Herbert Hoover

by Glen Jeansonne

  Lou’s passion for Chinese culture and thirst for adventure were expressed in other ways. She began collecting ancient Chinese blue- and-white porcelain from the Sung, Ming, and Qing dynasties, bargain shopping in obscure antique stores, amassing an enormously valuable variety, specimens of which remain on display at the Hoover Presidential Library. She accompanied her husband on many of his extended geological expeditions into distant regions of China. In the evening, she settled down with him to read classical literature, sometimes in its original tongue, as well as Chinese history, philosophy, and geology. While camping for the night, Lou wrote descriptions of their journeys into interior regions where the villagers had never seen a white woman. Her patience in waiting for Bert in California while her fiancé was marooned in the Australian outback, and her wisdom in delaying marriage until she earned her degree in geology, both proved justified. For a woman who thrived on adventure, she had hitched her destiny to a tornado, and in China she would cheat death narrowly without flinching.24

  Concerns about family and friends followed the Hoovers to China; in fact, they multiplied. About one month after their arrival in Tianjin, Bert and Lou learned that May had married a San Francisco plumber named Cornelius Van Ness Leavitt. Dismayed by the match, May’s brothers believed their sister had demonstrated bad judgment once more because of Leavitt’s meager income and apparent lack of polish and ambition. Bert’s and Tad’s families grew closer, but May’s marriage created a permanent estrangement. Nonetheless, the Pacific Ocean failed to separate the newlywed geologists from California. Lou now joined Bert in sharing their bounty with family and friends through private, confidential philanthropy. She chipped in to help complement a scholarship fund Bert had created shortly after leaving Australia. His higher salary plus Lou’s family’s money helped increase the number of Stanford students they were covertly aiding, and Lou also sent money to help needy personal friends to graduate. She partially funded her sorority’s new house on campus. Now Tad joined Lester Hinsdale as a funnel for funds. Unlike some philanthropists, Hoover did not wait until his fortune was made before he started to give it away.25

  In Australia, the young engineer had lived in a hut of corrugated metal penetrated by sand swept up by the wind, with ubiquitous black flies his inevitable companions. In Tianjin, the Hoovers dwelled in an opulence that sometimes embarrassed their Quaker modesty, especially considering the destitution of the Chinese masses. This was not Hoover’s idea. His boss, Chang Yen Mao, insisted that the young American would lose face if he did not display his high status in Chinese society. Chang, a former stable groom who knew nothing about mining but was an astute court politician, had risen to his position by intrigue, flattery, and bribery, manipulating the influence of his patron at court, a powerful Manchu prince. The nouveau riche Chang seldom did business before noon and his meetings sometimes dragged on until three or four a.m. Bert and Lou were attended by fifteen servants at the cost of less than one in America and were served nine-course meals at home, five courses when in the field. The couple was given five ponies, each with a groom. In addition, Hoover employed a secretary and an interpreter, on constant call. There were no telephones, but messenger boys stood on twenty-four-hour call. Besides their three-story mansion in Tianjin, the couple was furnished with another imposing dwelling in Beijing and still a third in Tong Shan near the coal mines Hoover managed. The Hoovers stood near the apogee of society in the foreign settlement, involving rounds of mandatory social revelry. Evenings included lavish dinner parties and grand balls. On some nights the men sipped cognac from crystal snifters, played billiards, and engaged in convivial conversation at the foreign club. Intrinsically egalitarian, the Hoovers had to compromise their preference for simplicity to satisfy the community. Nonetheless, some foreigners looked askance at the Hoovers’ inclination to fraternize with the native Chinese, including their own servants.26

  Bert was further distressed by the pay scale in China and the layers of petty corruption. He paid miners 10 cents per day—above the going rate—yet found their inefficiency frustrating. Chinese society, at all levels, was riddled with a tradition called the “squeeze,” a bribe for doing work for which one was already paid a salary. Hoover tried to eliminate the practice by paying decent wages, but he never succeeded completely. All work was done exclusively by hand, though Hoover modernized the enterprises he ran by using Western technology. He tried to inspire the Chinese to respond to pay based on initiative and individual merit yet could not instill such foreign values. Bert did not consider the Chinese lazy; he doubted that Americans would have worked as well for so little money.27

  China was in the throes of change during Hoover’s employment: first, a brief period of modernization under the boy emperor, Kwang Tsu, followed by a reversion to reaction under the empress dowager, complicated by a convulsive upheaval under the antiforeign Boxers, culminating in chaos and mass slaughter of Christians, missionaries, and their servants. The antipathy of the Boxers was directed at all foreign influence in China. Bert’s initial assignment was to modernize production and increase profitability at the Kaiping coal-mining and processing operation, in which Bewick, Moreing shared an interest under the oversight of the Chinese government. The mines were not only the largest in China; they were among the largest in the world, and they had fabulous untapped potential. Improving efficiency and profits was a relatively straightforward task for an engineer of Hoover’s ingenuity. However, Chang’s fate, and ultimately Hoover’s, drifted afloat the shifting tides of Chinese politics. Chang felt that he had to impress his superiors in the imperial government not simply by an incremental growth in profitability through introduction of Western technology, but by quick wealth via discovery of gold mines comparable to the Sons of Gwalia. Hoover’s ambitious boss was not deterred by the prosaic reality that Chinese gold mines had been worked to exhaustion over a period of centuries, and he sent Hoover on hopeless explorations to the far reaches of the Celestial Empire, at extravagant cost, a fool’s errand.28

  Hoover improved production at the coal works through infrastructure innovations and disciplined workmanship, yet most of his time was diverted to futile searches for gold mandated by Chang. China was an ancient empire in a rush. Chang could not conceive that in a country as vast as China there were not pockets of gold, and he was uninterested in base metals such as iron, copper, lead, or zinc, on which his countrymen might build an industrial economy. Each time Bert returned empty-handed, Chang dispatched him to the nether realms of the empire: to Shandong, the Gobi Desert, beyond the Great Wall to Manchuria and Mongolia, and to Shansi and Shensi provinces. Some of the trips lasted more than two months. Hoover probably saw more of the Celestial Empire than any foreigner since Marco Polo. The scope of the expeditions and Chang’s expectations for them were unrealistic. Hoover was the representative of Chang and, by extension, a reflection of the former stable groom’s elevated status. Because of his eminence in China, Hoover was not permitted to streamline expeditions by limiting them to a small team of experts and fellow geologists. Instead, his excursions were the equivalent of a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans, designed to entertain the peasants. The parade was aligned in precedence of the order of importance of the officials. One expedition began with a rail trip to the end of the line, where Hoover was met by a retinue comprised of one hundred heavily armed cavalry, a general and twenty officers together with their orderlies, government officials who read proclamations, an interpreter, a huge contingent of servants, grooms, and coolies, a cook, and mounds of luggage. The party included ten extra ponies, one hundred mules, and a hodgepodge of carts stacked with supplies. Officers unfurled flags and banners as they proceeded. The Chinese even wanted to carry the Hoovers, but the couple demurred. The cumbrous caravan crept along at twenty miles a day, even less when its majordomo stopped to inspect ancient mines. At least the pack mules were not burdened by tons of gold to carry back to Beijing.29

  Hoover’s inspection of previously worked mines
seemed unorthodox to the peasants. Previous government officials had only skimmed them from the surface, but Bert actually ventured down into the shafts. Once, when Lou accompanied her husband into a dilapidated mine, the local miners grew alarmed that a woman’s presence might attract evil spirits into the pit. Some villagers believed the mysterious green-eyed foreigner could peer through the rock and soil and spot mounds of gold. They crept close to see gold reflected in his eyes. Failing, they asked him point-blank. Hoover mysteriously responded that he could give such vital information only to the “superior being” at Beijing. At a monastery, Hoover encountered hundreds of orphans adopted by the missionaries, who had been sent four mysterious oblong leather objects from America for Christmas presents. Bert led them outside and showed the children how to kick and throw them, and there followed the mayhem of their first football game.

  When Bert, often accompanied by Lou, bedded down around a campfire or within a village inn, they dug into a huge collection of books that included works by Confucius, Mencius, Plato, Shakespeare, Goethe, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Émile Zola. Later he dipped into Balzac, Montaigne, Voltaire, Mirabeau, and the Encyclopedists. He read studies related to his work about British and Chinese mining and an occasional detective novel. Lou’s taste for literature and history was eclectic, and she wrote an incomplete account of her travels, which she originally planned to publish. If Hoover ranked among the best-read modern presidents, Lou probably ranked among the best-read modern First Ladies. One subject that did not interest her was politics.30

  The American engineer never found the precious metals Chang craved, yet he did confirm that China contained the greatest anthracite coal reserves in the world, some of which were already being developed at Kaiping. Over time, this represented China’s best opportunity to create an industrial economy and raise its people’s standard of living. Hoover made some progress in developing the potentially lucrative coal resources, but his work was barely under way before China was roiled by the turmoil of revolution. Western imperialists were slicing and dicing the Celestial Empire, carving out coastal enclaves and trade monopolies that drained Chinese resources and denied its people a fair portion of the profits. The revolutionaries, who called their clan the Righteous Fists, were known in the West as the Boxers and were motivated by hatred for such symbols of Western influence as Christianity. Christian missionaries and larger numbers of Chinese Christians were slain, sometimes burned alive, and their churches were burned and pillaged. Combining nationalistic zealotry, xenophobia, and religious mysticism, the Boxers considered themselves invulnerable to foreign bullets, though they were sadly mistaken, and believed deceased warriors would rise to help expel the foreign devils. The empress dowager implicitly encouraged the Boxers and arrested the young emperor, and the modernization movement was curtailed. Elements of the Chinese imperial army sympathized with the Boxers. As the contagion spread in the spring of 1900, Hoover recalled his field expeditions to the relative safety of Tianjin, protected by a combined contingent of foreign troops and a larger group of the imperial army trained and commanded by European officers. Some of Hoover’s Chinese servants fled, while others sought his protection. Even high-ranking officials who had worked with Westerners asked Bert to shield them, including his boss, Chang Yen Mao, now out of favor at court, and Tong Shao-yi, director of the railroads and later the first premier of China.31

  The foreign compound at Tianjin was ill equipped to withstand a massive assault. The allied soldiers in the village, chiefly Russians, totaled about 2,300 and were lightly armed. In addition, the compound’s minuscule population included some 400 able-bodied men, with some rifles and revolvers, and 300 women and children. About 5,000 Chinese imperial troops sent there to protect the village instead defected to the 25,000 Boxers, giving the aggressors a lopsided advantage. Moreover, more Boxers and rebellious regular troops poured in daily to stack the odds still further, peaking at almost 400,000 by June 23. Initially, the town lacked defensive fortifications and food had to be rationed. If ever a marriage in its early stages was tested by adversity, the Hoovers’ was; the newlyweds stared death in the face. Their response to the siege reveals volumes about their courage and coolness under fire, and it solidified their rapid bonding as a couple. Throughout their lives together, Lou shared the dangers, the triumphs, and the heartbreaks of Bert’s career. The Boxer Rebellion also showed a great deal about their respect for each other, their versatility, and their ability to work together as a team. Bert was never a coward; Lou lived on the edge. Yet they were also fortunate. Some equally brave souls lie buried in China.32

  Neither Bert nor Lou ever fired a shot, yet they were prepared to. Lou, a deadeye marksman, strapped on a .35 Mauser. That first evening, the village lacked any type of fortifications and was vulnerable to a massed direct assault. As the ranking engineer, Hoover took charge, and his responsibilities rapidly expanded. He organized the men to empty the warehouses of wool and cotton bales as well as bags of rice, peanuts, sugar, and grain, which they stacked by daylight to erect a wall. Bert worked around the clock. He doused fires and created a voluntary fire department. He repaired holes ripped in the fortifications, acted as a messenger, and stood night watch. He provided the Chinese in the settlement with food, provisions, and protection. When an arrogant British officer who considered all Chinese the enemy attempted to execute them, Hoover interceded to save their lives. A river ran near the village, but the only water-purification plant lay outside the defensive wall. Nightly, Hoover sneaked out, started the motors, which attracted Boxer fire, and, with help, carted one day’s supply of safe water back to the compound. Bert consolidated all food in a common warehouse, calculated the supply of daily calories required, and distributed rations to the community. Lou spotted a herd of cattle grazing in the no-man’s-land between the village and the Boxers, persuaded a soldier to round them up and bring them in, and supervised the feeding and milking of cows and the distribution of milk, giving priority to infants and children.33

  The newlyweds were so busy they rarely saw each other. Lou volunteered as a nurse at the provisional hospital, ripping up sheets for bandages and using the remaining cotton to make swabs. She commuted by bicycle, riding close to the low wall, and had several close calls. While she was pedaling, her front tire was blown off by a Boxer shell. One evening after a long shift at the hospital, Lou was playing solitaire at home, sitting in a side room. While she dealt, a shell crashed through a back window and exploded, blowing out the window and the front door. Lou continued to play impassively. Her only comment was that she could not seem to get the hang of solitaire. During the crisis, Lou chased looters from her home with a butcher knife. On another occasion, she read her own obituary in a San Francisco newspaper smuggled in by a Chinese messenger, at which she chuckled. On July 5, most of the women and children were evacuated by barge to the safety of the coast, but Lou felt her place was to remain with Bert. Earlier, some of the men had suggested shooting their wives, lest the Boxers storm the settlement and rape them, a suggestion Bert furiously rejected.34

  The defenders of the settlement were so undermanned that at the beginning they could station only one armed sentry every hundred yards. At any time, a massed assault at weak spots in the defense would have overwhelmed the settlement. Even after relief began to trickle in, the Boxers, who also increased daily, added to their numerical superiority. The Boxers, in fact, made numerous assaults, but never in full force, and never directed at a vulnerable point. They lacked the military training and discipline to breach the fortifications and slaughter the outnumbered, underarmed settlers. The raiders were far better armed than their opponents. It is estimated that they fired sixty thousand cannon shells into the settlement. These inflicted casualties and damaged buildings but were not decisive because the artillery’s trajectory lacked precision. Finally, at a point when the settlers had been worn down, with the hospital filling, and food and ammunition supplies low, the imperial army a
llied with the Boxers changed sides for a second time and a bloody battle of former allies resulted. Peering through binoculars, Hoover counted two thousand bodies floating in the river that flowed outside the compound. Ultimately, although the Boxers had martial zeal, they lacked martial discipline, the ability to plan, and a hierarchy of command. They constituted a disorderly band of fanatics, not an army, although if help had not arrived, they might have worn down their adversaries. They probably never realized how close they had come to exterminating the foreign settlement. Moreover, the defenders, at least the civilians, were not professional soldiers either. The trained soldiers defending them represented several nationalities, spoke different languages, and often argued. At what point a minor miracle morphs into a major miracle is difficult to determine, but the survival of the settlement virtually intact might rank as the latter.35

  Finally, relief arrived. Welsh fusiliers and American marines marched in with the Americans bugling “A Hot Time in the Old Town,” the most welcome song he ever heard, Hoover remembered. Yet victory was not inevitable. The Boxers still retained a substantial numerical advantage. The allied commanders made a bold decision. Rather than wait to be taken by siege, they decided to take the offensive in an audacious surprise attack that would demoralize the Boxers and chase them from the field. A part of the battle would be fought on an open marsh with rugged, difficult terrain, unknown to any of the allied officers. Hoover knew the landscape better than anyone in the foreign settlement. The military men asked him to act as guide for the charge, placing him in the front ranks. As the assault began, men began dropping around Bert, and he asked for a rifle. It settled his nerves, but he did not fire it. The last thing the Boxers had expected was a frontal attack. The daring of the allied commanders and the element of surprise proved crucial. The Boxers broke ranks and fled. The battle, a calculated risk, took a great toll in casualties on the relief troops. Nearly one in seven of their soldiers was killed or wounded. The settlement was now safe, though materially decimated. Most of Hoover’s possessions had been lost, destroyed, or looted, though Lou’s precious porcelains and Bert’s valuable book collection survived.36