RUTHFULLY YOURS

This illuminating book provides many new insights into Herbert Hoover’s political career. It examines his responses to the horrific pogroms in Poland immediately after World War I and to the Arab slaughter of Jews across Palestine in 1929. Most importantly, the book documents how Revisionist Zionists persuaded prominent Republicans, including former president Hoover, to join them in pressing for U.S. government action to rescue European Jews during the Holocaust. Hoover’s role administering European food relief sensitized him to Jews’ intense suffering after World War I, the result of savage anti-Semitic persecution and severe economic distress.

He enabled the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJJDC) to evade Polish government restrictions on Jewish organizations sending aid to Polish Jewry by having his own relief organization funnel AJJDC funds into Poland. Hoover’s Jewish aide Lewis Strauss praised him as “the only U.S. government official to effectively press Poland and its prime minister to act against the pogromists” (14). The authors also show that Hoover’s empathy for Polish Jews was limited by his fear that they were not sufficiently enthusiastic about Polish nationalism. Hoover maintained an isolationist stance during the 1929 Palestine pogroms, the first serious foreign policy crisis of his presidency.

He neither intervened to protect Palestinian Jewry nor pressured the British to do so. The authors note, however, that he at least “remained steadfast in his support for the upbuilding of Jewish Palestine” (58). In 1928, Hoover extolled the work of Zionist settlers in transforming Palestine, which, in his words, had remained “desolate and neglected for centuries” (48). As president, he sent statements of support to the Zionist Organization of America and to the American Palestine Committee, a Christian Zionist organization, when it was established. Notably, days before leaving the White House, Hoover instructed U.S. ambassador to Germany Frederick Sackett “to exert every influence on the Hitler regime” to stop the persecution of German Jewry (64).

Although hundreds of thousands of Americans had already staged massive street demonstrations and rallies to protest Nazi anti-Semitism, President Roosevelt told his ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, appointed in June 1933, that Nazi persecution of Jews was not a matter with which the U.S. government should be officially concerned. After Kristallnacht, ex-president Hoover moved away from his earlier support for immigration restriction and endorsed the Wagner-Rogers bill to admit 20,000 refugee children from Germany into the United States, above the annual quota for Germany. He lobbied members of the House Immigration Committee to support the bill, which President Roosevelt did not endorse.

Hoover’s most important contribution during his post-presidential career was the backing he gave the Revisionist Zionists in their campaign to persuade the U.S. government to initiate immediate measures to rescue as many European Jews as possible from annihilation and to mobilize the public in that effort. Leading this effort was Hillel Kook (Peter Bergson), head of the Bergson Group, and Eliahu Ben-Horin and Benzion Netanyahu, directing the New Zionist Organization of America. President Roosevelt’s lack of interest in rescuing Jews led the Revisionists to turn to prominent Republicans for assistance. Roosevelt’s indifference was dramatized at the Bermuda Conference in April 1943, ostensibly called to address refugee issues.

The Roosevelt administration made no effort to relax immigration quotas for countries whose Jews were being annihilated. It would not even use troop ships returning empty from Europe to transport Jewish refugees to the United States. Hoover was willing to challenge the Roosevelt administration publicly on the refugee issue. As the nation’s only living ex-president during World War II, his views drew attention. Hoover’s contribution to the rescue campaign included signing an appeal that the Bergson Group placed in newspapers denouncing the Bermuda Conference as a “cruel mockery” and calling for immediate action to rescue as many European Jews as possible from the “Nazi Death-Trap.” He served as honorary chairman of the Bergson Group’s Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe. The ex-president delivered one of the conference’s keynote addresses, in which he endorsed the Bergson Group’s drive to find temporary havens for Jewish refugees.

Amity Shlaes reviews two new books about the former president and argues that the New Deal was simply a more intense, less constitutional version of Hoover’s policies—and both failed to yield recovery.

Imagine a U.S. president who could personally stare down spear-wielding warriors seeking to penetrate an undermanned Western compound in a remote city. A president who could map the mineral resources of Russia and organize the feeding of whole states or even countries following a disaster. A president who could match John Quincy Adams in his familiarity with the streets of London, Alexander Hamilton in mastery of finance, Dwight Eisenhower in administrative experience and Ronald Reagan in keen appreciation of the evils of communism.

The U.S. did once elect such a president—Herbert Hoover. Voters chose him in a landslide in 1928, and when the Crash of 1929 hit, Main Street sighed with relief at its own good fortune. The Great Engineer, as Hoover was known, could be counted on to engineer them out of trouble.
Herbert Hoover in the White House

By Charles Rappleye

Simon & Schuster, 554 pages, $32.50

Yet when the crash came, the Great Engineer failed. Hoover did not reverse the crash or prevent the years of Depression that followed. By the end of his first and only term, public esteem for Hoover had plummeted so far that the incumbent could not take even his home state, California, in the 1932 election. Soon a caricature of the 31st president began to take hold: that of an unimaginative, credentialed elitist who had permitted a catastrophe so great that it would take four terms for a kind and collectivist president, Franklin Roosevelt, to counter him. The caricature has only hardened down the decades. In 1948, Arthur Schlesinger Sr. found voters ranking Hoover 20th out of 33 presidents. In a 2015 poll he appeared near the bottom, 38th out of 44.
Herbert Hoover: A Life

By Glen Jeansonne

New American Library, 455 pages, $28
Over the years a number of writers have sought to lift Hoover’s ranking and status, including George Nash in several volumes of biography; Kendrick Clements in “The Life of Herbert Hoover: Imperfect Visionary”; and Joan Hoff Wilson in “Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive.” Now two further revisionists are having a go. In “Herbert Hoover: A Life,” Glen Jeansonne portrays a president more centrist than extreme, a leader who might have succeeded in a second term. With “Herbert Hoover in the White House,” Charles Rappleye makes the case that though the Great Engineer represented “the embodiment of progress and competence,” his temperament and bad luck caused him to botch the job.

Any Hoover upgrade must start with his career, which rocketed skyward at a velocity warranting a Harvard Business School case study. The classic early adapter, Hoover while still in his teens placed a bet that studies in a little-known start-up college in “Polo Alta,” as one newspaper spelled it, might yield more than attendance at an established university. The knowledge Hoover garnered from his Stanford engineering professors helped to win him a position directing Australian mines. From Australia the youthful “doctor of sick mines” (he grew a beard and ’stache to look older) moved on to China, where he dug a harbor and surveyed and reorganized China’s mineral resources. It was in Tientsin that Hoover and his able wife, Lou, fended off an assault of rebellious warriors—the Boxers of the Boxer Rebellion.