Hoover's Giant Scrapbook

Associated Press Photo

Even though Herbert Hoover was born in West Branch, Iowa, where his Presidential Library now stands, his intellectual life started in California, at Stanford University where he, and his wife to be, were members of the first graduating class.

Hoover graduated from Stanford with a degree in engineering and went to work as a mining engineer for Bewick, Moreing & Co.  His work in gold mines took him around the world before he started Zinc Corporation and later became an independent mining consultant.  His mining lectures at Columbia and Stanford were recorded and have become the standard mining textbook.

Hoover left his mining career behind in August  of 1914.  He was ready for a change of pace and his success in mining gave him the chance to dedicate his life to the war relief effort (see yesterday’s post).

On one of his many trip to Europe,  Hoover read the autobiography of Andrew White.  White was a historian and the first President of Cornell University who had gathered a huge collection of materials on the French Revolution.  The materials gave scholars and historians a clear picture of the events and characters of the Revolutions. White was an inspiration to Hoover and the book convinced him to start collecting as many war records and documents as he could get his hands on. 

In 1919 Hoover donated $50,000 to Stanford to create a home for his collection, originally called the Hoover War Collection and collecting began in earnest.  Historians joined Hoover abroad and were enlisted to collect materials in Russian, Germany and Central Europe and France.  

The Hoover Institution’s website explains, “The emphasis was on saving materials that would ordinarily be quickly lost: publications intended to respond to a specific historical moment, eyewitness accounts of historical events, correspondence and memoranda by public figures, and files of international humanitarian organizations. Posters, film footage, and photographs were important components of the collection from the beginning. Most of the materials required special care and handling. Hoover was prescient in collecting source materials on ideologies such as fascism, communism, and nationalism, which he saw shaping the new global politics.”  

In 1923 the name of the collection was changed to the “Hoover War Library” and by 1929 it had more than 1 million items and was bursting at the seams.  Finally, in 1939 plans were made to build a dedicated space for the library which resulted in Hoover Tower, dedicated in 1941.  Hoover’s collection was  “the largest private repository of documents on twentieth-century political history.”  

Hoover said, “here are the documents which record the suffering, the self-denial, the heroic deeds of men. Surely from these records there can be help to mankind in its confusions and perplexities, and its yearnings for peace.”  Hoover’s desire that the collection be used for research and policy making and peace was reflected in the library’s final name change to the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace.

Hoover summarized the mission of his Institute in 1959:

"This Institution supports the Constitution of the United States, its Bill of Rights and its method of representative government. The overall mission of this Institution is, from its records, to recall the voice of experience against the making of war, and by the study of these records and their publication, to recall man's endeavors to make and preserve peace, and to sustain for America the safeguards of the American way of life. This Institution is not, and must not be, a mere library. But with these purposes as its goal, the Institution itself must constantly and dynamically point the road to peace, to personal freedom, and to the safeguards of the American system."

Hoover’s archives are more than enough to demonstrate the futility and horror of war, yet, as a country it is a lesson we haven’t yet taken to heart.  No matter how much we see and understand, we can’t seem to stay on Hoover’s road to peace.