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Keeping up with the Joneses, Americans felt their admiration for Hoover curdle into hatred. war stories Cascading boos spoiled his appearance at the 1931 World Series; A Presumption of Disclosure chants of "Hang Hoover!" resounded at a Detroit campaign stop the next summer. Faced with writing a new biography of such a figure, the average Advanced Search historian might perversely attempt a rehabilitation. In fact, over the years several such efforts have come and swiftly gone. But Friday, October 19, 2001, at 6:39 PM ET William Leuchtenburg, author of Herbert Hoover, is not your average historian. Still prolific at 86, he is one of the foremost authorities on the 1930s, the New Deal, and FDR. In this meaty little book, he brings to the life of Hoover his own lifetime of art study of this watershed moment in the American past. Robert Frank's The Americans How a Swiss émigré's cross-country road trip changed photography. Leuchtenburg's book is the latest in Times Books' American By Fred Kaplan Presidents series, a collection of short, readable biographies, for Wednesday, January 21, 2009, at 1:18 PM ET which, it bears mentioning, I wrote a volume about Calvin Coolidge in 2006 (the manuscript for which Leuchtenburg reviewed and improved). The series' best efforts have generally Click here to read a slide-show essay about the photography of been those that tackle the middle-tier presidents. Insignificant Robert Frank. presidents force their authors into strained claims that their present obscurity is undeserved, while giants like FDR defy . encapsulation in 200 pages. So Hoover is a choice assignment. Understanding the advent of the New Deal is impossible without . insight into his failures. And yet Hoover is largely forgotten: In 2004, John Kerry's presidential campaign stopped comparing Bush's dismal record on job creation to Hoover's when polling . discovered that most Americans barely knew who he was. Leuchtenburg's is a tragic Hoover. In his early career, Hoover won renown for his humanitarian commitments and his hypercompetence. Though Hoover was arrogant and prickly, his books managerial skills should have served him well in tackling the The Riddle of Herbert Hoover financial panic and economic downturn that followed the stock- How the hypercompetent technocrat failed. market crash seven months into his presidency—or, as Hoover By David Greenberg chose to name it in a bit of ill-considered spin, the Depression. Monday, January 19, 2009, at 6:54 AM ET The tin ear for popular nomenclature turned out to be the least of his problems. In 1932, the parents of a 4-year-old went to court to change his The first president born west of the Mississippi, Hoover had legal name. Christened Herbert Hoover Jones in 1928, when the risen through brains, luck, and an astonishing capacity for hard commerce secretary and Republican presidential nominee was a work to become, by the age of 40, one of the world's leading national hero, the boy deserved relief, said his parents, from "the mining engineers. A wealthy businessman as well, he performed chagrin and mortification which he is suffering and will suffer" a series of heroic tasks in World War I. He delivered food to the for sharing a moniker with the now-disgraced chief executive. starving masses of Belgium when the Germans invaded in 1914. His new name: Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones. Woodrow Wilson appointed him to oversee food rationing at home after the U.S. joined the conflict. Afterward, he again fed No president has ever suffered a reversal of political fortune as ravaged Europe. The world marveled. Wilson called him a "great sudden and complete as the fall from glory to ignominy that was international figure," one of few men who "stir me deeply and the sum and substance of Herbert Hoover's presidency. Elected make me in love with duty." in a landslide in 1928 to nurture the prosperity of the buoyant Coolidge era, Hoover proved unable and unwilling to lift Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC 3/104 Hoover eyed the White House in 1920. But his Republican "Nobody actually starved," Hoover said. The hospitals and Party's "old guard" blocked him, scorning such heresies as his morgues told a sadder tale. Not until a year after the crash did he support for a minimum wage and equal pay for the sexes. Still, set up an employment commission, which, Leuchtenburg no president could ignore his talents, and he wound up as seethes, "churned out press releases with pap topics such as commerce secretary for eight years under Warren Harding and urging people to 'spruce up' their homes." A mediocre speaker Coolidge. Here, too, Hoover was a dynamo. A consummate who shunned the bully pulpit, Hoover did little even to "talk up" bureaucrat, he commandeered control of issues from the economy or public morale. conservation to aviation to the regulation of radio, and he led Coolidge's efforts to help victims of the 1927 Mississippi flood, Hoover's boldest stroke, the creation of the Reconstruction the worst natural disaster in U.S. history until Hurricane Katrina. Finance Corp. in 1932, was too little too late. Authorized to lend money to banks, insurance companies, and other firms, the RFC What made Hoover's energy in these jobs so strange was his struck some observers at first as a happy volte-face for Hoover, steadfast commitment throughout to private effort instead of with government now given a key role in the intended recovery. public programs. His 1922 tract American Individualism was, (Others wondered why bankers, but not the jobless, were now on despite some progressive notes, what Leuchtenburg calls a the dole.) But Leuchtenburg maintains that Hoover enacted the "jejune screed" offering "nothing that could not be heard at a RFC only when the civic-mindedness that he expected from weekly Kiwanis luncheon." Leuchtenburg explains the financial and industrial leaders didn't materialize. "Only contradiction in Hoover by showing how in each of his previous unwittingly—by revealing the inadequacy of his voluntaristic experiences, he ascribed his feats not to the government approach—was Hoover the progenitor of FDR's enlargement of resources at his disposal but to the charitable spirit of leading federal authority." citizens—a stubborn misperception that would later cripple him. The final straw came when the "bonus army" of impoverished Where a smattering of Hoover revisionists have detected in his veterans marched on Washington in the spring of 1932 to thinking a bold progressivism, Leuchtenburg finds "mild demand overdue benefits.