The Life of Herbert Hoover: Imperfect Visionary, 1918‐1928. By Kendrick A.Clements. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 607 pp.

Abstract

The Life of Herbert Hoover: Imperfect Visionary, 1918-1928. By Kendrick A. Clements. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 607 pp. Who was Herbert Hoover? Answering that question depends not only on perspective from which query is made but also time period of his life. America's thirty-first president had several distinct careers in his adult life, and he achieved varying degrees of success in each. Upon graduating from Stanford University with a degree in geology, Hoover worked around world in mining industry, and he was a millionaire by 1914. Hoover changed course with advent of World War I, abandoning private sector employment for remainder of his life. Between 1914 and 1917, Hoover led successful Commission for Relief in Belgium, and, in 1918, he took charge of U.S. Food Administration where he oversaw a voluntary conservation program. In 1921, President Warren G. Harding named him secretary of commerce, a post he held until his four years in White House. Finally, Hoover had a prodigious postpresidential career during which he commented on public policy questions in numerous books and he advised several presidents, especially Democrat Harry S. Truman. Kendrick A. Clements's The Life of Herbert Hoover: Imperfect Visionary, 1918-1928 explores years immediately before and during Hoover's service in cabinet for Presidents Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Hoover remained involved with war-related problems after armistice, namely, feeding of entire European continent. Hoover was nothing if not peripatetic, and scope and breadth of his activity during 1920s carries through nicely in these pages. Clements tells story of these years in chronological fashion, a wise choice on his part as biographer. As he explains in his preface, had he told story topically, reader would miss the degree to which a large number of issues landed on his desk all at once, interacted with each other, and demanded simultaneous consideration (p. xiii). Indeed, Hoover remade role of commerce secretary, away from its limited nineteenth-century scope, into activist position needed to oversee burgeoning national economy. Among problems Hoover addressed as cabinet secretary included unemployment, Russian famine, child health issues, flooding along Mississippi River and in New England, organization of industry by type, railroad reorganization, agricultural production and consumption, disorganization in coal industry, electrical power generation and distribution, pollution, eight-hour day in steel industry, adequate and affordable housing, international trade, European war debts, emergence of radio and aviation, and status of fisheries. …