Shifting Gears by Cecelia Tichi

Author:Cecelia Tichi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2017-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

CODA: HERBERT HOOVER

Henry Adams’s new American was waiting in the wings, even if history has not been kind to him. The name Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) may call to mind the infamous Hoovervilles, the ramshackle huts of the homeless who migrated to the fringes of America’s cities during the Great Depression of his presidency (1928-32). But Hoover Dam on the Colorado River honors the engineering ideology of the man who succeeded Calvin Coolidge in the White House.

Hoover was as reticent as Clarence King was voluble, but he showed the prodigious energy that Adams found awesome in King and mandatory for leadership in the new century. Hoover was reportedly a “high pressure . . . pushful American,” and his career struck certain parallels with King’s. As a Stanford University student and recent graduate, Hoover served on the United States Geological Survey originated by Clarence King. And he worked as a mining engineer in China during the Boxer Rebellion of which Adams speaks in the Education. By 1928, the year of his election, Hoover was an internationally renowned mining engineer, a self-made multimillionaire who organized and directed the relief of Belgium during World War I, then became the United States food administrator in the postwar reconstruction of Europe before becoming the secretary of commerce (“Business Manager of the Nation,” as one biographer put it) in the Coolidge administration. By the time he became a presidential candidate Hoover had spent an adult lifetime “controlling the forces and utilizing the materials of nature for the benefit of man, and organizing and directing human activities in connection therewith” (Nash 570 ff.; Wilson 149).

Behind Hoover lay a monumental fictional image, for the engineer portrayed repeatedly in the popular engineer novels and movies went far to prepare the American public for Hoover’s presidential candidacy. Campaign-era magazine articles recall the adventures in the novels (“How Hoover’s Forces Fought the Flood”; “Hoover: Specialist in Public Calamities”), and Will Irwin’s campaign biography followed the fictional formula to the letter. The Hoover hero is controlled yet passionate, cultured yet rugged, visionary, powerful, and destined to advance civilization. During his western boyhood Hoover grows to love the hills and forests, fishing with Indian children with a bent pin even as he cultivates a taste for classical English writers, including Shakespeare. Diligent in his farm chores with the livestock, young ‘Bert becomes absorbed in mechanics, constructing a mowing machine from metal parts junked on his uncle’s farm, and continuing his interest in machinery until a mining engineer asks him, “Son, why don’t you go in for engineering?” The question, virtually a divine calling, works in Hoover “a change as sudden and revolutionary as a religious conversion. . . . [H]e wanted to go to Stanford, to become a mining engineer” (Irwin 11, 24-25, 30, 32, 99, 245, 249, 314).

The campaign biographer, like the novelists, worked to show the depths of feeling behind the implacable facade of the engineer. Thus Hoover’s emotion “translates itself not into tears but into action. ‘What can I do?’ he asks himself; and the mind once more takes control.

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