Through the Flaming Sword

I’ve returned to work on my book on Quakers and Capitalism, an economic history of Friends and otheir fortunes and of Quaker contributions to capitalist culture, especially to industrial capitalism. I’ve done much of the research up through the All Friends Conference in London in 1920. Now I’m turning to the key Quaker figures in political economics in the 20th and 21st centuries.

No one is more important in this category, perhaps, than Herbert Hoover (1874–1964). He was born a seventh-generation Quaker into West Branch Meeting in Iowa just six years before that meeting divided along Gurneyite–Wilburite lines; both of those meetings exist today. But at age 11, he was orphaned and was sent to be raised by his mother’s brother, Dr. Henry John Minthorn in Newberg, Oregon, an extraordinary man in his own right.  

Dr. Minthorn had breathed life back into 2-year-old Bertie as he lay near death from croup. Dr. Minthorn went on to found Friends Pacific Academy, which is now George Fox University.

Hoover was a truly august and significant figure, despite his bad rep from his handling of the Great Depression, which has been mischaracterized, anyway. Here’s a list of his accomplishments “constituting an almost unbroken record of success” *:

• He graduated from the very first class of Stanford University with a degree in geological engineering.
• By age 24, he was the superintendent of a very rich gold mine in Western Australia.
• At 27, he managed a coal mining operation in China.
• By 40, he was legendary in the mining community and a multi-millionaire.
• He was the first president born west of the Mississippi, the first to use radio in his campaign, the first to have a telephone on his desk in the Oval Office, the first commerce secretary to reach the White House, summoned to service by more presidents than any other American chief executive, including by Wilson, Coolidge, Truman, and Eisenhower.
• By his death, he had been awarded more honorary degrees than any other American. 
• But most important, his relief efforts saved more human lives than any other individual in human history. He was the greatest humanitarian of the First World War and took part in the Versailles peace negotiations, and, according to his friend John Maynard Keynes, was “the only man who emerged from that ordeal with his reputation enhanced”
• After the war, his American Relief Administration fed millions, including millions of children; its European Children’s Fund was the forerunner of CARE.
• During the drought and famine of 1921–23, as President Harding’s Commerce Secretary, he persuaded Harding to allocate $20 million for food and medicine for Soviet peasants.
• In 1927, he rescued and rehabilitated the Mississippi Valley during the Great Flood that inundated hundreds of thousands of acres and swept away whole towns.
• He was the first president to use the government’s resources against the economic cycle of boom and collapse. He erected more public works in four years than were built in the previous twenty, distributing them to counties of highest unemployment rather than according to political influence, refusing to barter patronage for votes.
• He got a divided Congress to pass more constructive legislation than had any previous president who served in hard times and incubated a number of ideas that were integral to the New Deal.
• He pioneered summit diplomacy, initiated the Good Neighbor Policy with Latin America, and worked tirelessly for international peace.
• He reformed prisons, revised the legal code, improved worker conditions with the Norris-La Guardia Act, and improved the health and welfare of children.
• No law he signed was declared unconstitutional. None of his appointees were dismissed for corruption. He created a lean bureaucracy and preserved labor peace.
• He won his office in a landslide, then lost in a landslide, and was denounced ironically by Franklin for doing too much too son, exploding federal debt, and wasting taxpayer dollars.
• He remained extremely active in public affairs for the rest of his life. He drifted to the right as time went on, becoming the conscience of GOP philosophy. He became “the single most important bearer of the torch of American conservatism between his own administration and that of Ronald Reagan.”
• He led another relief effort after WWII. 
• He chaired commissions to reorganize the executive branch under Truman and Eisenhower.
• He became active with the Boys Club of America.
• He wrote a lot of books.

I plan to share more about this Friend in future posts as I read his biographies.

*  Herbert Hoover: A Life, by Glen Jeansonne, with David Luhrssen.