The Real Herbert Hoover

photo from the Kalamazoo Public Library

I always learn something at the library.  That’s why I keep going.   And the more I learn,  the more I want to learn or, as Socrates said, “The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know”.

Wasn’t that the truth at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa today.  Just getting to the library was a journey but when I started reading about Hoover’s life and work it blew my mind.

Before today’s ‘aha moment’, whenever I heard Hoover's name I sang the ‘Herbert Hoover’ song from Annie.  Remember?  Annie and Sandy at the hobo camp?
  
"We'd like to thank you Herbert Hoover,
you made us what we are today...
today we're living in a shanty,
today we're scrounging for a meal,
today I’m stealing coal for fires,
who knew I could steal?”

I figured the lyrics to a Broadway show probably summed up everything I needed to know about Hoover; he was an unfeeling  President who mishandled the Great Depression and failed the American people.  Right?  

Turns out, Herbert Hoover was a little more complex than his song.  While it’s true that he might not have been the best leader during our country’s greatest financial crisis, he was a great humanitarian, famous and revered for his unrelenting assistance to people caught in the crossfire of WWI.  Not surprisingly, I learned all about Hoover’s heroic side in gallery two, The Humanitarian Years.

• When the war broke out in 1914, 120,000 Americans were literally trapped in Europe.  On August 3rd, Hoover got a call from the US Ambassador in England begging for help.  Hoover rallied his rich buddies and within 24 hours the Savoy Hotel was turned into a distribution center and cafeteria.  Hoover, his friends and the US Government loaned $1.5 million to the stranded travellers.  With the exception of $400, he was paid back every cent and the experience reinforced his faith in the American character.

• The next war related crisis was in Belgium.  Hoover created the Commission for the Relief of Belgium, a $12 million a month endeavor to save Belgians from starvation (thanks to its geography wedged between the Germans and the British Blockade).  He told a friend that his fortune could, "go to hell" and embarked on the great undertaking without pay.  He bought food from around the world, crossed the North Sea more than forty times to try to persuade each side to allow food to reach the victims and taught the Belgians that cornmeal was not just for cattle.  The CRB is estimated to have save 10 million people from starvation.

• Hoover and his wife, Lou Henry, didn’t stop in Belgium.  They went on  to feed millions of starving children in France, founded the European Children's Fund, the National Committee on Food for Small Democracies, the Finnish Relief Fund, the Polish Relief Commission and the Famine Emergency Committee.  Hoover even convinced Congress to spend $20 million to prevent famine in Russia under the new Bolshevik regime.  The exhibit shares a story from a Latvian child who had lived for a year on black bread and crackers. "It was like the sun coming out," she recalled of the Sunday morning she first sampled white rolls. "Finally bread, Hoover's bread. I will never forget. Whenever anyone mentions Hoover, I think white bread."

Hoover was a hero, known around the world for coming to the rescue of the neediest citizens in the world.  
Ambassador Walter Hines Page called Hoover "a simple, modest, energetic little man who began his career in California and will end it in heaven."   
In 1920, the New York Times ranked Hoover as one of the ten greatest living Americans.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hoover’s D.C. neighbor, wrote, "He is certainly a wonder, and I wish we could make him President of the United States.  There could not be a better one."

And if I hadn’t been to the library in West Branch I would have missed the whole story.

JFK Online

January 20th marked the 50th anniversary of JFK’s inauguration.  To celebrate, the JFK Presidential Library (Columbia Point in Boston, MA)  unveilled the first, and largest online presidential archive.  The $10 million project sifted through papers (200,000), recordings (1,200), film, and photographs to capture important aspects of JFK’s presidency.  The library will continues to add 100,000 items to the archive each year and it will still take 100 years to digitize the entire collection!  Imagine how much room that would take up in the attic.  This collection will give the world the chance to virtually experience the material while  also preserving the original documents.

This site is honestly a fun way to spend an evening (if you are a geek like me).  First, I watched the presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon in 1960, what a riot - the debate looked like it was set up in someones garage with an old sheet as the background.  I was struck by how remarkably respectful and polite Nixon and Kennedy were to one another as they discussed domestic policy.  I don’t know how they felt on the inside but they didn’t display the disdain and superiority that I see in candidate today.  
Next, I headed into the personal papers of Kennedy and found a letter that his father, Joseph, had written to him in September, 1940.  The letters have been scanned and as I read the ‘original’ it really felt like I had found this old letter at the bottom of a suitcase, I could even imagine the typewriter he used to create it.   Joseph writes to John about the book Profiles in Courage, which was published in 1956 and won JFK the Pulitzer Prize (I put this on my book list).  There was actually some debate about JFK’s role in writing the book, some suspected that Ted Sorensen had actually written the majority of the book with JFK’s notes.  Anyway, Joe tells John that the Duchess of Kent came over for dinner and was curious how such a young man could have written such a powerful book (can’t you just hear her saying that?).  Joe reports that he told the Duchess that his sons had always been precocious!  
Personal letters, photographs and artifacts are a powerful way to learn and understand historic events.  This archive is a gift to students who are now able to sift through JFK’s “scrapbooks”, reading primary source materials, even though they might live on the other side of the planet.    It’s also a treasure to Americans who can better understand JFK as a person, a son, a father, and a brother struggling to do his best during a turbulent time in American history.  After reading his letters and flipping through the family photos I feel just a little wiser about the JFK than I did  yesterday which qualifies today as a successful day.