Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874 – October 20, 1964) was the 31st President of the United States (1929–1933). Hoover was a professional mining engineer and author. As the United States Secretary of Commerce in the 1920s under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he promoted government intervention under the rubric "economic modernization". In the presidential election of 1928, Hoover easily won the Republican nomination, despite having no previous elected office experience. To date, Hoover is the last cabinet secretary to be directly elected President of the United States, as well as one of only two Presidents (along with William Howard Taft) to have been elected President without electoral experience or high military rank. The nation was prosperous and optimistic at the time, leading to a landslide victory for Hoover over Democrat Al Smith. Hoover, a trained engineer, deeply believed in the Efficiency Movement, which held that government and the economy were riddled with inefficiency and waste, and could be improved by experts who could identify the problems and solve them. When the Wall Street Crash of 1929 struck less than eight months after he took office, Hoover tried to combat the following Great Depression with volunteer efforts, none of which produced economic recovery during his term. The consensus among historians is that Hoover's defeat in the 1932 election was caused primarily by failure to end the downward economic spiral, compounded by popular opposition to prohibition. Other electoral liabilities were Hoover's lack of charisma in relating to voters, and his poor skills in working with politicians. As a result of these factors, Hoover is typically ranked very poorly among former U.S. presidents. Hoover was born on August 10, 1874 in the town of West Branch, Iowa. He was the first president to be born west of the Mississippi, and remains the only Iowan president. His father, Jesse Hoover, was a blacksmith and farm implement store owner, of German (Pfautz, Wehmeyer) and German-Swiss (Huber, Burkhart) descent. His mother, Hulda (Minthorn) Hoover, was born in Norwich, Ontario, Canada of English and Irish (probably Scots-Irish) descent. Both were Quakers. His father died in 1880, and his mother in 1884, leaving Hoover an orphan at the age of nine. After a brief stay with one of his grandmothers in Kingsley, Iowa, Herbert lived for the next 18 months with his uncle Allen Hoover in West Branch. In November 1885, he went to live in Newberg, Oregon with his uncle John Minthorn, whose own son had died the year before. For two and a half years, Herbert attended Friends Pacific Academy (now George Fox University), then subsequently worked as office assistant in his uncle's real estate office in Salem. Though he did not attend high school, the young Hoover attended night school and learned bookkeeping, typing, and math.[1] Hoover entered Stanford University in 1891, the first year of the new California college. None of the first students were required to pay tuition.[1] Hoover claimed to be the first student ever at Stanford, by virtue of having been the first person in the first class to sleep in the dormitory.[2] While at the university, he was the student manager of both the baseball and football teams, and was a part of the inaugural Big Game versus rival California (Stanford won).[2] As manager of the baseball team, in 1894, one game Hoover found the receipts were short. He went after the person who had failed to pay the twenty-five cents, former President Benjamin Harrison. Later in life, Hoover would call his encounter with Harrison, "his first time with greatness." Hoover graduated in 1895 with a degree in geology.[3] Hoover went to Australia in 1897 as an employee of Bewick, Moreing & Co., a London-based mining company. He served as a geologist and mining engineer while searching the Western Australian goldfields for investments. After being appointed as mine manager at the age of 23, he led a major program of expansion for the Sons of Gwalia gold mine at Gwalia, Western Australia, and brought in many Italian immigrants to cut costs and counter the union militancy of the Australian miners.[4][5] He believed "the rivalry between [the Italians] and the other men [was] of no small benefit."[4] He also described Italians as "fully 20 per cent superior"[4] to other miners. Hoover worked at gold mines in Big Bell, Cue, Leonora, Menzies and Coolgardie.[6][7] Hoover married his Stanford sweetheart, Lou Henry, in 1899. The Hoovers had two sons, Herbert Clark Jr. (1903–1969) and Allan Henry (1907–1993). They went to China, where Hoover worked for a private corporation as China's leading engineer. Hoover and his wife picked up Mandarin Chinese while he worked in China and used it during his tenure at the White House when they did not want to be overheard.[8] The Boxer Rebellion trapped the Hoovers in Tianjin in June 1900. For almost a month, the settlement was under heavy fire. Hoover himself guided US Marines around Tianjin during the battle, using his extensive knowledge of the local terrain.[9] Hoover was made a partner in Bewick, Moreing & Co. in 1901 and assumed responsibility for various Australian operations. In August–September 1905, Hoover came up with a technological innovation. When visiting the mines at Broken Hill, New South Wales, he noticed considerable zinc in the Broken Hill lead-silver ore, which could not be recovered and was lost as tailings. Hoover devised a practical and profitable method to use the then-new froth flotation process to treat these tailings and recover the zinc.[10] With William Baillieu and others, he founded the Zinc Corporation (later, following various mergers, a part of Rio Tinto Group). In 1908, he became an independent mining consultant, traveling worldwide until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. His lectures at Columbia and Stanford universities were published in 1909 as Principles of Mining,[11] which became a standard textbook. Hoover and his wife also published their English translation of the 1556 mining classic De re metallica in 1912. This translation from the Latin of Renaissance author Georgius Agricola is still the most important scholarly version and provides its historical context.[12] It is still in print and published by Dover Publications. When World War I began in August 1914, he helped organize the return of 120,000 Americans from Europe: tourists, students, executives, et al. Hoover led five hundred volunteers in the distribution of food, clothing, steamship tickets, and cash. "I did not realize it at the moment, but on August 3, 1914, my career was over forever. I was on the slippery road of public life." Hoover liked to say that the difference between dictatorship and democracy was simple: dictators organize from the top down, democracies from the bottom up. Belgium faced a food crisis in fall, 1914 after being invaded by Germany. Hoover undertook an unprecedented relief effort with the Committee for Relief in Belgium (CRB). The official chairman was Emile Francqui, but Hoover was the de facto head of operations. The CRB became an independent republic of relief, with its own flag, navy, factories, mills, and railroads. Private donations and government grants supplied an $11-million-a-month budget. For the next two years, Hoover worked 14-hour days from London, administering the distribution of over two and one-half million tons of food to nine million war victims. In an early form of shuttle diplomacy, he crossed the North Sea forty times to meet with German authorities and persuade them to allow food shipments, becoming an international hero. The Belgian city of Leuven named a prominent square Hooverplein after him. After the United States entered the war in April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Hoover head of the U.S. Food Administration. Hoover believed "food will win the war." He established set days to encourage people to avoid eating particular foods to save them for soldiers' rations: meatless Mondays, wheatless Wednesdays, and "when in doubt, eat potatoes." This program helped reduce consumption of foodstuffs needed overseas and avoided rationing at home. It was dubbed "Hooverizing" by government publicists, in spite of Hoover's continual orders that publicity should not mention him by name. After the war, as a member of the Supreme Economic Council and head of the American Relief Administration, Hoover organized shipments of food for millions of starving people in Central Europe. He used a newly formed Quaker organization, the American Friends Service Committee, to carry out much of the logistical work in Europe. Hoover provided aid to the defeated German nation after the war, as well as relief to famine-stricken Bolshevik-controlled areas of Russia in 1921, despite the opposition of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and other Republicans. When asked if he was not thus helping Bolshevism, Hoover retorted, "Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!" At war's end, the New York Times named Hoover one of the "Ten Most Important Living Americans". Hoover confronted a world of political possibilities when he returned home in 1919. Democratic Party leaders looked on him as a potential candidate for President. (President Wilson privately preferred Hoover as his successor.) "There could not be a finer one," asserted Franklin D. Roosevelt, then a rising star from New York. Hoover briefly considered becoming a Democrat, but he believed that 1920 would be a Republican year. Also, Hoover confessed that he could not run for a party whose only member in his boyhood home had been the town drunk. Hoover realized that he was in a unique position to collect information about the Great War and its aftermath. In 1919, he established the Hoover War Collection at Stanford University. He donated all the files of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, the U.S. Food Administration, and the American Relief Administration, and pledged $50,000 as an endowment. Scholars were sent to Europe to collect pamphlets, society publications, government documents, newspapers, posters, proclamations, and other ephemeral materials related to the war and the revolutions that followed it. The collection was later renamed the Hoover War Library and is now known as the Hoover Institution.