Herbert Hoover, noble or whatever

When I came to Stanford, I knew little about Herbert Hoover. He was generally reviled by the public, the Stanford faculty and the students. Since he lived close to us, I saw him often, always looking morose and resentful. I accepted the general attitude that he was a nasty reactionary who was responsible for the Great Depression. Little by little, as I read the record, I revised my opinion, and viewed him as a man of total integrity. Finally, his work on behalf of the victims of war persuaded me that he was the most altruistic of Presidents.

Eric Boehm, who referred to Hoover's relief work in Germany, is going through a similar change of viewpoint. He writes: "Thanks in part to what you have been writing about Hoover and what I read about Hoover elsewhere, I have learned to revise the common image I also had of Hoover, I suspect heavily attributable also to the disparity between expectations of a people under economic duress, Hoover's non-dramatic style of governance,and by contrast Roosevelt's dramatic way of addressing the crisis -- and the attendant contrast between the two. More on the"Quaekerspeise" in Germany in 1924: the fact that I had enough to eat at home led to my being part of the group that did not get it at school, and I was genuinely envious (as I suspect others in my class were also) of the classmates who got that big mug of hot chocolate and a bun! I felt excluded!!"

Words, words, words, as Hamlet said. I should have used the word "altruistic", but I described Hoover as noble, a nobler word. That gave lawyer David Westbrook his chance: What did I mean by "noble"? He writes: "Nobility in Shakespeare is hardly "high moral qualities" in the modern sense. Shakespeare is often interested in just that sort of greatness of spirit that may lead into sin -- consider not just Hamlet, but Othello or even Lear/Macbeth -- each of whom has a degree of nobility, and each of whom is culpable.

And while you are right about slavery/union, Lincoln's nobility is more apparent from his prose. And I think -- from a constitutional law perspective -- it is the Madison of the Federalist Papers and the Constitution itself, the sense in which we understand the governmental frame as "Madisonian." that might lead us to characterize his spirit as noble. Which brings me to Madison's friend, the enlightened and famously slaveholding Jefferson, who perhaps best embodied the early Republic's understanding of noble . . . none of these guys are angels, but they have a certain largeness that I'd call noble. I'm not sure Hoover has such scope, even if he's undeserving of much of the criticism he's received. But I'm playing.

Did Brazil have two fundamentally different economies at work, as did the United States? The difference between North and South was slavery, but slavery was simply the most visible/important part of entirely different worldviews, economies, etc.

My response: The Shakespearean characters mentioned had "a degree of nobility", but they were not noble in the sense of altruistic. Nor were Lincoln and Madison. As for Jefferson, he was a devious individual, virtually a French agent, dazzled by and envious of the life of the French aristocracy, as was even Franklin. That was a period when Europe spoke French and thought that French culture was supreme. In fact, the Encyclopedists took English writers like Locke and popularized them. The world did not realize that the French Revolution was coming over the horizon. It is interesting to compare the reaction of the various Founding Fathers to it when it occurred and as it sank into bloodshed. But Jefferson noble? No!! But he liked French nobles. Hoover would not have. He was...(choose your word).

Brazil did have two economies. In the Northeast there was the plantation economy of the large estates described by Gilberto Freyre. The south was more like the American North, with smaller land holdings, a lesser concentration of blacks and slaves, and a nascent industry. Brazil was spared the traumatic experience of the Civil War, which cost half a million lives.

Ronald Hilton - 1/25/02