1929-33 Herbert Hoover

Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874 – October 20, 1964), the 31st President of the United States (1929-1933), was a successful mining engineer, humanitarian, and administrator. more...

He exemplified the Efficiency Movement component of the Progressive Era, arguing there were engineering-like technical solutions to all social and economic problems--a position that was challenged by the Great Depression that began while he was President.

Family background

Hoover was born into a Quaker family of distant German (Pfautz, Wehmeyer) and Swiss (Huber, Burkhart) descent, in West Branch, Iowa. He was the first President to be born west of the Mississippi River. Both of his parents, Jesse Hoover and Hulda Minthorn, died when Hoover was young. His father died in 1880, and his mother in 1884.

In 1885, eleven-year-old "Bert" Hoover went to Newberg, Oregon to become the ward of his Uncle John Minthorn, a doctor and real estate developer whom Hoover recalled as "a severe man on the surface, but like all Quakers kindly at the bottom."

At a young age, Hoover was self-reliant and ambitious. "My boyhood ambition was to be able to earn my own living, without the help of anybody, anywhere," he once reported. As an office boy in his uncle's Oregon Land Company he mastered bookkeeping and typing, while also attending business school in the evening. Thanks to a local schoolteacher, Miss Jane Gray, the boy's eyes were opened to the novels of Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. David Copperfield, the story of another orphan cast into the world to live by his wits, would remain a lifelong favorite.

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