Herbert Hoover: The Man and His Work. Vernon L. Kellogg
at the very beginning of his college life Herbert Hoover and another distinguished son of Stanford, known to the early students as Rex Wilbur and to the present ones as Prex Wilbur—for he is now the university's president—put their heads together and decided that if they had any brains at all in those heads they would make them count in this little matter of earning their way through college. And both of them did.
In most of the things that Herbert Hoover did as a college boy to earn his needed money he revealed an unusual faculty for "organizing" and "administering" which is precisely a faculty that as a man he has revealed to the world in highest degree. He organized, at some profit to himself, the system of collecting and distributing the laundry of the college boys which had been done casually and unsatisfactorily by various San José and San Francisco establishments. He acted also as impresario, at a modest commission, for various lecturers and musicians, developing an arrangement for bringing visiting stars from San Francisco to the near-by university.
More important in its permanent influence on student activities was his work in reorganizing the system of conducting general student body affairs, especially the financial side of these affairs. In his Senior year he had been made treasurer of the student body and on taking office found little treasure and much confusion. Each of the many student activities had its own separate being, its own officers and own funds—or debts—and a dangerous freedom from general student control. Hoover worked out a system by which all control was vested in the officers of the general student body, and all funds passed into and out of a general treasury. The Hoover system of student affairs management prevails, in its essential features, in the university today.
In later years, as trustee of the university, he was the initiating figure in reorganizing the handling of all the institution's many million dollars worth of properties, and so his organizing genius is evidenced today at Stanford both in the management of student activities and in the handling of the financial affairs of the whole university.
But the work that he did in his student days that paid him best, because it brought him more than money, was that which he did partly for, and partly at the recommendation of his "major" professor, Dr. John Casper Branner, a great geologist and remarkable developer of geological students.
Dr. Branner has been one of Stanford's greatest assets from the day of its opening in all his successive capacities as professor, vice-president, and president, and he still wields a benign influence on the institution as resident professor and president emeritus. It was the particular good fortune of young Hoover to find that his early decision to become a mining engineer, like the wonderful man who had visited him in Newberg, led him, when he came to the university, into the class-rooms and laboratories of this kind and discerning scholar. Dr. Branner quickly discovered "good material," something that he was always looking for, in this industrious, intelligent, and ambitious Quaker boy; and Herbert Hoover found in his major professor not only a teacher but a friend, who, in both relations, has had a great influence, all for the best, in his life. It is an interesting illumination of the democracy of American education to note that while the professor became the university's president the student became one of its trustees.
The first money-earning work that student Hoover did for Dr. Branner, except for various little jobs about the laboratory or office, was a summer's work on a large topographic model of Arkansas which that state was having prepared by Dr. Branner after a new method devised by him. Part of this summer was spent in the field in Arkansas and the rest of it wrestling with the model in the basement of the professor's house.
Two summers were spent in work with the U. S. Geological Survey in the California Sierras around Lake Tahoe and the American River under Waldemar Lindgren, one of the greatest of American scientific mining engineers. This work was on the relations of the famous Sierra placer gold deposits to the original gold-bearing veins and lodes, and resulted in tracing those comparatively recent placers back to the old mountain slopes and valleys. It was a fascinating problem successfully carried through. The young geologist's association with Lindgren, whose standards of personal character and regard for the dignity and ethics of his profession were of the highest, was a source of much valuable education.
All this summer activity was of value to young Hoover not only for the help it afforded him in his struggle for existence, and for the outdoor exercise it involved, but for the practical experience in geological work which it gave him to mix in with his lecture room and laboratory acquisitions and to test them by. He seemed to have no difficulty in getting all of this kind of work he had time to do. In fact, some of the other students used to speak a little enviously and suggestively about "Hoover's luck" in this connection. Dr. Branner happened to overhear some remarks of this kind from a group around a laboratory table one day and promptly broke out on them in his forcible manner.
"What do you mean," he said, "by talking about Hoover's luck? He has not had luck; he has had reward. If you would work half as hard and half as intelligently as he does you would have half his luck. If I tell any one of you to go and do a thing for me I have to come around in half an hour to see if you have done it. But I can tell Hoover to do a thing, and never think of it again. I know it will be done. And he doesn't ask me how to do it, either. If I told him to start to Kamchatka tomorrow to bring me back a walrus tooth, I'd never hear of it again until he came back with the tooth. And then I'd ask him how he had done it."
Dr. Branner was as kind to his boys as he was stern when sternness was needed. Hoover came down with typhoid in his Junior year, just at a time when his finances could not afford such an expensive luxury. So Dr. Branner sent him to a hospital and saw that he was cared for by the best of physicians and nurses and told him to forget about paying for it all until after he had graduated. And that probably meant that the good professor had to go for some time without buying books, which was what he usually did with his extra money.
Another unfortunate illness was announced to the busy student by an outbreak of little red spots on his body which were declared by the college physician to be the result of poison oak. But they were not; they meant measles, and measles needs prompt attention. Unfortunately young Hoover's neglected case affected his eyes to such an extent that for several years afterward he had to wear glasses. And out of this grew the familiar Stanford tradition that Herbert Hoover ruined his eyes while in college by over-much night work on his studies!
As a matter of fact Hoover was no college grind. He studied hard enough at what he liked or thought important for his fitting to be a mining engineer, but he did not dodge getting a few credits from well-known "snap" courses, and he got through other required, but, to his mind, superfluous ones without doing much more work on them than necessary. He had a disconcerting habit of starting in on a course and then if he found it uninteresting or unpromising as a contributor to the special education he was interested in, of simply dropping out of the class without consultation or permission. But he did dig hard into what he thought really counted; his record in the geology department was an unusually high one.
But with all his work and study he found time for some other kinds of activity. At least the two Irwin boys, Will and Wallace, who were Stanford's most ingenious disturbers of the peace in pioneer days, claim that Hoover, in his quiet effective way, made a few contributions of his own to the troubles of the faculty. But such contributions from others were generally credited—or rather debited—to the more notorious offenders, so that they had to suffer not alone for their own brilliant inspirations but for those of other less conspicuous collaborators. Wallace, for what seemed to the faculty sufficient reasons, was, as he has himself phrased it, "graduated by request," while Will had his Senior year encored by the faculty, so that it took him five years, instead of the more conventional four, to graduate. In fact, I remember that even as this fifth year was drawing near its close, the faculty committee of discipline, of which I was a reluctant member, seriously considered letting Will go in the same way that Wallace had gone. But some of us argued that if we should let Will graduate in the more usual way we should be rid of him soon anyway and without risking the bare possibilities of doing him an injustice. President Jordan always maintained that Will had good stuff in him, and he used his ameliorating influence with the faculty committee. So Will Irwin is today one of Stanford's best-known alumni.
Herbert Hoover's haunting trouble all through his college course was that unpassed entrance requirement in