One Summer: America, 1927

Stanford’s first-ever class, he studied geology and also met there his future wife, Lou Henry, who by chance was also from Iowa. (They would marry in 1899.) Upon graduating, Hoover took the only job he could find, in a mine in Nevada City, California, loading and pushing an ore cart in a gold mine ten hours a day seven days a week for 20 cents an hour – a meagre salary even then. That this was the permanent lot for his fellow miners seems never to have troubled him. Hoover was a great believer in – and living personification of – the notion of personal responsibility.
    In 1897, still in his early twenties, Hoover was hired by a large and venerable British mining company, Bewick, Moreing and Co., and for the next decade travelled the world ceaselessly as its chief engineer and troubleshooter – to Burma, China, Australia, India,Egypt and wherever else its mineralogical interests demanded. In six years, Hoover circled the globe five times. He lived through the Boxer Rebellion in China, hacked through the jungles of Borneo, rode camels across the red emptiness of Western Australia, rubbed shoulders with Wyatt Earp and Jack London in a Klondike saloon, camped beside the Great Pyramids of Egypt. He had experiences as rich and memorable as any young man has ever enjoyed, and was moved by none of them. In his memoirs, written towards the end of his life, Hoover rather testily acknowledges that he visited many marvellous places and saw many wondrous things as a young man, but informs the reader that he will dwell on none of that. ‘For those who are interested [in romance and adventure] there are whole libraries of books in every geographical setting,’ he says. Instead the reader is given an emotionless survey of duties fulfilled and minerals extracted. His life was work. There was nothing else.
    After a decade in the field, Hoover was brought back to London and made a partner in Bewick, Moreing. Now a family man with two young sons, he moved into a big house on Campden Hill in Kensington, and became a pillar of the British business community. He socialized a little, but poorly. Dinners at his house often passed in more or less complete silence. ‘Never was he heard to mention a poem, a play, a work of art,’ wrote one observer. Instead, he just steadily accumulated wealth – some $4 million of it before his fortieth birthday.
    He would very probably have passed his life in wealthy anonymity but for a sudden change in circumstances that thrust him unexpectedly into the limelight. When war broke out, Hoover, as a prominent American, was called on to help evacuate other Americans stranded in Europe – there were, remarkably, over 120,000 of them – and he performed that duty with such efficiency and distinction that he was asked to take on the much greater challenge of heading the new Commission for Relief in Belgium.
    Belgium was overwhelmed by war, its farms destroyed, its factories shut, its foodstocks seized by the Germans. Eight millionBelgians were in real peril of starving. Hoover managed to find and distribute $1.8 million worth of food a week every week for two and a half years – 2.5 million tons of it altogether – and to deliver it to people who would otherwise have gone unfed. The achievement can hardly be overstated. It was the greatest relief effort ever undertaken on earth, and it made him, deservedly, an international hero. By 1917, it was reckoned that Hoover had saved more lives than any other person in history. One enthusiast called him ‘the greatest humanitarian since Jesus Christ’, which of course is about as generous as a compliment can get. The label stuck. He became to the world ‘the Great Humanitarian’.
    Two things accounted for Hoover’s glorious reputation: he executed his duties with tireless efficiency and dispatch, and he made sure that no one anywhere was ever unaware of his accomplishments. Myron Herrick, America’s avuncular ambassador in Paris, performed similar heroic feats in occupied France without receiving any thanks from posterity, but only because he didn’t seek them. Hoover by contrast was meticulous in ensuring that every positive act associated with him was inflated to maximum importance and covered with a press release.
    In fact, Hoover was almost totally lacking in feeling for those he saved. He refused to visit any relief sites or otherwise interact with the unfortunate victims he was helping. Once when an aide innocently took him to a field kitchen