engineering and financial consulting firm.

Herbert Hoover Birthplace, West Branch, IA (23 October 2006)

At the same time, he always engaged in public service. He headed relief efforts for Americans caught up in the First World War, then the Commission for Relief in Belgium. He was so successful that President Wilson asked him to be the U.S. Food Administrator and Director of the American Relief Administration. The organization fed 350 million people in more than twenty countries after The War to End All Wars.

The Goddess Isis, Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, 

West Branch, IA (23 October 2006)

The statue of the Egyptian Goddess of Life was a gift 

from the people of Belgium to honor Hoover’s 

humanitarian work during and after World War I.

He was Secretary of Commerce during the Harding and Coolidge administrations. During that time, he performed another administrative feat. The Great Mississippi River flood of 1927 was the worst natural disaster in the nation’s history. There were numerous levee breaches and the river was over one hundred miles wide in places. Hundreds of thousands were displaced in the south.

I am reminded of Randy Newman’s wonderful song – Louisiana 1927 and the following lyric:

President Coolidge, come down in a railroad train
With a little fat man with a notepad in his hand
President say, “Isn’t it a shame
What the river has done to this poor cracker’s land?”

Louisiana, Louisiana
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
They’re tryin’ to wash us away

(Go to the link to hear the song and see images of the flood)

I believe the ‘little fat man’ was Herbert Hoover. He orchestrated the response and recovery as only Hoover could. John Barry’s terrific Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America notes that he convinced the railroads to provide free transportation for refugees and to cut rates for freight during the emergency. Contrast that with the lousy federal relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina where FEMA consistently botched the job but managed to cut sweet deals with favored contractors at profiteering rates. Want to buy a used trailer? Is this a great country or what?

Hoover Graves, West Branch, IA (23 October 2006)

Many First Ladies have significant stories of their own. From my grave-hunting perspective, it’s unfortunate that their last resting places alongside their husbands are often marked so insignificantly. Not so with Lou Henry Hoover. She has a grave that is equal to the president’s. She was the first woman to earn a geology degree from Stanford. She spoke Chinese and translated a classic, medieval mining and metallurgy text from Latin. Lou Henry was no lightweight.

Bert outlived Lou by twenty years. He died in his Waldorf-Astoria suite in New York City on this day in 1964. At over 31 years, his was the longest retirement of any president, until Jimmy Carter passed him. At 90, he was the second oldest president after John Adams until Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan passed them both.

Bert and Lou are buried together on a hillside in the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site in West Branch, Iowa. The site includes his birthplace, Library and Museum.

Herbert Hoover

31st President; Served 1929-1933

Born: August 10, 1874, West Branch, IA

Died: October 20, 1964, New York, NY

Grave Location: Herbert Hoover Birthplace, West Branch, IA

Date Visited: 10/23/2006

Passed Presidents - # 14 – Franklin Pierce

Franklin Pierce, our fourteenth president, died 144 years ago today. The first president born in the 19th century, ‘Handsome Frank’ was the son of a Revolutionary War officer and governor of New Hampshire. His story does not begin in a log cabin.

I’m enjoying the new basis for presenting the ‘Dead Presidents Quest’. The change from the chronological order of service to the anniversaries of their passing adds an element. It also allows me to bounce around the eras and histories as we commemorate them on the day they drew their last breath. Unfortunately, since I started this format in August, all three of the featured guys died in office and two of them were murdered. Though the next man up did not die on the job, his story is also sad.

Historical marker at entrance to Old North Cemetery, 

Concord, NH (7 October 2009)

Pierce won the presidency in a landslide and four years later, his own party would not nominate him for a second term. A New Englander with southern sympathies, he supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act which nullified the Missouri Compromise and permitted new territories to decide if they were to be free or slave states. Since slavery is one of those issues that has very little middle ground...and testosterone was so dominant in those days, the Act led to warfare among the settlers and moved the nation further towards the Civil War.

Pierce also supported the southern scheme that we should acquire Cuba and make it another slave state. The failure of his Democratic administration spurred the creation of the Republican Party. As a result, he has been a fixture on many ‘Bottom Ten’ lists of our presidents.

Apart from doing little more than grease the skids toward Civil War, the real sadness of his life was personal. He married Jane Appleton, a painfully shy, strict Calvinist who was raised by a minister father who slept only a few hours a night and ate barely enough to keep him alive. He felt it was God’s will that he be denied even the simplest pleasures of life. Life of the Party he was not.

Jane battled depression much of her life. She hated politics and Washington. She persuaded Franklin to quit his U.S. Senate seat and return to Concord. When Franklin ran for president, she and her son Bennie wrote letters to each other that expressed their hope that Daddy would lose.

Pierce Family Grave, Concord, NH (13 August 2010)

The Pierces had three sons. One died three days after birth. The second succumbed to typhus at age four. After Pierce was elected president, Bennie, their only child for 10 years, was killed in a train accident at age eleven. His parents were there and witnessed their last child’s death from a massive head injury. For years, the First Lady wore black and hardly ever emerged from her bedroom. The White House was draped in black bunting and clearly was not the place for parties and social activity in Washington.

Pierce was New Hampshire’s only president. Despite that, his sympathy with the Southern cause and criticisms of Abraham Lincoln’s management of the war did not sit well with his Concord neighbors. When Lincoln was assassinated, a mob gathered on his property and accused him of treason. It took over 50 years before the state’s citizens acknowledged their only president with a statue on the capitol grounds.

In front of the capitol in Concord, NH (7 October 2009)

I had never been to Concord, New Hampshire before 2004. The quest to photograph presidents’ graves was underway by then and a business conference in Massachusetts got me close enough for my first visit that October. By 2009, the interest had turned to state houses and I returned to Concord to shoot the capitol. Melanie Swords and CJ’s wedding got me back there a year later. Both times, I drove the short distance to Old North Cemetery to pay respects to ‘Handsome Frank’ and ‘Sad Jane’.

Franklin Pierce

14th President; Served 1853-1857

Born: November 23, 1804, Hillsborough, NH

Died: October 8, 1869, Concord, NH

Grave Location: Old North Cemetery, Concord, NH

Dates Visited: 10/1/2004; 10/7/2009; 8/13/2010