Herbert Hoover Part 4

His work soon took him back to Australia, the land of his first notable success, but this time into South Australia instead of West Australia.

Here he took personal charge of a large constructive undertaking in connection with the rehabilitation of the famous Broken Hill Mines.

These mines were in the inhospitable wastes of the Great Stony Desert, four or five hundred miles north of Adelaide, the port city. The living and working conditions in the desert were a little worse than awful, but by his technical and organizing ability he brought to life the two or three abandoned mines which const.i.tuted the Broken Hills properties, and, adding to them some adjoining lower grade mines, converted the whole group from a state of great but unrealized possibilities into one of highly profitable actualities. An important factor in this achievement was his origination and successful development of a process for extracting the zinc from ores that had already been treated for the other metals and then cast aside as worthless residues. There were fourteen million tons of these residues on the Broken Hills dumps and from them he derived large returns for the company that he had organized to purchase the property.

He also introduced new metallurgical processes for the profitable handling of the low-grade sulphide ores that const.i.tuted most of the mineral body of the mines. Indeed, this work in South Australia did much to help prove to him what has long been one of his cardinal beliefs, namely, that the safe backbone of mining lies in the handling of large bodies of low-grade ores. When such great ore-bodies are given the benefit of proper metallurgical processes and large organizing and intelligent building up of exterior plants, mining leaves the realms of speculation and becomes a certain and stable business operation.

All this successful work in South Australia occupied but seven months.

Back in London again he gathered about him a remarkable staff of skilled young mining engineers, mostly Americans. There were thirty-five or forty of them, indeed, not on salary or fixed appointment, but men eager to attach themselves to him for the sake of working with him or for him in connection with the ever-increasing number of his large enterprises in the way of reorganization and rehabilitation of mines scattered all over the world. He became the managing director or chief consulting engineer of a score of mining companies, and the simple a.s.sociation of his name with a mining enterprise gave investors and other engineers a perfect confidence in its success and its honest handling.

Two of his largest undertakings were in Russia, one at Kyshtim, in the Urals, the other at Irtish on the Siberian plains near Manchuria. The Kyshtim property was a great but run-down historic establishment, on an estate of an area almost equal to that of all Belgium. One hundred and seventy thousand people lived on the estate, all dependent on the mining establishment for their support. The ores were of iron and copper, but the mines were so far from anywhere that not only did these ores have to be smelted at the mine mouths, but factories had to be erected to manufacture the metal into products capable of compact transportation. When Hoover took over the bankrupt properties he found himself not only with mining and manufacturing problems to solve, but with what was practically a relief problem to face. For the underpaid workmen and their unfortunate families were in a state of great misery.

He succeeded not only in modernizing and rehabilitating the material part of the great establishment, but at the same time in rescuing and revivifying a suffering laboring population of helpless Russians.

The Irtish properties were near the Manchurian border, a thousand miles up the Irtish River from Omsk, a mere remote bleak spot on the wild, bare Siberian steppes. But at this spot lay extensive deposits of zinc, iron, lead, copper and coal, all together. He had first of all to build 350 miles of railroad to make the spot at all accessible. And the actual "mining" operations included everything from digging out and smelting the ores to manufacturing all sorts of things from metal door-k.n.o.bs to steel rails and even steamboats to ply on the Irtish River. He put a large sum of English, Canadian and American money--including much of his own--into the work of building up a great establishment which was just on a paying basis when the war broke out. It is all now in the hands of the Bolsheviki, with a most dubious outlook for the recovery of any of the money put into it.

Other large operations under his direction were in Colorado, Mexico, Korea, the Malay Straits Settlement, South Africa, and India (Burma).

The Burma undertaking has been, in its outcome at least, and, indeed, in many other respects, Hoover's greatest victory in mining engineering and organization. It is today the greatest silver-lead mine in the world, although it started from as near to nothing as a mine could be and yet be called a mine. It took him and his a.s.sociates five years to transform some deserted works in the heart of a jungle into the foremost producer of its kind in all the world. This mine is far away in the north of Burma, almost on the Chinese border. They had first to build eighty miles of railroad through the jungle and over two ranges of mountains, a sufficient feat of engineering in itself, and then to create and organize at the end of this line everything pertaining to a great mining plant. Thirty thousand men were employed in establis.h.i.+ng the mine.

Altogether Hoover and his a.s.sociates had in their employment, in the various mining undertakings under way in 1914, about 175,000 men, and the annual mineral output of the mines being handled by them was worth as much as the total annual output of all the mines in California. And practically all of these successful mines had been made out of unsuccessful ones. For Hoover really developed a new profession in connection with mining; a profession of making good mines out of bad ones, of making bankrupt mining concerns solvent, not by manipulation on the stock exchange but by work in the earth, in the mills, in the mine offices. He works with materials, not pieces of paper. It takes him from three to five years to bring a dead mine to life; the mine must have mineral in it, to be sure, to start with, but he does all the rest. That little matter of having mineral in it is the whole thing, you may think.

But if you do, you must think again. The history of mining is more a history of how mines with mineral in them have not succeeded in becoming mines where the mineral could be profitably got out of them, than of how such mines have succeeded. A successful mine is infinitely more than a hole in the ground with mineral at its bottom. It is railroads and steamers, mills, housing for men, men themselves, organization, system, skill, brains, all-around human capacity. Herbert Hoover is a great miner because he is--I say it bluntly and not from any blind hero-wors.h.i.+p--a great man.

If he is, he can do more than mine greatly; he can do other things greatly. Well, he can, and he has done them. We come to that part of his story now, the part that begins when the World War began, when the world saw with amazement that grew into ever greater amazement an unknown miner, that is, unknown except to other miners, calmly do things that only great men can do. But we who know now the story of the boy and the man of the years before the war are not so much amazed. We know that he is the kind of man, who had had the kind of experience, the kind of world education, who with opportunity can do things the world calls great and be the great man. But just for a few minutes before we begin with August, 1914, the time when Herbert Hoover began a new chapter in his work because the world had begun a new epoch in its history, let us have a glimpse of this man outside of his mines and his offices. Let us see him in his home, with his family, with his books if he has any, and with his friends of whom he has many.

His two children, Herbert and Allan, were born in 1903 and 1907 respectively. Living first in apartments, the Hoovers felt that they and the boys and the dog Rags needed more room, or perhaps, better, different kind of room, room for an energetic family of Americans to grow up in Western American fas.h.i.+on, as far as this could be compa.s.sed in London. And so they found, farther west, in a short street just off Kensington High Street and close to Kensington Gardens, a roomy old house with a garden with real trees in it and some gra.s.s and flower-beds. It had been built long before by somebody who liked room, and then rebuilt, or at least made over and added to, by Montin Conway, the Alpinist and author. For generations it had been called "The Red House," a name that became in the succeeding years more and more widely known to Americans living in, coming to, or pa.s.sing through London, for it became a well-known house of American foregathering.

I knew it first in 1912 when I was doing some work in the British Museum Library. The bedroom to which my wife and I were shown was inhabited already by a happy and very vocal family of little Javanese seed birds and green parrakeets, a part of the boys' menagerie which had to find refuge from the other animals already housed in their adjoining rooms.

Out in the garden there were pigeons fluttering in and out of a cote, and hens solemnly inspecting the newly-seeded flower-beds. A big silver Persian cat, and a smaller yellow Siamese one regularly attended breakfasts, and Rags irregularly attended everything. The cats were Mr.

Hoover's favorites. He liked to have one on his lap as he talked.

There were bookshelves in all of the rooms, and I noted that the owner, however many the guests had been, or long the evening, never went up to bed without a book in his hand. I came later to know how fixed this night-reading habit had become, for in the Belgian relief years when we had frequently to cross the perilous North Sea together on our way from Thames-mouth to Holland or back in one of the little Dutch boats which used to run across twice a week until most of the boats had been blown up by floating mines, Hoover used always to fix an electric pocket lamp or a stub of a candle to the edge of his bunk and read for a while after turning in. He has had little time for reading in daytime, but yet he has read enormously. It is this night-reading that explains it.

The shelves in "The Red House" contained many books about geology and mining and metallurgy. But they contained many others as well.

Especially were they burdened with books on economics and political science. And they bore lighter loads of stories. Sherlock Holmes was there _in extenso_. The books on civics and economics and theories of finance were well thumbed and some of them margined with roughly penciled notes. I should say they had been studied. A frequent evening visitor, who came by preference when there had been no guests at dinner, was a well-known brilliant student of finance and economics, formerly editor of the best-known English financial weekly and now editor of a very liberal, not to say radical, weekly of his own. He and Hoover held long disquisition together, each having clear-cut ideas of his own and glad to try them out on the keen intelligence of the other. As a mere biologist, whose little knowledge was more of the domestic economy of the four and six-footed inhabitants of earth than of the social science and politics of the bipedal lords of creation, my role was chiefly that of fascinated listener.

Although he likes books and even likes writing, Hoover makes no claims to authors.h.i.+p himself. Nevertheless he has found time to put something of his knowledge, based on firsthand experience of the fundamentals and details of mining geology, and mining methods and organization, into a book which, under the t.i.tle of _Principles of Mining_, has been a well-known text for students of mining engineering since its appearance in 1909. The book is a condensation of a course of lectures given by the author partly in Stanford and partly in Columbia University. Although it contains an unusual amount of original matter and old knowledge originally treated for the kind of book it professes to be, namely a compact manual of approved mining practice, the author's preface is a model of modest apprais.e.m.e.nt of his work. One of its paragraphs simply demands quotation:

"The bulk of the material presented [in this book] is the common heritage of the profession, and if any may think there is insufficient reference to previous writers, let him endeavor to find to whom the origin of our methods should be credited. The science has grown by small contributions of experience since, or before, those unnamed Egyptian engineers, whose works prove their knowledge of many fundamentals of mine engineering six thousand eight hundred years ago. If I have contributed one sentence to the acc.u.mulated knowledge of a thousand generations of engineers or have thrown one new ray of light on the work, I shall have done my share."

In the latter chapters of the book Hoover, having devoted the earlier chapters to technical methods, treats of the administrative and financial phases of mining. The last chapter is devoted to the "character, training, and obligations of the mining engineering profession" in which he sets up a standard of professional ethics for the engineer of the very highest degree and reveals clearly his own genuinely philanthropic att.i.tude toward his fellow men. In the discussion of mining administration there is a concise but illuminating treatment of the subject of labor unions. After discussing contract work and bonus systems he says:

"There is another phase of the labor question which must be considered, and that is the general relations of employer and employed. As corporations have grown, so likewise have the labor unions. In general, they are normal and proper antidotes for unlimited capitalistic organization.

"Labor unions usually pa.s.s through two phases. First, the inertia of the unorganized labor is too often stirred only by demagogic means. After organization through these and other agencies, the lack of balance in the leaders often makes for injustice in demands, and for violence to obtain them and disregard of agreements entered upon. As time goes on, men become educated in regard to the rights of their employers and to the reflection of these rights in ultimate benefit to labor itself. Then the men, as well as the intelligent employer, endeavor to safeguard both interests. When this stage arrives, violence disappears in favor of negotiation on economic principles, and the unions achieve their greatest real gains. Given a union with leaders who can control the members, and who are disposed to approach differences in a business spirit, there are few sounder positions for the employer, for agreements honorably carried out dismiss the constant hara.s.sments of possible strikes. Such unions exist in dozens of trades in this country, and they are ent.i.tled to greater recognition. The time when the employer could ride roughshod over his labor is disappearing with the doctrine of _laissez faire_ on which it was founded. The sooner the fact is recognized, the better for the employer. The sooner some miners' unions develop from the first into the second stage, the more speedily will their organizations secure general respect and influence.

"The crying need of labor unions, and of some employers as well, is education on a fundamental of economics too long disregarded by all cla.s.ses and especially by the academic economist. When the latter abandon the theory that wages are the result of supply and demand, and recognize that in these days of international flow of labor, commodities and capital, the real controlling factor in wages is efficiency, then such an educational campaign may become possible.

Then will the employer and employee find a common ground on which each can benefit. There lives no engineer who has not seen insensate dispute as to wages where the real difficulty was inefficiency. No administrator begrudges a division with his men of the increased profit arising from increased efficiency. But every administrator begrudges the wage level demanded by labor unions whose policy is decreased efficiency in the false belief that they are providing for more labor."

Three years before publis.h.i.+ng the _Principles of Mining_ Hoover had collaborated with a a group of authors in the production of a book called _Economics of Mining_. And three years later, that is in 1912, he privately published, in sumptuous form, with scrupulously exact reproduction of all of its many curious old woodcuts, an English translation of Agricola's "De Re Metallica," the first great treatise on mining and metallurgy, originally published in Latin in 1556, only one hundred years after Gutenberg had printed his first book. "De Re Metallica" was the standard manual of mining and metallurgy for 180 years. Georgius Agricola, the author, was really one Georg Bauer, a German of Saxony, who, following the custom of his time used for pen-name the literal Latin equivalents of the words of his German name.

This translation, with its copious added notes of editorial commentary, was the joint work of Hoover and his wife--it was Mrs. Hoover, indeed, who began it--and occupied most of their spare time, especially their evenings--and sometimes nights!--and Sundays, through nearly five years.

They had been for some time collecting and delving in old books on China and the Far East and ancient treatises on early mining and metallurgical processes, and had acc.u.mulated an unusual collection of such books, ransacking the old bookshops of the world in their quest. In 1902, Mrs.

Hoover while looking up some geology in the British Museum Library, stumbled again on Agricola, which she had forgotten since the days she was in Dr. Branner's laboratory. By invoking the services of one of their friends among the old book dealers the Hoovers soon owned a copy.

Caught especially by the many curious and only half understandable pictures in it they began to translate bits from it here and there, especially the explanations of the pictures, and in a little while they were lost. Nothing would satisfy them short of making a complete translation. It became an obsession; it was at first their recreation; then because it went very slowly it seemed likely to become their life avocation.

They found an early German translation, which, however, helped them little. The translator had apparently known little of mining and not too much of Latin. They went to Saxony, to the home of Agricola, hoping to get clues to the difficult things in the book by seeing the region and mines which had been under his eyes while writing it, and finding traditions of the mining methods of his time. But it was as if a sponge had been pa.s.sed over Agricola and his days. Fire had swept over the towns he had known and all the ancient records were gone. The towns, rebuilt, and the mines of which he had written were there, but of him and of the ancient methods he wrote about there was hardly record or even tradition. They went to Freiberg, where has long existed the greatest German school of mines, the greatest mining school in the world, indeed, until the American schools were developed--probably the Germans would not admit even this qualification--and there they found no more to help them than in Agricola's own towns. In fact, the Freiberg professors seemed rather irritated by the advent of these searchers for ancient mining history, for, as the savants explained, the Freiberg methods and machines were all the most modern in the world; there were "no left-overs, no worn-out rubbish of those inefficient ages" around Germany's great school of mines.

So the Hoovers were little rewarded by their pilgrimage to Germany for help in their attempt to resuscitate the Saxon Agricola. But they kept on mining in the big tome and finally, in the fifth year of their devoted spare-time labors they had before them a completed translation.

CHAPTER VII

THE WAR: THE MAN AND HIS FIRST SERVICE

From the first day of the World War Herbert Hoover has been a world figure. But much of what he has done and how he has done it is still only hazily known, for all the general public familiarity with his name as head of the Belgian relief work, American food administrator, and, finally, director-general of the American and Allied relief work in Europe after the armistice. The public knows of him as the initiator and head of great organizations with heart in them, which were successfully managed on sound business principles. But it does not yet know the special character of Hoover's own personal partic.i.p.ation in them, his original and resourceful contributions to their success, and the formidable obstacles which he had constantly to overcome in making this success possible. There was little that "just happened" which contributed to this success; that which did just happen usually happened wrong. Things came off because ideals were realized by practical method, decision, and driving power. I should like to be able to give the people of America a revealing glimpse, by outline and incident, of all this.

And I should like, too, to be able to make clear the pure Americanism of this man; to disclose the basis of belief in the soundness of the American heart and the practical possibilities of American democracy on which Hoover banked in determining his methods and daring his decisions.

This belief was the easier to hold inasmuch as he has himself the soundness of character, the fundamental conviction of democracy, and the true philanthropy that he attributes to the average American. He is his own American model.

To call Herbert Hoover "English" as a cheap form of derogation, is to reveal a surprising paucity of invention in criticism. It is also unfair to about as American an American as can be found. The translation of Agricola, an account of which closed our last chapter, stretched over the long time that it did, not alone because Mr. and Mrs. Hoover could give only their spare hours to it, but also because they could turn to it only while they were in London where the needed reference books were available. And their presence in London was so discontinuous that their translating work was much more marked by interruption than continuity.

The constant returns to America where there were the New York and San Francisco offices to be looked after personally, and the many trips to the mining properties scattered over the world, limited Hoover's London days to a comparatively small number in each year. A London office was, to be sure, necessary between 1902 and 1914 because of the advantage to a world miner of being close to affairs in the world's center of mining interests. And it was also necessary during Belgian relief days because of its unequaled accessibility, by persons or cable, from all the vital points in the complex international structure of the relief organization. But in all this period of London connection, except in the Belgian relief period, Hoover was a familiar figure in mining circles in both New York and San Francisco, and although rarely able to cast his vote in America he maintained a lively interest in American major governmental affairs.

Hoover kept up, too, an active interest in the development of his _alma mater_, Stanford University, and especially in its geology and mining engineering department. In 1908 he was asked to join its faculty, and delivered a course of lectures on the principles of mining, which attracted such favorable comment that he repeated it shortly after in condensed form in Columbia University. On the basis of his experience as a university student of mining, and as a successful mine expert and operator, and as an employer of many other university graduates from universities and technical schools Hoover has formed definite conclusions as to what the distinctive character of professional university training for prospective mining engineers should be. It differs from a widely held view.

He believes that the collegiate training should be less practical than fundamental. The attempts, more common a decade ago than now perhaps, to convert schools of mining and departments of mining geology into shops and artificial mines, do not meet with favor in his eyes.

Vocational, or professional, training in universities should leave most of the actual practice to be gained in actual experience and work after graduation. If the student is well-grounded in the fundamental science of mining and metallurgy, in geology and chemistry and physics and mechanics, he can quickly pick up the routine methods of practice. And he can do more. He can understand their _raison d'etre_, and he can modify and adapt them to the varying conditions under which they must be applied. He can, in addition, if he has any originality of mind at all, devise new methods, discover new facts of mining geology--the interior of the earth is by no means a read book as yet--and add not only his normal quota of additional wealth to the world, as a routine worker, but an increment of as yet unrealized possibilities, as an original investigator. In Hoover's own choice of a.s.sistants he has selected among men fresh from the universities or technical schools those who have had thoroughly scientific, as contrasted with much technical, or so-called practical, training.

His interest in universities and university administration and methods has always been intense. It has been reciprocated, if his honorary degrees from a dozen American colleges and universities can be a.s.sumed to be evidence of this. In 1912 he was made a trustee of Stanford and from the beginning of this trustees.h.i.+p until now he has taken an active part in the university management, giving it the full benefit of his constructive service. His most recent activity in this connection has concerned itself with the needed increase and standardization of faculty salaries so that for each grade of faculty position there is a.s.sured at least a living minimum of salary. He was the originating figure and princ.i.p.al donor of the Stanford Union, a general club-house for students and faculty, which adds materially to the comfort of home-wandering alumni and to the democratic life of the University. In all the great University plant there was no place for a common social meeting-ground for faculty, alumni, and undergraduates. The Union provided it. If Stanford did much for Hoover in the days when he was one of its students, he has loyally repaid his obligation.

But all of these accounts of Hoover's various activities still leave unanswered many questions concerning the more intimate personal characteristics of the man to whom the World War came in August, 1914, with its special call for service. He was then just forty years old, known to mining engineers everywhere and to the alumni and faculty and friends of Stanford University and to a limited group of business acquaintances and personal friends, but with a name then unknown to the world at large. Today no name is more widely known. Today millions of Europeans call him blessed; millions of Americans call him great. My own belief is that he and his work did more to save Europe from complete anarchy after the war than any other influence exerted on its people from the outside, and that without it there was no other sufficient influence either outside or inside which would have prevented this anarchy.

Hoover's kinds of work are many, but his recreations are few. His chief form of exercise--if it is exercise--is motoring. He does not play outdoor games; no golf, tennis, but little walking. He has no system of kicking his legs about in bed or going through calisthenics on rising.

And yet he keeps in very good physical condition, at least he keeps in sufficiently good condition to do several men's days' work every day. He has a theory about this which he practices, and which he occasionally explains briefly to those who remonstrate with him about his neglect of exercise. "You have to take exercise," he says, "because you overeat. I do not overeat, and therefore I do not need exercise." It sounds very simple and conclusive; and it seems to work--in his case.

He likes social life, but not society life. He enjoys company but he wants it to mean something. He has little small talk but plenty of significant talk. He saves time by cutting out frills, both business and social. His directness of mental approach to any subject is expressed in his whole manner: his immediate attack in conversation on the essence of the matter, his few words, his quick decisions. He can make these decisions quickly because he has clear policies to guide him. I recall being asked by him to come to breakfast one morning at Stanford after he had been elected trustee, to talk over the matter of faculty standards.

His first question to the two or three of us who were there was: What is the figure below which a professor of a given grade (a.s.sistant, a.s.sociate, or full professor) cannot maintain himself here on a basis which will not lower his efficiency in his work or his dignity in the community? We finally agreed on certain figures. "Well," said Hoover, "that must be the minimum salary of the grade."

He knows what he wants to do, and goes straight forward toward doing it; but if difficulty too great intervenes--it really has to be very great--he withdraws for a fresh start and tries another path. I always think of him as outside of a circle in the center of which is his goal.

He strikes the circle at one spot; if he can get through, well and good.

If not he draws away, moves a little around the circ.u.mference and strikes again. This resourcefulness and fertility of method are conspicuous characteristics of him. To that degree he is "diplomatic."

But if there is only one way he fights to the extreme along that way.

And those of us who have lived through the difficult, the almost impossible, days of Belgian relief, food administration, and general European after-the-war relief, with him, have come to an almost superst.i.tious belief in his capacity to do anything possible to human power.

He has a great gift of lucid exposition. His successful argument with Lloyd George, who began a conference with him on the Belgian relief work strongly opposed to it on grounds of its alleged military disadvantages to the Allies, and closed it by the abrupt statement: "I am convinced; you have my permission," is a conspicuous example, among many, of his way of winning adherence to his plans, on a basis of good grounds and lucid and effective presentation of them. He has no voice for speaking to great audiences, no flowers of rhetoric or familiar plat.i.tudes for professional oratory, but there is no more effective living speaker to small groups or conferences around the council table. He is clear and convincing in speech because he is clear and precise in thinking. He is fertile in plan and constructive in method because he has creative imagination.

The first of his war calls to service came just as he was preparing to return to America from London where he had brought his family from California to spend the school vacation of 1914. Their return pa.s.sage was engaged for the middle of August. But the war came on, and with it his first relief undertaking. It was only the trivial matter--trivial in comparison with his later undertakings--of helping seventy thousand American travelers, stranded at the outbreak of the war, to get home.

These people, rich and poor alike, found themselves penniless and helpless because of the sudden moratorium. Letters of credit, travelers'

checks, drafts, all were mere printed paper. They needed real money, hotel rooms, steamer pa.s.sages, and advice. And there was n.o.body in London, not even the benevolent and most willing but in this respect powerless American amba.s.sador who could help them. At least there seemed none until Hoover transferred the "relief" which had automatically congested about his private offices in the "city" during the first two days to larger headquarters in the Hotel Savoy. He gathered together all his available money and that of American friends and opened a unique bank which had no depositors and took in no money, but continuously gave it out against personal checks signed by unknown but American-looking people on unknown banks in Walla Walla and Fresno and Grand Rapids and Dubuque and Emporia and New Bedford. And he found rooms in hotels and pa.s.sage on steamers, first-cla.s.s, second-cla.s.s or steerage, as happened to be possible. Now on all these checks and promises to pay, just $250 failed to be realized by the man who took a risk on American honesty to the extent of several hundred thousand dollars.