Hoover, Lou Henry (1874–1944)

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Hoover, Lou Henry (1874–1944)

First lady of the United States from 1929 to 1933, who was identified with the Girl Scouts and the promotion of women's sports. Born on March 28, 1874, in Waterloo, Iowa; died on January 7, 1944, in New York City; daughter of Florence (Weed) Henry and Charles Delano Henry; degree in geology from Stanford, 1898; married Herbert Hoover, on February 10, 1899; children: Herbert Hoover, Jr. (b. 1903); Allan Henry Hoover (b. 1907).

Lou Henry Hoover is one of the most neglected and forgotten first ladies of the 20th century. Her contributions to the institution have been overshadowed because of the Great Depression that made her husband's presidency a historical failure and the impact of her successor Eleanor Roosevelt . She was, however, the first wife of a president to give speeches on the radio, and she used her connections with the Girl Scouts to fight the hard times that accompanied the Depression.

Lou Henry was born in 1874, the first child of Florence Weed Henry and Charles Delano Henry. Her father, a local banker who had hoped for a son, took his daughter on fishing trips and hikes through the woods near Waterloo, Iowa, and Lou was horseback riding by age six. She was a member of a girls' group in Iowa where at nine or ten she did her first cooking and eating outdoors.

In 1884, Charles decided to move his banking business to California where the climate was better for Florence's asthma. They settled in Whittier, where they lived for the next eight years. At 13, Lou sent a description of her town to St. Nicholas Magazine which published her letter in its December 1887 issue.

The Henrys relocated to Monterey in 1892. Lou graduated from the San Jose Normal School in 1893 and worked in her father's bank until the spring of the following year. She would later re-call Monterey as a place where she and her father "were always doing things out of doors." During the spring of 1894, she attended a lecture on "The Bones of the Earth" given by Professor John Casper Branner of Stanford University. Branner agreed to let Lou study geology at Stanford. Though her parents warned her that she would be the only woman in the program, she was determined and enrolled in September 1894.

In her geology classes, she met a senior named Herbert Clark Hoover who was her age and had been born in the same part of Iowa. By the end of the school year, they had agreed to write to each other after Herbert's graduation, and there was an understanding that they would spend their future together. Herbert pursued a mining career during the three years that followed, writing Lou from all parts of the world. She graduated in 1898 with a degree in geology, after which Herbert proposed by telegram and asked her to spend their honeymoon in China. They were married on February 10, 1899, in Monterey.

The Hoovers spent their first years of marriage in a Chinese nation experiencing the upheaval of the Boxer Rebellion against foreigners from the West. In 1900, the Boxers besieged the city of Tientsin (Tianjin) where the Hoovers were living. Herbert urged Lou to leave, but she

remained and stood guard duty, rode her bicycle through sniper fire, and sought food for the two of them. Possessed with an aptitude for languages since her childhood, Lou learned to read Chinese during their stay and studied the culture extensively.

During the next 15 years, she followed Herbert's mining career around the world, circling the globe with him five times. Meanwhile, they had two sons, Herbert, Jr., born in 1903, and Allan, born in 1907. Lou maintained a home amid the hectic schedule, engaged in philanthropic and volunteer work, and became a member of such organizations as the Society of American Women in London.

In collaboration with her husband, Lou also translated into English a 16th-century textbook on mining, written by Georgius Agricola, De Re Metallica. The Latin text was filled with technical mining terms, some of which Agricola had invented, and the translation took the Hoovers five years, during which Lou's Latin skills were crucial to the success of their joint endeavor. The result was a book of nearly 600 pages that brought the work of Agricola to the attention of modern scholars. The Hoovers dedicated the book to their old teacher, Professor Branner, and published it in 1912 at their own expense.

Their lives took an unexpected turn during the summer of 1914 when World War I erupted in Europe. American citizens were trapped in London by the start of hostilities, and Herbert organized relief for his 120,000 stranded fellow citizens through his American Committee. Now president of the Society of American Women in London, Lou coordinated the society's work on behalf of Herbert's Committee, proving herself to be an efficient organizer, fund raiser, and public speaker on behalf of relief activities in England, France, and Belgium. By 1916, she had demonstrated her skills as a leader in working with organized women.

She was recognized during her lifetime as a uniquely intelligent woman, who refused to let official formalities interfere with her deep and friendly interest in people.
—Ray Lyman Wilbur

When the United States entered the war in April 1917, the Wilson administration named Herbert head of the Food Administration. Lou became a public force for conserving food supplies and developing recipes that used different grains and cereals. She also organized boarding houses for women who had come to take wartime jobs in Washington, calling her enterprise the Food Administration's Women's Club. In addition, she worked with the American Red Cross to set up a service to escort wounded soldiers from their hospital ships to the trains that would take them to their homes.

After working with the Girl Scouts in Washington for several years during the war, in the postwar years Lou Hoover intensified her commitment to the organization as she explored ways to help children. Hoover concluded that the Girl Scouts (founded in America by Juliette Gordon Low in 1912) were more effective in building character for their members than any other comparable organization for young people. Hoover was soon serving as acting commissioner for the Girl Scouts in Washington, D.C., and she rose steadily in the national organization between 1922 and 1927. She served as national president (between 1922 and 1925) and then chaired the national board of directors of the Girl Scouts (from 1925 to 1928). With a dislike for the more military aspects of Girl Scouting, she encouraged the change from khaki-colored uniforms to a softer green during the 1920s.

Hoover believed that Girl Scouting instilled proper values in the young women who were members. She wanted girls to learn about the outdoors not from the backseat of a car but by experiencing the woods and fields firsthand. The training that Girl Scouts received, she argued, prepared them to be better citizens and homemakers in the future. She expected the Girl Scouts to contribute service to their communities, to set an example of good citizenship, and to be active participants in all the physical activities that Scouting demanded.

Hoover's dedication to athletics and sports for women ran parallel to her commitment to the Girl Scouts. She worried that American women were not getting the proper preparation for the rigors of life, and believed that greater participation in sports could remedy that national problem. To that end, Hoover gave her time to the National Amateur Athletic Federation during the 1920s as a vice president involved with the Women's Division. Hoover cooperated with those educators who did not want women to stress spectator sports or to take part in the Olympic Games. She believed that the focus should be on having as many girls take part in sports as possible rather than on the competition which characterized male athletics. At the same time, she campaigned to broaden the opportunities for women to play sports in areas where most of the resources were devoted to male athletics. Throughout the 1920s and 1930, she gave her own money and time to promote these goals for women athletes.

By 1928, Herbert Hoover, the secretary of commerce, was the Republican candidate for the presidency. His election made Lou Henry Hoover the first lady in March 1929. She had already given radio speeches, and now from the White House and the presidential retreat in Maryland she went on the radio for her favorite causes, including the Girl Scouts. No first lady before her had used the national media in this way. While she did not hold formal press conferences, Hoover often spoke with reporters when she made speeches about the Girl Scouts, a method which proved very effective in getting her messages across to the public.

By not bowing down to the prevalent racial prejudices of the day, Lou Hoover came under attack during her first year in the White House. After the election of 1928, an African-American Congressional representative named Oscar De-Priest represented a black district in Chicago, Illinois. Traditionally, the wives of representatives were received at the White House by the first lady. There were warnings to Lou Hoover, particularly from Southerners, that entertaining Mrs. DePriest would conflict with the racial segregation that operated in Washington at the time. Though she was careful to make the visit as low-key as possible, Hoover did invite Mrs. DePriest to the White House in June 1929. The episode caused an intense reaction from the press in the South where Hoover's action was depicted as a direct challenge to segregation. The Texas Legislature and several other legislatures in the South passed resolutions denouncing her action as an abuse of her position as first lady. Lou Hoover made no public statements about what had happened; unlike her successor, Eleanor Roosevelt, she did not have the ability to garner press support when she acted on behalf of racial equality.

By the end of 1929, the nation had experienced the Wall Street stock-market crash, and conditions in the economy were worsening. The Hoover presidency endeavored to respond to the onset of the Great Depression, but the next three years were difficult and painful ones for the Hoovers. Growing lines of unemployed, families in poverty, and economic despair across the nation cost them much of the popularity that had swept them into the White House.

Like her husband, Lou Henry Hoover did not believe that the answer to the Depression was to increase the role of the federal government. Instead, she emphasized the volunteer spirit that she saw in the Girl Scouts and her earlier relief work. She believed that the membership of the Girl Scouts—not through a connection with the federal government but by providing a model volunteer force that could support the president's programs—could be a positive element to provide aid to the impoverished and needy in local communities.

Throughout 1931, she made speeches urging charitable groups to rally to the needs of their neighbors and help destitute Americans get through the coming winter. Hoping that the rest of the country would follow the example of the Girl Scouts, Lou Hoover invited the leaders of the national Girl Scout organization to the Hoovers' official retreat in the Rapidan mountains of Maryland (now Camp David) during September 1931. They hammered out a program of volunteer service that was presented to the Girl Scout annual convention the following month as the "Rapidan Plan" to involve 250,000 Girl Scouts in relief work.

The plan was an ambitious undertaking, and the work of the Girl Scouts did some good during the Depression winter of 1932. Hoover had used the influence that a first lady commands on behalf of a generous and caring volunteer endeavor. Unfortunately, the scale of the economic suffering that the Depression caused meant that volunteer campaigns, however well intentioned, could not relieve the misery that the majority of citizens were experiencing. Like the administration of her husband, the Rapidan Plan of Lou Henry Hoover was rejected by the American people in the presidential election of 1932 when Herbert Hoover was defeated over-whelmingly for reelection. The Hoovers left Washington in March 1933 to return to their home in Stanford, California.

In retirement, Hoover kept up an active schedule. She renewed her work with the Girl Scouts and with women's sports, while adding to those commitments the Red Cross, the Community Chest (now the United Way), the Young Women's Christian Association, and several Stanford alumni groups. She founded the Friends of Music in Stanford to support concerts and to bring distinguished artists to the campus.

Because of her natural reserve and dislike of the spotlight, Lou Henry Hoover did not receive acknowledgement for the good she did during her lifetime. Her fame receded during the last ten years of her life amid the popular attention showered on her successor, Eleanor Roosevelt. By the time of her death of a heart attack on January 7, 1944, Lou Hoover was largely forgotten by the public.

After her death, former President Hoover found among her personal papers evidence of numerous acts of private charity that she had performed without asking for credit or notice. In his will, he specified that his wife's personal papers should be closed until 20 years after his own death. He died in 1964, and Lou Henry Hoover's records did not become available until the mid-1980s. With those papers open, biographers and historians are discovering a woman who had an intense commitment to the cause of expanded opportunity for all women and who left an impressive legacy of good works and genuine innovations as first lady of the United States.