Fighting Quaker

Abstract

Polls of historians ranking presidents, from the 1930s to the present, even those confined to conservative historians, place Hoover near the bottom of chief executives, and polls of the general public rank him yet lower. In the twenty-first century, the only thing most Americans remember about Hoover is that he failed to end the Great Depression. However, many historians who have studied Hoover carefully, especially since the opening of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library to researchers in 1966, are more positive. There are reliable studies of Hoover in print, yet few major scholarly syntheses of Hoover’s life exist. The best are David Burner’s balanced yet dated biography published in 1979 and Richard Norton Smith’s more popular life study, An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover, published five years later. Martin L. Fausold’s The Presidency of Herbert C. Hoover (1985) is the most valuable study confined to Hoover’s presidency. There are perceptive monographs, dissertations, and articles about Hoover, but these have not received comparable attention to some of the prominent books denigrating the Quaker president as a total failure, some penned by distinguished historians. Even the best of the major published works do not fully illuminate Hoover’s personality, his private life, or his relationship with his family and friends, although Smith goes further than the others. Burner’s title, Hebert Hoover: A Public Life, for example, is indicative of the fact that he eschews dissecting the private man.