Herbert Hoover was the American president when its economy crashed. Herbert Hoover was born on August 10th, 1874 to working class parents. His father was a blacksmith and also dealt in farm implements; his mother was a seamstress. When he was just six years old, his father died of heart disease. Three years later his mother also died, of pneumonia, and Hoover was raised by an aunt and uncle. Still, his parents’ character and their religious beliefs (his mother became a Quaker) had a life-long influence on Hoover. It give him a self-reliance and a capacity for hard work, as well as a concern for the needy, abandoned, and downtrodden. Though he had left school at fourteen to work for his uncle, he returned to his studies and eventually graduated from Stanford University in 1895 with a degree in geology and he became a mining engineer, working around the world. He also knew how to make money, amassing a personal fortune of about $4 million.
Hoover had deservedly gained credit for his humanitarian work in different crises. Hoover was in China during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and he organised the relief efforts for foreigners trapped there. He also helped Americans stranded in Europe when World War I began, and during the war, he established and headed the Commission for Relief in Belgium, helping to get food for 9 million Belgians. When America entered the war, President Wilson made Hoover head of Food Administration securing supplies both for the Home Front and for the American troops. He instigated “wheatless” and “meatless” days in order to maximise supplies. After the war, he was made head of the American Relief Administration which provided food for the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, including Germany and Bolshevik Russia. Back home, President Harding made Hoover his Secretary of Commerce, a position he held under President Coolidge too. In this position he oversaw the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Hoover Dam. He also supervised relief efforts during and after the Mississippi River flood of 1927.
He was regarded as a radical in the Republican Part, supporting American membership of the League of Nations, collective bargaining rights for labour, and government regulation of such new industries as radio broadcasting and commercial aviation.
When President Coolidge decided not to run for another term, Hoover was nominated as the Republican candidate and he was elected president in 1928 by a landslide, the third Republican president of the 1920s, but six months into his presidency the stock market crashed. During his campaign he declared that, ‘We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.’ It was a boast that would come back to haunt him as he struggled to comprehend the full implications of the crash.
After losing to Roosevelt in the 1932 election, Hoover continually attacked Roosevelt’s programmes in speeches and books, for example The Challenge to Liberty (published in 1934). He died in 1964 aged 90. He was buried in a simple grave on an Iowa hill overlooking the cottage where he was born.