WEST BRANCH, IA. — The forgotten president and his lady sleep on a serene hillside, warmed by a spring sun that seems fastened like a campaign button to a broad blue swatch of prairie sky. A line of trees shelters the gravesite from the wind and gives the impression that, if it had the power, it would protect the site`s occupants from the cruel judgments of history, as well.
A few hundred yards away in this, the bucolic town of Herbert Hoover`s birth, stands the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum. For years, the shrine has been a quiet, not heavily trafficked place, a sedate monument to a sedate man who, in the popular mind, bears almost sole guilt for one of the most cataclysmic social events of the century, the Great Depression.
But there is uncharacteristic bustle in West Branch this season. You feel it driving up to the library complex to find mini-vans from local television stations parked outside. You sense it as you walk in the front door, where workmen are giving the reception area a facelift. It is apparent in the jaunty step and upbeat mood of the staff, who for years have borne the burden of tending a discredited man`s flame.
The immediate cause of the bustle and good humor is an official occasion: the unveiling of the personal papers of Lou Henry Hoover, the adventurous and remarkable woman who from 1928 to 1932 was First Lady of the United States. Coming 41 years after her death, it is an event of considerable historical importance, for Mrs. Hoover`s prolific writings reveal a great deal about her times.
But this alone would not explain all the excitement and activity. Something else is at work here. What is making museum employees smile is that finally, after his seemingly endless time in purgatory, things are looking up for Herbert Hoover.
For more than 50 years the man who put West Branch on the map has been saddled with a public image that ranks among the worst of all American presidents.
``Hoover is like the bell in Pavlov`s theory,`` says one of the museum staff. ``You hear his name and you think of the Depression.``
The stock market crash. The bread lines and bank failures. The suicides and shattered homes and the spectre of rural America torn from the soil. Hoover has come to be blamed for all of it, as if any one man could be responsible for an economic disaster of such worldwide proportions.
Ironically, at the outset of his presidency, Hoover stood as one of the most esteemed figures in public life. The voters had swept him into office in 1928 by the second largest margin in U.S. history.
He earned his popularity in some unorthodox ways. Hoover is almost unique among American leaders in that his background was neither in politics nor the military. Orphaned at a young age, he was a self-made man who early on distinguished himself as a brilliant engineer, bringing modern mining expertise to what were then industrial backwaters of the world--China, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Mexico and Russia. When World War I broke out, he volunteered to head the Allied relief effort and by the end of the war he had directed the handling of more than $3 billion in relief funds. Woodrow Wilson so admired Hoover`s vast organizational abilities that he appointed him wartime food administrator and Hoover responded with such canny methods of stimulating production and conserving supplies that in 1918 he was able to distribute 18 million tons of food--three times the normal export--to Allied armies and to the famine areas of Europe.
Hoover became synonymous with efficiency, humanity and incorruptibility, and he was talked of as a possible presidential candidate in 1920 and 1924. Meanwhile, he served as Secretary of Commerce under Presidents Harding and Coolidge and while in this post, won an even larger popular following by reinvigorating the department and emphasizing traditional American values, such as individualism and equality of opportunity.
But even as Hoover, a Republican, was being propelled into the presidency in 1928, the mechanism of his destruction was already at work. Within a few months of his inauguration, the nation`s stock market bubble burst. Soon, economic pressures that had been building up in Europe and the U.S. for years, like a gas leak, erupted, throwing the finances of the world into chaos. Hoover was the unfortunate legatee of a world he never made.
It is generally conceded by historians that by the end of his term Hoover was making some headway in bringing about economic recovery. But he never got the chance to finish the job. In the autumn of 1932, Democrat Franklin Roosevelt foiled Hoover`s reelection bid, mounting a massive propaganda blitz that painted Hoover as a callous, insensitive tool of the rich who was fiddling while the country burned. So effective was the blitz that the label was to haunt Hoover to the end of his days.