First Ladies (38 page)

Herbert Hoover’s only obstacle to the Oval Office was the Democrats’ 1928 “cherce”—Alfred E. Smith, the first Catholic to run for the presidency. Al’s sidewalks of New York accent and assaults on Prohibition ignited almost as much opposition as his Catholic faith. It was a nasty campaign, in which vicious things were said by some of Hoover’s backers, leaving the Democrats more than ordinarily furious about losing by another landslide.

On inauguration day, advertising executive Bruce Barton accurately forecast the public mood when he told Hoover: “People expect more of you than they have of any other President.” Hoover’s inaugural address did little to diminish this soaring optimism. He envisioned a nation of homeowners and farmers “insured against death and accident, unemployment and old age,” a future “bright with hope” in which every American could count on “security from poverty and want.” Completing his image as a combination white knight and miracle man, Hoover announced he would serve without pay.

Lou seemed the perfect First Lady for the Great Engineer. Finding the White House “bleak as a New England barn,” she rearranged the furniture and brought from California some lovely pieces she had collected in her world travels. She also hired Signal Corps photographers at her own expense to take pictures of every piece of furniture in the White House and embarked on a vigorous search for authentic American antiques, continuing the tradition her friend Grace Coolidge had launched. The President may have had some doubts about this eagerness to restore the past after he sat on a chair that had supposedly belonged to Dolley Madison and it collapsed under his bulky six-foot frame.

Lou’s long years as a hostess enabled her to cope with any and all entertaining emergencies. She even provided the cook with a recipe that became known as White House Supreme—croquettes of ground ham, beef, lamb, and whatever else happened to be in the refrigerator. The dish was Lou’s answer to the frequent discovery that her dinner guests would number forty rather than four. When someone asked the weary housekeeper to sum up the Hoovers’ regime, she groaned: “Company, company company!” Lou and “Bert,” as she called him, had guests for lunch and dinner every day of the year except February 10, their wedding anniversary, when they dined alone.

On these occasions, guests sometimes encountered a Herbert Hoover who was a less than gracious host. If he decided the company was insufficiently stimulating, or was failing to give him the information he had expected, he would lapse into a glum silence worthy of Calvin Coolidge. Fortunately, Lou was adept at keeping the conversation
alive. She was also deft at changing the subject if she saw a topic was starting to embarrass or annoy her husband. Although she never made the kind of extravagant statements about her absolute faith in Herbert Hoover’s judgment that Grace Coolidge made about Silent Cal, it was evident to everyone that Lou not only loved Bert, she admired him deeply.

Lou and Herbert Hoover relax at their camp on the Rapidan River in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Lou designed this forerunner of the current presidential retreat Camp David. Protecting the President from stress is one of the First Lady’s primary responsibilities
.
(Herbert Hoover Presidential Library-Museum)

A devoted outdoorswoman who had grown up riding and camping in the California hills, Lou used the First Lady’s star status to call for more and better school athletic programs for women and urged parents to enroll their daughters in the Girl Scouts as an ideal way to get them in touch with nature and the beauty of the American countryside. She persuaded her husband to buy 164 acres for a camp on Virginia’s Rapidan River, 109 miles from Washington, where they could fish and relax, beyond the reach of the White House’s formalities. Lou
personally designed a little village of log cabins where, her younger son Allan remarked, everyone could “rough it in perfect comfort.”

When the Hoovers discovered that the children in the area had no school, they donated the money to start one and went to considerable trouble to find a teacher for it. That was typical of their private generosity. Both Quakers, they were devout believers in voluntary charity. Lou fretted over the illnesses of the White House staff. One butler, unable to afford the cream he needed for a stomach ulcer, found bottles of it on his doorstep each morning, paid for by Mrs. Hoover.

Lou made some enemies below the Mason-Dixon line when she invited Mrs. Oscar DePriest, wife of an African-American congressman from Chicago, to tea. Some of the other guests refused to shake Mrs. DePriest’s hand. Southerners reviled the First Lady for desecrating the White House; the Texas legislature passed a formal rebuke. Lou not only refused to waver—she invited the choir of the black college, Tuskegee Institute, to perform at the White House. These gestures were part of the Hoovers’ mutual determination to do their utmost to eliminate injustice and deprivation from American life.

In the Oval Office, the President unleashed a whirlwind of programs to reform America’s creaky banking system, improve the farmers’ lot, and launch an old-age pension plan. Newspapers showered praise on him, comparing him with Theodore Roosevelt and other presidential dynamos. Then the nation’s economic roof collapsed on top of Herbert Hoover—and everyone else. On October 24, 1929, seven months after he became President, the stock market crashed with a rumble heard around the world. By 1930 six million people were out of work, banks were failing, and businesses were going bankrupt by the hundreds. Similar things were happening in Europe.

The Great Engineer, the man who saw the presidency as primarily a managerial problem, struggled to cope with the catastrophe. But his public personality, with its penchant for statistics and facts, its emphasis on the head rather than the heart, lacked a crucial ingredient for political leadership in hard times. Herbert Hoover had a tender heart, and his First Lady had an even more tender one—but they were loath
to reveal their private feelings to the American voter and were appalled at the thought of publicizing them for political gain.

A perfect example was the story of three children from Detroit, the oldest thirteen, who showed up at the White House gates to ask the President to help get their father out of jail. The man had stolen a car to keep his family from starving. President Hoover ordered a meal for the children from the White House kitchen, sat them in chairs around his desk, and talked to them about their father. He told them he was sure he was a good man, if he had children who loved him enough to travel all the way from Detroit to Washington for his sake. After the children left, Hoover called in his secretary, who saw tears on the President’s face. “Get that man out of jail,” Hoover said. “I don’t care how you do it.”

The secretary succeeded in quashing the conviction—and asked the President if he could release the story to the press. “Of course not!” Hoover said.

Instead of searching for words and gestures that could lift the hearts of the growing numbers of bewildered defeated Americans, Herbert Hoover tried to conquer the worldwide Great Depression with work. Eighteen hours a day, he sat at his desk in the Oval Office, conferring with aides and experts, ordering studies, and forming commissions to cope with the mounting crisis. Lou Hoover tried to contribute, making speeches to women’s groups, urging them to help those in need. “The winter is upon us,” she said in a radio broadcast from the White House in 1931. “We cannot be warm, in the house or out, we cannot sit down to a table sufficiently supplied with food, if we do not know… every child, woman and man in the United States [is] sufficiently warmed and fed.”

Both Lou and the President gave thousands of dollars of their own money to strangers who wrote to the White House begging for help. Always, the gifts were anonymous, delivered through friends who were asked to investigate the pleas to make sure the money was needed. But the scale of the nation’s misery was too vast for individuals to comprehend, much less solve. The Hoovers’ good intentions, coupled with their stubborn resistance to sympathetic publicity and
their inaugural promise to create Utopia, soon transformed the White House into hell.

The Democratic Party played a major role in this metamorphosis. The Democrats’ publicity director was a shrewd, ruthless man named Charles Michelson. He correctly discerned that the Great Engineer presented a perfect target for dirty tactics and even dirtier tricks. As one biographer has put it, “The public barely knew him. To most Americans [Hoover] was a rubber face perched above a stiff size 17 collar.” From Democratic Party headquarters in Washington flowed a stream of vituperation, blaming this synthetic Herbert Hoover for the Depression, and portraying him as a cold, cruel, uncaring servant of the ruling class.

The stories ranged from scandals to smears to fantasy An Interior Department employee took a twelve-thousand-dollar bribe to reveal another supposed Teapot Dome oil scam. The President’s older son Herbert was forced to resign from his job when he was accused of profiteering because the airline he worked for had a government contract to fly the mail. Thousands, perhaps millions, believed the whopper that the real cause of the Depression was the theft of the nation’s gold supply from Fort Knox by Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, with the President’s help.

Soon even Republican-aligned
Time
magazine was calling Herbert Hoover “President Reject.” Comedians ridiculed him. H. L. Mencken called him a “fat Coolidge.” A Pennsylvania congressman persuaded twenty fellow statesmen to vote a bill of impeachment. Everywhere people recited ditties such as this one:

Hoover later claimed that his Quaker background enabled him to tolerate this abuse. He simply refused to let it penetrate the center of peace he had cultivated in the core of his self. Perhaps that was true. Nevertheless, his hair turned white and twenty-five pounds
vanished from his frame. Beside him, Lou Hoover suffered even more. The President could at least lash back at the “gangster tactics” of Charles Michelson and his allies. The First Lady had to maintain a smiling silence. White House staffers often saw Lou accompany her husband to the door of the Oval Office, where, in a desperate gesture of sympathy, she smoothed his hair with her hand and turned forlornly away.

In the spring and summer of 1932 came the imbroglio that totally ruined Herbert Hoover’s reputation. Some twenty thousand unemployed World War I veterans marched on Washington to demand the immediate payment of a long debated bonus for their services in France. They pitched a makeshift camp across the Potomac on the Anacostia Flats and sent flying columns into the city to demonstrate in front of the White House and other government buildings.

Lou Hoover sent coffee and sandwiches to the veterans, but the President decided sterner tactics were in order. With strict instructions to avoid bloodshed, he ordered the U.S. Army’s chief of staff, General Douglas MacArthur, to disperse the marchers. MacArthur assembled a thousand men, including a detachment of saber-wielding troopers from the Third Cavalry and six tanks, to assault the unarmed veterans. The only military man with any common sense was MacArthur’s aide, Dwight Eisenhower, who advised the chief of staff to play down the operation.

Instead, MacArthur, justifying all the things President Harry Truman said about him twenty years later, reveled in the chance to seize the spotlight. When Herbert Hoover decided a show of force was enough to disperse the marchers, and ordered the troops not to cross the bridge to Anacostia, MacArthur flagrantly disobeyed a President for the first but not the last time. The general sent his men surging into the encampment, which they put to the torch. In the melee a child was badly injured and later died. Hoover, unaware that his orders had been flouted, announced he was “pleased” by the results—hammering the final nail in the coffin of his reputation.

In Albany, New York, when Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt heard the news, he turned to his adviser Felix Frankfurter and said: “Well, Felix, this elects me.”

FDR was right, of course, but Charles Michelson and his cohorts took no chances. They continued to batter Hoover with every negative adjective and nasty accusation they could find. Not even Lou was exempt from their dirty tricks. When she attempted to give a radio speech to the nation at a Girl Scout encampment in Virginia, some enterprising Democrat slashed the wires, cutting her off the air.

The embattled President refused to surrender. He accepted the Republicans’ nomination in 1932, and with Lou beside him as usual, crisscrossed the nation by train, attacking Roosevelt’s solutions to the Depression, defending the Hoover record in the White House. It was a bitter campaign. Voters flung insults and rotten eggs at him. In Kansas—Republican Kansas—a barrage of tomatoes almost finished him. “I can’t go on with it anymore,” he said to Lou.

She could only put her arm around him in silent sympathy. She did not have the authority to urge him to make a dignified withdrawal, or suggest a change of tactics. She had never been an equal political partner. The man who had worked miracles in her life and in the greater world was being destroyed before her eyes, and there was nothing she could do.