Herbert Hoover

Herbert Clark Hoover was born at West Branch, Iowa, on Aug. 10, 1874, the first

president to be born west of the Mississippi. A Stanford graduate, he worked from 1895

to 1913 as a mining engineer and consultant throughout the world. In 1899, he married

Lou Henry, his Stanford sweetheart, and they went to China, where he worked for a

private corporation as China\'s leading engineer. In June 1900 the Boxer Rebellion caught

the Hoovers in Tientsin. For almost a month the settlement was under heavy fire. While

his wife worked in the hospitals, Hoover directed the building of barricades, and once

risked his life rescuing Chinese children.

During World War I, he served with distinction as chairman of the American

Relief Committee in London, as chairman of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, and

as U.S. Food Administrator. His political affiliations were still too indeterminate for him

to be mentioned as a possibility for either the Republican or Democratic nomination in

1920, but after the election he served Harding and Coolidge as secretary of commerce.

In the election of 1928, Hoover overwhelmed Gov. Alfred E. Smith of New York,

the Democratic candidate and the first Roman Catholic to run for the presidency. He

soon faced the worst depression in the nation\'s history, but his attacks upon it were

hampered by his devotion to the theory that the forces that brought the crisis would soon

bring the revival and then by his belief that there were too many areas in which the

federal government had no power to act. In a succession of vetoes, he struck down

measures proposing a national employment system or national relief, he reduced income

tax rates, and only at the end of his term did he yield to popular pressure and set up

agencies such as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to make emergency loans to ...