Hoover may have been a Stanford graduate who made his fortune working on foreign mine extraction projects, but he grew up poor in this tiny house in a rural Iowa Quaker village. Note the outhouse in back and his father’s blacksmith shop on the right. His hardworking father died of heart failure and his even harder working mother later died of typhoid and pneumonia. Herbert’s relatives took him and his two siblings in, and he grew up in a school principal uncle’s house in Oregon.

I also visited his Presidential Library & Museum next door, run by the National Archives. They go to great lengths to rehabilitate Hoover’s reputation, since he was widely blamed for the Great Depression. They point to his conservation efforts for example, but neglect to mention that his 5 million acres are not as much as Teddy Roosevelt’s 150 million acres. The museum helped convince me that Hoover was a generous humanitarian who saved many lives in Belgium, Russia and elsewhere by running food aid programs, who was elected with extremely high expectations, and who implemented a variety of positive programs (not just the dam). I genuinely think he was a smart and nice guy.

But, Hoover was an ardent believer in solving social problems with volunteerism and without government intervention. Even though he had warned Coolidge about the dangers of stock speculation, Hoover was all about efficiency, not reform. Hoover had seen massive, desperate social failure all around the world, including being trapped in the foreign enclave during the Boxer Rebellion with his wife (see movie, ’55 Days at Peking’). But he still believed that if government supported business leaders and capitalists, then everything could be solved with goodwill and determination.

He was wrong. FDR crushed him and immediately implemented massive social programs including unemployment payments, government work programs, and Social Security. In retrospect, Hoover should have been able to look at his own family’s struggle with poverty and the tragedies of his parents’ deaths and consider that maybe government intervention would have helped them in their hour of need. Instead, he shared the common views among the ruling elites, that government programs like military protection for foreign business interests in China are good but that government programs like unemployment relief are bad.