Herbert Hoover: The Man and His Work. Vernon L. Kellogg
further advances, that the feeding of the millions of hungry children of Eastern Europe could go on as it is now actually going on every day under Hoover's direction, until the time arrives, some time this summer, when it can be wholly taken over by the new governments.
But just now I want to tell another story.
CHAPTER II
THE CHILD AND BOY
The account of Mr. Hoover's sympathetic interest in the child sufferers from the Great War, and of his active and effective work on their behalf, makes one wonder about his own childhood. He is not so old that his childhood days could have been darkened by the one war which did mean suffering to many American children, especially those of the South. He was not born in the South, nor of parents actually afflicted by poverty, and did not spend his early days in any of the comparatively few places in America, such as the congested great city quarters and industrial agglomerations of poor and ignorant foreign working-people, where real child distress is common; so he certainly did not, as a growing child, have his ears filled with tales of child suffering, or with the actual crying of hungry children.
There was one outstanding fact, however, in his relations as a child to the world and to the people most closely about him, which may have had its influence in making him especially susceptible to the sight of child misfortune. This is the fact that he, like many of his later wards in Europe, was orphaned at an early age. But he was by no means a neglected orphan. So I hardly think that his own personal experience as an orphan is a sufficient explanation of the passionate interest in the special fate of the children, which he displayed from the beginning of the war to its end.
Nor can the explanation lie in the coldly reasoned conclusion that the most valuable relief to a people so stricken by catastrophe that its very existence as a human group is threatened, is to let whatever mortality is unavoidable fall chiefly to the old and the adult infirm for the sake of saving the next generation on which alone the future existence of the group depends. This actual fact Hoover always clearly saw; but the thing that those close to him saw quite as clearly was that this alone accounted for but a small part of his intensive attention to the children.
It is, then, neither any sad experience in his own life, nor any sociologic or biologic understanding of the hard facts of human existence and racial persistence, that does much to explain his particular devotion to the health and comfort of the millions of suffering children in Europe. The explanation lies simply, although mysteriously, in his own personality. I say mysteriously, for, despite all the wonderful new knowledge of heredity that we have gained since the beginning of the twentieth century, the way by which any of us comes to be just the sort of man he is is still mostly mystery. Herbert Hoover is simply a kind of man who, when brought by circumstances face to face with the distress of a people, is especially deeply touched by the distress of the children, and is impelled by this to use all of his intelligence and energy to relieve this distress. What we can know of his inheritance and early environment may indeed reveal a little something of why he is this kind of man. But it certainly will not reveal the whole explanation.
Herbert Hoover, or, to give him for once his full name, Herbert Clark Hoover, was born on August 10, 1874, in a small Quaker community of Iowa which composed, at the time of his birth, most of the village of West Branch in that state. That is, he usually says that he was born on August 10, but sometimes he says that this important day was August 11. He seems to slide his birthday back and forth to suit the convenience of his family when they wish to celebrate it. He does this on the basis of the fact that when, in the midst of the general family excitement in the middle of the night of August 10–11, one of the busy Quaker aunts present bethought herself, for the sake of getting things straight in the family Bible, to say: "Oh, doctor, just how long ago was it that baby was born?" she got the following answer, "Just as near an hour ago as I can guess it." Thereupon she looked at the clock on the wall, and the doctor looked at his watch, and both found it exactly one o'clock of an important new morning!
Herbert's Quaker father, Jesse Clark Hoover, died in 1880, and his Quaker mother, Hulda Minthorn, in 1884. The father had had the simple education of a small Quaker college and was, at the time of Herbert's birth, the "village blacksmith," to give him the convenient title used by the town and country people about. But really he was of that ambitious type of blacksmith, not uncommon in the Middle West, whose shop not only does the repairing of the farm machines and household appliances, but manufactures various homely metal things, and does a little selling of agricultural implements on the side. Jesse Hoover's mind was rather full of ideas about possible "improvements" on the machines he repaired and sold. And his two sons, Herbert and Theodore, and Herbert's two sons, Herbert, Jr., and Allan, are all rather given to the same "inventiveness" about the home.
Hulda Randall Minthorn Hoover, Herbert's mother, was a woman of unusual mental gifts. After her husband's death she gave much attention to church work, and became a recognized "preacher" at Quaker meetings. In this capacity she revealed so much power of expression and exhortation that she was in much demand. Her death, in 1884, came from typhoid fever. Those who knew her speak of her "personality." They say that she had color and attractiveness, although she was unusually shy and reserved. One can say exactly the same things of her son Herbert.
The immediate Hoover ancestry is Quaker. The more remote is Quaker mixed with Dutch and French Huguenot. The Dutch name was spelled with an e instead of the second o. All of Herbert's grandparents were Quakers, and the Quaker records run back a long time. One of the family branches runs into Canada, with the story of a migration there of a group of refugees from the American colonies during the Revolution. These emigrants came from prosperous farms in Pennsylvania, but while they wanted to be free from England's control, they could not, as Quakers, agree to fight for this freedom. So as the neighbors were inclined to be a little "unpleasant" about this, and as Canada was just then offering free farms to colonists, they packed up their movables and trekked north.
Another Canadian branch, French Huguenot in origin, has traditions of hurried removals from France into Holland before St. Bartholomew's Night, and of later escapes into the same country. But all finally decided that Europe anywhere was impossible, and hence they determined on a wholesale emigration to Canada. Here by chance they settled down side by side with the little Quaker group which had come from Pennsylvania. Close association and intermarrying resulted in the Quakerizing of the European Huguenots—their beliefs were essentially similar, anyway—so in time all the descendants of this double Canadian line were Quakers.
There were two other children in Jesse and Hulda Hoover's family: one a boy, Theodore, three and a half years older than Herbert, and the other a girl, Mary, who was very much younger. Theodore, like his younger brother, became a mining engineer, and after a dozen years of professional and business experience with mines all over the world—part of the time in connection with mining interests directed by his brother—is now the head of the graduate department of mining engineering in Stanford University.
After the father's and mother's death, the three Hoover orphans came under the kindly care of various Quaker aunts and uncles, and especially at first of Grandmother Minthorn. This good grandmother took special charge of little Mary, and pretty soon carried her with her out to Oregon, where she had a son and daughter living. There had been a little property left when the father died, enough to provide a very slender income for each child. But if the dollars were few the kind relatives were not, and the little Hoovers never suffered from hunger.
These relatives were not limited to Iowa, and the boy Herbert soon found himself in a new and strange environment, surrounded by a different race of human beings, whose red-brown skin and fantastic trappings greatly excited his boyish wonder and imagination. For he was sent to live with his Uncle Laban Miles, U. S. Government Indian Agent for the Osage tribe in the Indian Territory, who was one of the many Quakers who had dedicated their lives to the cause of the Indians