The Life of Herbert Hoover ─ Fighting Quaker, 1928-1933

Provocative, brilliantly written, and exhaustively researched, this book is the first definitive study of the presidency of one of America's most maligned and poorly understood Chief Executives. Born in a Quaker hamlet in Iowa and orphaned at nine, Herbert Hoover had already risen to wealth and global fame as an international mining engineer, the savior of Belgium during the Great War, Woodrow Wilson's Food Administrator, and perhaps the greatest Secretary of Commerce in American history by the time he assumed the presidency. Modest, shy, humble, with a subtle sense of humor, he lacked the self-promotional style of professional politicians and eschewed political invective. While in the cabinet he had helped to engineer the prosperity of the 1920s and vainly warned of an economy overheated by speculation, but the ensuing Wall Street Crash of 1929 would come to overwhelmingly define his legacy. Combining public and private resources, he made history as the first president to pit government action against the economic cycle, creating a precedent that would be employed by his successor and all other future presidents. His economic measures mitigated the effects of the Great Depression, yet they failed to end it. In foreign policy he sponsored naval disarmament and made world peace his priority. Unfairly painted as a miserly misanthrope and the architect of the stock market crash, he lost the 1932 campaign to Franklin D. Roosevelt by a slightly larger margin than he had defeated Al Smith in 1928. Glen Jeansonne's study sweeps away the cobwebs of neglect from Hoover's presidency. His lively prose humanizes Hoover for us and allows a greater understanding of our thirty-first president, one that is more valuable now than ever before.

Glen Jeansonne is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His books include A Time of Paradox: American Since 1890; Messiah of the Masses: Huey P. Long and the Great Depression; and Women of the Far Right: The Mothers Movement and World War II, among others. His second book, Gerald L. K. Smith: Minister of Hate, won the Gustavus Myer Award, the Wisconsin Writer's Award, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Jeansonne has also published biographies of Barack Obama, Elvis Presley, and Leander H. Perez, and more than sixty academic and popular articles.