Hoover and the World

Abstract

Although John Quincy Adams was well traveled for his time, it is unlikely that any president before the age of jet travel lived and worked abroad as much as Hoover before reaching the White House. By the end of World War I he had visited every nation in Europe, including the new ones carved out of the German, Hapsburg, Turkish, and Russian empires. In his work as an engineer he traversed Australia, China, Siberia, Canada, South Africa, much of Latin America, the Middle East, Burma, Mongolia, and—with the exception of equatorial Africa, traveled widely on every inhabitable continent. Neither did he confine his visits to capital cities or major trade centers. The engineer was at home on camel, horseback, mule, automobile, bicycle, and boat, in the Australian outback, unexplored sections of China and Burma seldom visited by foreigners, remote stretches of Siberia, Japan, the frozen Arctic, and the Mediterranean rim. Before arriving, Hoover read prodigiously about local history, customs, and geography. And beginning with China, he had an accomplished traveling companion in his wife Lou, a woman of insatiable curiosity and tireless endurance who learned to speak five languages. The Hoovers capaciously absorbed what they saw abroad. Fifty years later, Hoover could describe in detail his experience during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. Although cosmopolitan, Hoover was thoroughly American in his practicality and disdain for pretense. He disliked European aristocracy and elitism, and he found the poverty he observed appalling.