Herbert Hoover

 This is a sympathetic biography of the thirty-first president of the United States. Although forever associated with the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover was a wildly successful businessman, humanitarian, and secretary of commerce in the decades prior to becoming president. His handling of relief operations in Belgium during World War I, Germany and Europe after the war, and in the United States during the great Mississippi River flood of 1927 all earned him the moniker “Master of Emergencies.”  In Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017) Kenneth Whyte wants to remind readers of this part of Hoover’s career, the one often eclipsed by his unsuccessful presidency. 

 

Whyte points out several ethical lapses in his subject that I found shocking. Hoover graduated at Stanford University because a professor wrote an essay on his behalf so he could pass the grammar competency. Hoover later lied about his age and degree to get a job. Hoover routinely played fast and loose with contracts, and often post-dated them. One of these transactions led to a lawsuit that dragged on for years, generating a controversy that reared its ugly head whenever his name came in public. Whyte does not fully engage in this aspect of his subject’s behavior but did not hide it either. In a similar vein, he does not shy away from Hoover’s quirky emotional character. He could be cold and distant. A serious workaholic, he spent very little time with his children or his wife. Like the other Quaker president from California, he could be paranoid, especially when stressed, spun conspiracy theories about his supposed enemies, and always thought the press was out to destroy him whenever it did not praise him. Yet, he did not like to be alone and needed to have dinner guests, even if he did not always engage them. He could be petty, prone to feel insulted, downright rude and dismissive, even though it does not seem that he intended to be so. To his credit Whyte does not attempt any armchair psychologizing. 

 

After making a fortune in mining and business management, Hoover wanted to serve the public. His career change coincided with the start of the First World War in 1914.  With such successes at Belgian relief, as Food Administrator in the United States, and later as European food Czar, Hoover emerged from the war with a reputation for competency that no other human could match in 1919. Driven by a need for acceptance, if not praise, unimpressed with the politicians he met, he was bitten by the political bug. After all, as someone who always thought he was the most competent person in the room – as he frequently was – why wouldn’t he have thought he could do a better job? But Hoover proved a poor politician. His half-assed non-campaign for the 1920 Republican nomination was a total flop. Senator Warren Harding of Ohio who got thenomination and won the election with 60 percent of the popular vote wooed Hoover into accepting a cabinet post as secretary of commerce. Hoover wanted to be secretary of state and drove a hard bargain for the lesser position. 

 

With a very expansive view of his role and the full support of the president, the ambitious Hoover turned the Commerce Department into a buzzing hub of activity and the branch of the federal government synonymous with progress. He trod on the toes of the State Department in negotiating agreements with foreign governments to expand American business. More importantly and less dramatically, Secretary Hoover led a massive and consequential campaign of standardization across the economy. There really needs to be more on this. Everything from screw threads to the size of a brick was prescribed. Hoover worked well with Harding and had a close relationship with the president. In 1923 he was with Harding when he died on his western tour.   

 

Harding is routinely ranked among the worst American presidents for the corruption of his administration, with Tea Pot Dome being the worst example prior to Watergate. It was interesting to read that Hoover was absolutely convinced that he would be dragged into the scandal, even though he had nothing to do with it. Hoover survived the tempest unscathed. The new president, Calvin Coolidge, and Hoover did not get along.  Whyte paints an unfavorable view of “Silent Cal,” depicting him as an unpleasant, mean-spirited man who flew into bitter rages. Over the next two election cycles, Hoover and Coolidge engaged in a tense dance over the Republican nomination. Hoover did not want to openly challenge a standing president as Coolidge masked his own intentions, to former’s great discomfort. When Coolidge announced he would not run in 1928, Hoover immediately sought the nomination and secured it with little challenge. Defeating the Democratic candidate Al Smith with 58% of the popular vote, Hoover entered the White House with a popular mandate and booming economy.

 

Per Whyte, Hoover was one of those people long concerned about speculation fueling the Wall Street bubble. With the farm sector particularly hurting, the new president called a special session of the congress to pass farm relief and revise the tariff. Although the special session passed a farm relief bill, it failed at the more complicated business of tariff reform. Hoover didn’t demonstrate the leadership required to revise the tariff and the special session adjourned without passing a measure. The following year, Congress produced the (infamous) Smoot-Hawley Tariff, lifting rates to their highest point in the history of the United States. It was not the particular outcome that Hoover sought, but he obtained the ability for the president to adjust rates.  

 

The tariff could be the third rail in presidential politics, and Hoover was not the first to be burned. It made me think of Grover Cleveland and William Howard Taft, two other presidents who failed at tariff reform; Theodore Roosevelt who was smart enough to never engage the issue but threatened to do so to keep the various Republican factions in line; and the spectacular success Woodrow Wilson had in the most thoroughgoing tariff reform of 1913. 

 

Much of the section on the presidency, of course, focuses on the thirty-first president’s handling of the social-economic crisis known as the Great Depression. The idea that Hoover did nothing during the depression has long been discarded. As Whyte shows, workaholic Hoover put in very long days, met with numerous people, read many books and other items, and was very engaged in creating policy. What was lacking, however, was some sort of common touch. Although Whyte does not mention this point, the perception of what the president was changed in the minds of Americans in the early twentieth century. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson understood this, but William Howard Taft who occupied the White House between them did (see Peri Arnold, Remaking the Presidency). Similarly, Hoover did not realize that Americans wanted sympathy and empathy from their president, not just competency. This is something Franklin D. Roosevelt (and later Ronald Reagan) fully grasped. 

 

As we all know the stock market crash in October precipitated the depression. Hoover responded by meeting business leaders and convincing them to not lay off workers. Within a couple of months, the situation stabilized and appeared to many, including the man in the White House, that the worst had passed. This was a cycle that would replay itself several times. Every time Hoover thought he had a handle on it something outside of his control triggered another downturn. Thus, Whyte’s account sounds as if Hoover was quite successful until the French screwed up the international payments by insisting on not cancelling reparations, Great Britain went off the gold standard, and the congressional Democrats messed up the Reconstruction Finance Corporation by requiring public disclosure of who received the money, each setting off another downward spiral. The Democrats receive harsh criticism in this account. They are portrayed as being more interested in prolonging the depression for political purposes than in solving it. Most of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (FDR) famous “hundred days” is categorized as being essentially stolen from Hoover. Since Hoover, according to Whyte, was very concerned about the Nazis and wanted to save Europe from the twin threats of fascism and communism, it is implied that by abandoning his predecessor’s international economic policies, FDR directly contributed to the rise of Hitler and the start of World War II. In The Challenge to Liberty (1934), Hoover basically lumps the New Deal in with both communism and fascism. It’s not explained how the New Deal could have largely been pirated from Hoover when he equated these measures to the very worst authoritarian regimes.

 

Whyte covers the rest of Hoover’s long life, but I wish there would have been a full chapter on Hoover’s memoirs and their creation.  Whyte consults the papers at the Hoover presidential library at West Branch, Iowa. The letters from his wife Lou Henry Hoover to their children Allan and Herbert Junior provide an intimate view into their family life. 

 

 

Emmanuel Krieke, Scorched Earth

 I was impressed by this book. It is an important contribution to the growing scholarship at the intersection of military and environmental history. With such global warming induced security risks as flooding, ecologically forced migration, conflicts over fresh water, heat, deterioration of the arctic, etc., this is a most relevant field of inquiry. 

As historian Emmanuel Krieke demonstrates through a series of case studies ranging across several continents during the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries total war and its environmental consequences existed long before the twentieth century. As an alternative to total war, Scorched Earth offers the new concept of environcide, or deliberate warfare waged against both nature and humans primarily by targeted the environmental infrastructure of the enemy. An attack on one multiplied the damaging effects on both. For example, intentionally opening dikes in the Netherlands to flood fields damaged the farmland and displaced the human population dependent on that land. Seeking food and shelter, these hungry, sick, and weak refugees further strained the resources of the towns and cities they travelled through and to, leading to more environcide. Environcide created both immediate, devastating shocks to both nature and human society, as well as long-term consequences that lasted for generations or longer.  

 

One finding that some might find shocking is that this form of warfare was common from the 1600s to the twentieth century on all continents and societies and was not the exclusive domain of European settler societies.  Indigenous groups used against one another and the European invaders. Moreover, Europeans utilized environcide against each other, even during civil wars, as much as they did against peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Asia.  

 

Another point he makes is that there is an element of human agency in the spread of disease. Smallpox, for example, did not kill so many millions of indigenous Americans solely because it entered a virgin environment. Instead, he contends, germs found susceptible hosts made more vulnerable to death from the hunger, violence, forced migration, and physical and emotional trauma caused by environcidal warfare and the destruction of environmental infrastructure.  

Recent read: Armed Progressive by Jack C. Lane

I have three takeaways from this very solid account of General Leonard Wood, a man who was fairly well known in his own time but who is largely forgotten a century later. 

First, his forceful personality, arrogance, charisma, and ruthless ambition led to not only his greatest triumphs, but also his most significant disappointments. Wood was blatantly partisan, shamelessly self-promoting, and leaned heavily on his political network. He owed much, for example, to his friend Theodore Roosevelt (Wood commanded the famous Rough Rider regiment). He climbed to the top of the hierarchy as chief of staff of the Army without having attended West Point. His relentless criticism of Woodrow Wilson and his administration's military policies cost Wood not only a combat command in World War I but led him to being banished to training assignments far from the spotlight. 

Second, Wood was an able administrator. He demonstrated competency in his various military governorships, as well as army assignments. As chief of staff he initiated many long overdue, modernizing reforms, but his autocratic and divisive personality polarized the army. In the parlance of the twenty-first century, he had "sharp elbows" - in other words, he was skilled at internecine bureaucratic in-fighting. He was not a consensus-builder.

Third, I was a little surprised how strongly he desired the presidency. It was on his mind for at least a dozen years before he jumped into the Republican race for the nomination in 1920. I always assumed that he was really a stand-in for Theodore Roosevelt, who died in 1919. But it is possible that Roosevelt would have supported Wood, without entering the race himself. His campaign echoed Roosevelt's strenuous life, focused  on law and order during the Red Scare, and pointed out the Wilson administration ignored his Wood's  proposals and made numerous mistakes in doing so. Yet, public opinion changed in early 1920 and those themes lost their resonance as the convention approached.  

Recent read: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

 David Wallace-Wells paints a grim picture of human future in The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. He elucidates all the terrible forecasts and statistics in section one, “Cascades,” and in section two, “Elements of Chaos.” Rising oceans will drown the largest cities, two-thirds of which, are on the coast. Increasing temperatures will render the entire tropical zone of the planet uninhabitable, potentially creating heat that humans simply cannot survive in. Catastrophic drought, deadly food shortages, and millions of climate refugees surging north will create chaos, disorder and conflict for billions of future humans. The hot age will be defined not by a “new normal,” but by the absence of any normal. What once were considered “500 year” natural disasters will become annual occurrences. Forget standards of living, economic growth, or even enlightenment liberal values, survival will be the sole objective for most people. We are already seeing this world come into focus in our own time as the first waves of climate refugees, super storms, fires, and other troubling signs are battering the earth. 

 

Section three, “The Climate Kaleidoscope,” contains some intriguing ruminations. Wallace-Wells takes on shibboleths, such as the idea that consumer choices are meaningful substitutes for political action, or that somehow technology – which, honestly, created this situation in the first place – will somehow come to the rescue and save us all. He notes that we, the living generation, have created much of the problem ourselves (for example, despite the increase in green energy, coal use has jumped 80% since 2000 due  to our increased reliance on energy for electronic gadgets, air conditioning, and home appliances, among other things) and we can be the ones to mitigate its effects with adjustments and changes now. It’s not just the economic and political power structures that are stalling action, either. In seeing climate change as the foremost and most immediate threat, he argues that environmentalists get “distracted” in what seem to be side issues, like recycling (no tangible impact on global warming), plastic pollution (ditto), GMOs (might actually be necessary in the new hot world), nuclear power (it’s better than coal), green energy (its good, but is supplementing fossil fuel use, not supplanting it), and straws (again, no impact on warming). He argues that we will have to live in a world with a certain amount of pollution (at least it reflects sun light) and the resulting chronic health conditions that will come with that when the alternative increases temperatures. Wallace-Wells tackles a lot more in this section, such as the meaning of civilization, future of politics (most likely will see more authoritarian regimes and less democracy), and ethics. All of which are equally thought evoking.  

 

Wallace-Wells posits that future civilization will likely live amidst the ruins of the past, like Europe in the post-Roman Empire, pining for the order and stability of the old world. But as that fades increasingly into the past, future humans could lose sight of even that and sink into a sort “Planet of the Apes” world (my analogy, not the author’s) where there is no memory at all of the past. 

 

In light of recent culture war debacles over monuments, public memory, and the teaching of history, I wonder what future generations on a charred earth will think of us. Will they wonder why we could not get rid of our cars, multiple electronic devices, and carbon-fueled vacations? Will parched mouths ask why we never fixed our leaky pipes that waste astronomical amounts of fresh water? Will hungry people be outraged by our carbon-heavy diets and food industry that they could no longer able to sustain? As millions, if not billions, of people are displaced from coastal and tropical zones, will they ask in despair why we bothered to build cities in the desert, like Phoenix, or on the coast, like Florida, in the first place? Will they in short, look at us in the same contemptible and angry manner that we do when looking at slaveholders? 

Recent Reads: Speece, Defending Giants

 In my twenty years of teaching at community colleges I was continuously fascinated by the experiences that my students shared in class. One student in my environmental history class a couple  years ago had been a lumberjack in the northwest. He described to the class what that entailed, confrontations with protesters, and even what an unpleasant experience it was to strike a tree spike with a chainsaw. I couldn’t help thinking about this as I read Darren Speece’s superb Defending Giants: The Redwoods  Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017). 

 

The Redwoods Wars transpired in the northwest coast of California from the early 1980s to the end of the twentieth century. From Speece’s description of the events in that twenty-year period, it certainly sounds like so many battles fought over a long, grueling war as local activists battled both external environmental groups and a multinational corporation. Their objective was to ensure sustainability. They were radical for employing direct action to confront loggers and for seeking to regulate timber harvesting on private land. The battleground went beyond the forests, reaching into the courthouses, trailblazing a new front for both environmentalists and business resistance to regulations. Their great success was in bringing this local matter to national and even international prominence. 

 

For much of the first three quarters of the twentieth century a corporatist approach protected the Redwoods from over harvesting. Save-the-Redwoods League and Sierra Club supported the California Board of Forestry who worked with Pacific Lumber to set harvest goals. For their part, Pacific Lumber was a paternalistic corporation who feared depleting a valuable resource. This arrangement had its drawbacks, of course, and the cooperation is a bit of a simplification, but this status quo lasted until the 1980s. What changed?

 

Well, lots of things changed, as Speece tells us. First off, Redwoods country became a prime destination for back-to-the-land hippie refugees fleeing urbanization. They arrived with an anti-government and anti-corporate mindset and many years of grass roots organization and protest experience. Second, an external firm, fueled by junk bonds and loaded with debt took over Pacific Lumber. This business had no interest in the local economy or sustainability. The Redwoods to them were one more resource to be leveraged to maximum financial payoff to stabilize their finances. Third, the emergence of a more militant environmentalism as exemplified by Earth First!. Finally, on the other end of the spectrum was the radicalization of the anti-environmentalist movement often referred to as the Sage Brush Rebellion.   

 

Local activists battled the international lumber giant for two decades. This is the meat of the book and Speece covers much ground in detail, examining the personalities, intent, tactics, strategy, sources, and outcomes of each of the scores of battles waged during the Redwoods Wars. Direct confrontation created more distrust, and violence. Each success by either side further enflamed mutual hostility. A car bomb seriously injured activist Judi Bari. The FBI even arrested her on the assumption that she was a terrorist who was on her way to bomb someone else. Pacific Lumber violated laws and regulations in their quest to cut trees, an opening that activists sought to exploit with lawsuits. On their other flank, local activists resented and resisted efforts by national environmental organizations to take control of their protest movement. The dedication and strength of the local activists is one of the main points of Speece’s interpretation of the Redwoods Wars.

 

The Redwoods Wars ended with “The Deal,” a bundle of compromises brokered by the Clinton administration in an effort to shore up the president’s support among environmentalists in the lead up to the 1996 election. Pacific Lumber agreed to sell land to California and promised to file the necessary plans with the proper agencies. A deal on paper was one thing, lining up all the parties and implementing it took another few years. There definitely was a hang-over effect. Unsurprisingly, considering the emotional investment, both sides struggled with second-guessing and regrets.

Colorado State Pioneer Museum

The Colorado State Pioneer Museum (CSPM) is housed in the old El Paso County courthouse that was built in 1903. It is free to the public and well worth the time. Guests will learn about Colorado Springs and the American West. 

One of the museum staff told me that decision to convert the courthouse to a museum was done to save the building from being razed to make room for a parking garage. That would have been a terrible shame! It is a beautiful example of the architecture and style of the Progressive Era city beautiful movement. There is a recreated courtroom on the third floor and functioning 1906 Otis elevator, which moved a lot quicker than I thought it would. There are numerous items representing the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

General William Jackson Palmer was the founding spirit of Colorado Springs. He was a Civil War cavalry officer who won the medal of honor in 1865. After the war Palmer became a railroad executive, industrialist, and, in 1871 founded the settlement that would become Colorado Springs. As a wealthy man and town leader, Palmer attracted much attention from newspaper writers and gossips. Unsurprisingly, many myths and legends emerged about the Palmer family. CPSM has an entire room focused on separating Palmer family fact from fiction. 

Author Helen Hunt Jackson lived in Colorado Springs. Her house is partially rebuilt in the CPSM. In addition to A Century of Dishonor 1881), her ground-breaking work on American treatment of Native Americans, Jackson also wrote poems and other stories. 

Colorado Springs became known as a playground for rest and recuperation, especially for those suffering from tuberculosis (TB). A room with replica doctor's offices, TB patients, a pharmacy counter, and explanative plaques tells this prominent part of early Colorado Springs history. There is a small exhibit on women's suffrage, which Colorado granted in 1893. In my humble opinion this could have been expanded upon. An exhibit entitled "Any Place North and West" examines the life of African Americans in Colorado Springs. Although there as no de jure (legal) segregation in Colorado, there was de facto (practiced) segregation. I think it is always important to remind people that segregation was not a strictly southern phenomenon. There were many examples of segregation practiced in northern and western cities. And not just small ones like Colorado Springs. Chicago was a heavily segregated city through the use of public housing money and restrictive covenants to ghettoize African Americans. 

There were several different collections of Native American artifacts. The most impactful to me was the work of guest curator Gregg Deal who used the photographs of Roland Reed taken around 1910 to show how the camera distorted native life. Deal's exhibit is divided by theme with about five or seven Reed photographs in each theme. For example, one theme was entitled Romanticism and showed how Reed's staged and posed photographs and the use of scenery and costume, were designed to best appeal to white Americans who felt pressured by the pace and demands of modernity and industrial capitalism and longed for a primitive life. Here Reed gave it to them. The larger point that I think Deal was making is that this was appropriating Native American images and then using those photographs to define their lives without their own agency for the gratification of a white audience. Yet, another example of appropriated Native American culture. However, I should mention that Deal is not overly didactic in his presentation. After a brief five minute introductory video, the emphasis is on the creation and organization of the themes around the very large images, not explanations. The point is to let the guests do their own thinking about this. Ironically, I was wearing my St. John's University t-shirt and hat. Their sportsteam used to be called the Red Men. Although this was probably more  because of the school color, it did, nonetheless, appropriate the image of Native Americans. When I was a master's student there in the early 1990s, St. John's renamed their teams the Red Storm. It is long overdue for others to follow.  

Cannery Row (1945) by John Steinbeck

 I finally checked off a long pending item on my reading list, John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, published in 1945.[1]Cannery Row is the story of life on a small stretch of street based on Ocean View Ave. in Steinbeck’s home town of Monterrey, California. Ocean Ave. has since been renamed Cannery Row. Although he cheekily declares in his dedication that all characters “are, of course, fictions and fabrications,” they are indeed modeled on Monterey residents the author knew. Doc, the main protagonist is a facsimile of Ed Ricketts, a noted California scientist and the author’s closest friend, to whom the book is dedicated. Other characters, like Mack and his band of homeless men and Lee Chong, the Chinese grocer, are likewise depictions of people in Steinbeck’s acquaintance. Like other Steinbeck novels, Cannery Row depicts individuals living on the margins of society.[2]

 

Honestly, I did not enjoy the book but struggled to put my finger on the exact reason why until I read a contemporary review of Cannery Row by Joseph Warren Beach in The Virginia Quarterly Review. Among other things, Warren criticizes Steinbeck’s “soap-boxing for a way of life which he demonstrates to be precarious and unsatisfying.”[3] This really hit the mark for me. There is too much of a romantic flavor to the lives of Mack and the boys. I make no claims to be an expert on homelessness or life on the streets, but I do know it is a terribly difficult and rough existence filled with risk and danger, not a romantic rebellion against the dehumanizing aspects of a capitalist/industrial society. 

 

My strongest personal connection with the story was not Steinbeck’s “soap-boxing” but with Doc’s work. He is a naturalist who collects specimens, like frogs, octopi, and starfish, that he ships to his clients for research purposes from his lab, Western Biological. As many roads to me seem to lead back to my pal William T. Hornaday, so did this one. As a young man, Hornaday served in the employ of Henry A. Ward’s Natural History Establishment in Rochester, New York. Between 1874 and 1879 a young Hornaday travelled to Florida, the Caribbean, South America, Europe, the Middle East, and south Asia in search of specimen’s that Ward sold to the ballooning number of museums in American cities and universities in the decades following the Civil War. While Doc sent live animals for scientific research, Ward shipped skeletons, skins, and taxidermically-prepared (a.k.a. “stuffed”) specimens as learning objects. At a time before zoos access to most animals was limited to their remains – a fact that Hornaday would work to change in his twenty-five-year reign as director of the New York Zoological Park, more commonly called the Bronx Zoo.[4]

 

I doubt Hornaday, or Ward, for that matter, would appreciate the comparison. Both were men of the Victorian age in which they lived and upheld its rigid moral code. Certainly, they would have denounced Doc’s proto-Beatnik/Hippie lifestyle. They certainly would look at Mack and the boys with undisguised contempt. Steinbeck might have sympathetically portrayed them as noble individuals who refused to be cowed by the capitalist economy into a robotic existence, but Hornaday and Ward would be repulsed by their lack of morality, thirst for drink, unwillingness to work for their keep, and their abandonment of their families. In other words, their having forsaken any sense of responsibility. Hornaday, who was an outspoken supporter of 100% Americanism during World War I, would undoubtedly have described Mack and the boys as slackers, or much worse, during World War II.

 

 

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[1] John Steinbeck, Novels 1942-1952 (New York: The Library of America, 2002).

[2] San Jose State University, “Cannery Row – Critical Reception,” Steinbeck in the Schools, August 23, 2020, https://sits.sjsu.edu/curriculum-resources/cannery-row/critical-reception/.

[3] Joseph Warren Beach, "SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND ITS ANTIDOTE." The Virginia Quarterly Review 21, no. 2 (1945): 291. Accessed August 23, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26441972.

[4] See Gregory J. Dehler, The Most Defiant Devil: William Temple Hornaday & His Controversial Crusade to Save American Wildlife (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013).