BOOKS OF THE WEEK
Mr. Hoover
The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: Years of Adventure 1874-1920. (Hollis & Carter. 30s.)
MR. HOOVER is the only living ex-president of the United States, and that tells us a great deal about him. For the presidency is often termed a " killing " office. Harding and F. D. Roosevelt died in office. Coolidge died shortly after leaving it, and Wilson was an invalid for the last ,two years of his term. But Mr. Hoover, at seventy-eight, is still active, still a great public figure. Nor is this survival due to idleness or to the lines having fallen to him in pleasant places. His term as president was one of the most strenuous and trying in American history ; it followed on fourteen years of laborious and responsible public service ; and they, in turn, came after a youth and early middle age of endless and varied activity. For it is one of the paradoxes of modern American history that the national leader who was supposed to be the stuffiest of stuffed shirts has had a life more full of adventure than any other modern president has known, with the possible exception of Theodore Roosevelt.
It is this life of adventure that Mr. Hoover 'recalls in the first volume of his memoirs. He tells the story clearly, candidly, with no false modesty or vainglory, the story of the orphan from Iowa who went west as a boy, went to the new university, Stanford, and in a few years was one of the world's leading mining engineers. It would be an interesting story had Mr. Hoover remained a leading citizen of Palo Alto, New York orlondon. But it is made far more interesting by Mr. Hoover's having passed from business into-public life, and having been president at a very dark moment in American history. And it is made interesting by the fact,,that Mr. Hoover, consciously, and, one suspects, unconsciously, reveals the set of his mind, a set of mind shared by millions of Americans, whose opinions, judgements, prejudices, we often too simply set aside as the mere naIvet6s of " isolationism." If Mr. Hoover is an isolationist, it is not from ignorance of the outside world. No tenant of the White House, not Ulysses himself, has seen more of cities and men. China, Russia, Australia, Europe have been nearly as familiar as California, and more familiar than some parts of the United States. Nor was Mr. Hoover a tourist or mere observer. :He was a doer, in Siberia, in Western Australia; in Burma before he moved on to the public stage as the head of the " Commission for Relief in Belgium." If he has been deemed an isolationist, if he opposed American inter- vention in the last war, if he opposes an American frontier on the Elbe in the present cold war, it is not the judgement of a senator like Borah, proud in his immunity to the contagion of-the outside world.
Something must, no doubt, be put down to Mr. Hoover's Quaker ancestry. He is not a formally orthodox Friend (could a formally orthodox Friend be president ?), but the Quaker bias against violence, the Quaker hatred of the hates bred by war have made Mr. Hoover resent, or; at any rate, regret, the place of force in the world, and suspect that a changing of men's hearts is more needed than any formal world organisation. Then Mr. Hoover's business career reached its triumphant culmination in that golden age of free enter- prise, free trade, free movement that ended in 1914. War has destroyed that world.
And, lastly, Mr. Hoover is very profoundly American indeed. The United States iIs for him what it was for Lincoln, " the last, best hope of earth." This may surprise readers who remember the repeated charges brought against Mr. Hoover of being too 'cosmo- politan, too Anglophile. Did not Mr. Mencken lampoon hhn as " Lord Hoover " ? Did- not political enemies, not -all of them _Democrats, mutter about his long residence in LOndon, and spread rumours of his being a secret British subject'? But it is not para- doxical to say that it was his foreign experience, in China during the Boxer rebellion, in Czarist Russia, in Edwardian England that made Mr. Hoover a 100-per-cent. American.
He recalls candidly the pleasures of life in the Red House in London before 1914. Then, for prosperous people, was the true plaisir de vivre that you couldn't get in the United States. But for the others ? The plaisir de vivre was the fruit of docility, of servility; of a class-structure that stunted growth. For the good qualities of the English as well as for the charm of England, Mr. Hoover has lavish praise, but he thought and thinks the price too high. It could be said that absence from America at this time blinded him to American defects. The modern social-service State may be a mistake, but, whatever pioneering a few American states had done, in 1914 the United States was " backward," and England was beginning that egalitarian revolution that, for better or worse, has transformed her almost as much as war. But for anyone who wants to understand why so many Americans still think of England as " undemocratic," Mr. Hoover's chapters on his life in London are required reading. So, too, are his comments on imperialism which he sees as the territorial encroachment of one political society on another. He over-estimates its political and its economic importance, and be fails to realise that he, in Russia, in China, was as much an imperialist as an English civil servant, and that it was the framework of imperial rule that made careers like his possible.
Of great and permanent historical interest is Mr. Hoover's account of his role in the First World War. For it taught Mr. Hoover what he, possibly unconsciously, knew already, the weight of the damnosa hereditas of European feuds. Mr. Hoover's business, until the United States entered the war, was relief. He had to deal with men whose business was victory, and there was a natural clash. But Mr. Hoover's sense of justice saves him here from complacency. He saw and felt that, as long as the war lasted, hate, passion, blind anger, the daily necessities of desperate expediency would destroy more and 'more of the moral heritage of Europe. He saw the possibility of what M. Raymond Aron has called les guerres en chain, of one war breeding another like a chain reaction. For that reason he did not share Wilson's optimism, though he was a loyal collaborator of the President and paints a sympathetic picture of him. Wilson, above the battle, thought that general principles would serve. He made the mistake (against which Mr. Hooyer warned him) of coming down from Sinai to Paris with the results we all know. Perhaps the battle was lost anyway. Mr. Hoover thinks that there was a sudden, deplorable, physical change in Wilson, the first symptoms of the• final disaster.
It would be possible to criticise a good deal of this section of the book if it were put forward as a general picture of peace-making in 1919. But it is not ; it is one man's story, told from the inside, but also from one point of view. Like Keynes, Mr. Hoover ignored the immense political problems created by the collapse of Austria, the eclipse of Russia, the automatic predominance, therefore, in Europe, of the nominal loser, Germany. But nevertheless this is a very valuable remind& of some truths about 1919, marred by some curious errors of fact and lightened by a very appreciative and friendly account of Clemenceau.
Then there are, too, accounts of the relief of Poland, of the great work of Dr. Nansen to fight famine in Russia. Relief organisations are wound up ; Mr. Hoover goes home acclaimed by the world and by his country. That the acclaim was deserved few honest men can doubt. The self-portrait is one of a man of great administrative capacity and public spirit. There are limitations of course. The standard American tirade against cartel-ridden Europe is applied to the free-trade England of 1914 whose business-men, willy-nilly, had t6 undergo far more rigorous competition than had most of their American brethren. But even this blind spot gives the book new evidential value. For it should be remembered that, in 1952 as in 1919, Mr. Hoover is a very representative man.
D. W. BROGAN.
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