George Nash, though still in his early 40’s, has become one of our most prolific American historians. His output consists of a seminal study of the postwar American Right, numerous essays on American conservatism, and since 1975 a multivolume biography of Herbert Hoover. His exhaustive research into Hoover has yielded an introductory volume of more than 700 pages, The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Engineer, 1874-1914 (1983), a learned monograph, Herbert Hoover and Stanford University (1988), and now the second part of the general biography begun in 1975, The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Humanitarian, 1914-1917. Like all of Nash’s writings, the newest volume is meticulously researched and immaculately written. Though Nash identifies himself and American conservatism with the doctrine of Progress, his work may in fact be a throwback to the 19th century, when history was widely viewed as a dispassionate discipline intended for gentlemen who could rise above partisan impulses. Nash always writes with philosophic detachment and rhetorical restraint.
His portrait of Hoover has won the praise of The Washington Post and, more predictably, of movement conservatives, in both cases for good reason. Hoover, the fabulously successful mining engineer and world traveler, descended from and orphaned by Iowan Quakers, can be seen as an appropriate metonymy for the American on the make. The quest for wealth and the passion for humanitarian service are both aspects of the American character that Hoover personified. He showed other characteristically modern American traits as well, such as a dualistic view of other nations. His involvement with Belgian relief during the First World War aroused his revulsion for Imperial Germany and led him to view the war as an ideological struggle. Hoover, no less than President Woodrow Wilson and Colonel Edward House, went from support of selective humanitarian aid (in view of the massive British blockade of Germany, aid could go to the Allies more easily than it could to the beleaguered Germans), to the judging of Germany as a political threat, and, from there, to a call for a democratic crusade against the powers of darkness. Hoover was urging on Wilson a program of national mobilization even before war was declared. Notes Nash: “The humanitarian-turning-war-mobilizer was well aware that his appeal for centralized social control ran against the American tradition of states’ rights and even (he noted several times) the Constitution. But to him there was no alternative.”
In England during the war. Hoover consorted with disciples of Richard Cobban, the 19th-century radical democrat who had taught that free trade would usher in an age of internationalism and equality. Hoover’s affinity for Cobban and his disciples tells much about his early philosophic orientation, though it is equally true that as an elder statesman he gave evidence of a sober, realistic side. In his cautious attitude toward American intervention during the Second World War and, then, in the Cold War, Hoover became the mentor of Robert Taft and abandoned his Wilsonianism—despite his continued tributes to someone he had once served. At some point, America for Hoover ceased to be a proposition and became a real country, with legitimate national interests.
Though Nash has not yet reached the post-Wilsonian Hoover, he does suggest in the first two volumes something that may account for his subject’s evolution from Utopian internationalist to old-fashioned patriot. Much of Hoover’s adult years until the 1920’s were spent outside the United States, in China, Belgium, France, England, and Russia. Throughout these years. Hoover struggled with the question of American identity in relation to the rest of the world. What distinguished his experience growing up in Iowa, Oregon, and California from the way of life among non-Americans, particularly Asians? In his younger years, Hoover was accustomed to respond “equality of opportunity,” as if American life on the plains or in the Pacific Northwest at the end of the 19th century could be reduced to a single rhetorical phrase.
But in his later years, one suspects, he came to see the American experience of his youth as a unique culture that could not be exported en bloc. Despite the Utopian and statist phase of Hoover’s life depicted in volume two, one expects to find Hoover transformed again in the later volumes. The global crusader lived long enough to become a defender of American liberties and a critic of his own middle-aged enthusiasms.
[The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Humanitarian, 1914-1917, by George H. Nash (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co.) 497 pp., $25.00]
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