Hoover biography

Herbert Clark Hoover was born on August 10, For the first nine years of his life, he lived in the small town of West Branch, Iowa, the place of his birth. His Quaker father, Jessie Clark Hoover, a blacksmith and farm equipment salesman, suffered a heart attack and died when Herbert was six years old. Three years later, the boy's mother, Huldah Minthorn Hoover, developed pneumonia and also passed away, orphaning Herbert, his older brother Theodore, and little sister Mary. Passed around among relatives for a few years, Hoover ended up with his uncle, Dr. John Minthorn, who lived in Oregon.

The young Hoover was shy, sensitive, introverted, and somewhat suspicious, characteristics that developed, at least in part, in reaction to the loss of his parents at such a young age. He attended Friends Pacific Academy in Newberg, Oregon, earning average to failing grades in all subjects except math. Determined, nevertheless, to go to the newly established Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, Hoover studied hard and barely passed the university's entrance exam. He went on to major in geology and participated in a host of extracurricular activities, serving as class treasurer of the junior and senior student bodies and managing the school baseball and football teams. To pay his tuition, Hoover worked as a clerk in the registration office and showed considerable entrepreneurial skill by starting a student laundry service.

Career and Monetary Success

During the summers, Hoover worked as a student assistant on geological survey teams in Arkansas, California, and Nevada. After his graduation in , he looked hard to find work as a surveyor but ended up laboring seventy hours a week at a gold mine near Nevada City, California, pushing ore carts. Luck came his way with an office job in San Francisco, putting him in touch with a firm in need of an engineer to inspect and evaluate mines for potential purchase. Hoover then moved t

Early Life

Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, –October 20, ), mining engineer, humanitarian, U.S. Secretary of Commerce, and 31st President of the United States, was the son of Jesse Hoover, a blacksmith, and Hulda Minthorn Hoover, a seamstress and recorded minister in the Society of Friends (Quakers). Hoover was born in West Branch, Iowa, where he enjoyed fishing in the local creek and working in his father’s blacksmith shop.

Hoover lived in Iowa only for the first decade of his life. Orphaned at nine years old, he began an odyssey that would make him a multi-millionaire, international humanitarian, secretary of commerce, and President of the United States.

He left Iowa at age 11 in November , bound for Oregon and the home of his maternal uncle, Henry Minthorn, who was a doctor and a school superintendent, and later, a real estate broker. Hoover lived with the Minthorns for six years; at 14, he left school to work as a clerk in his uncle's real estate business. Three years later, having decided to pursue a career as a mining engineer, Hoover sought to resume his studies and applied to a new school, Leland Stanford Junior University, set to open in

It was at Stanford that he made lifelong friends, found a mentor in Professor John Caspar Branner, and met his future wife, Lou Henry. He was active in extracurricular activities, serving as student body treasurer and as manager of both the baseball and football teams.

Mining Career and Public Service

Hoover graduated from Stanford in , and then made his fortune as an international mining engineer and financier over the next two decades. In , Hoover was living in London when World War I broke out in Europe. Yearning for an opportunity for public service, he immediately organized assistance for American travelers who were fleeing the war. A few weeks later he established the Commission for Relief in Belgium to provide food for Belgian civilians trapped in the w

American law enforcement administrator (–)

This article is about the person. For the headquarters building for the FBI, see J. Edgar Hoover Building.

John Edgar Hoover (January 1, &#;– May 2, ) was an American attorney and law enforcement administrator who served as the fifth and final Director of the Bureau of Investigation (BOI) and the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). President Calvin Coolidge first appointed Hoover as director of the BOI, the predecessor to the FBI, in After 11 years in the post, Hoover became instrumental in founding the FBI in June , where he remained as director for an additional 37 years until his death in May – serving a total of 48 years leading both the BOI and the FBI under eight Presidents.

Hoover expanded the FBI into a larger crime-fighting agency and instituted a number of modernizations to policing technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. Hoover also established and expanded a national blacklist, referred to as the FBI Index or Index List.

Later in life and after his death, Hoover became a controversial figure as evidence of his secretive abuses of power began to surface. He was also found to have routinely violated both the FBI's own

Son of a Quaker blacksmith, Herbert Clark Hoover brought to the Presidency an unparalleled reputation for public service as an engineer, administrator, and humanitarian.

Born in an Iowa village in , he grew up in Oregon. He enrolled at Stanford University when it opened in , graduating as a mining engineer.

He married his Stanford sweetheart, Lou Henry, and they went to China, where he worked for a private corporation as China's leading engineer. In June the Boxer Rebellion caught the Hoovers in Tientsin. For almost a month the settlement was under heavy fire. While his wife worked in the hospitals, Hoover directed the building of barricades, and once risked his life rescuing Chinese children.

One week before Hoover celebrated his 40th birthday in London, Germany declared war on France, and the American Consul General asked his help in getting stranded tourists home. In six weeks his committee helped , Americans return to the United States. Next Hoover turned to a far more difficult task, to feed Belgium, which had been overrun by the German army.

After the United States entered the war, President Wilson appointed Hoover head of the Food Administration. He succeeded in cutting consumption of foods needed overseas and avoided rationing at home, yet kept the Allies fed.

After the Armistice, Hoover, a member of the Supreme Economic Council and head of the American Relief Administration, organized shipments of food for starving millions in central Europe. He extended aid to famine-stricken Soviet Russia in When a critic inquired if he was not thus helping Bolshevism, Hoover retorted, "Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!"

After capably serving as Secretary of Commerce under Presidents Harding and Coolidge, Hoover became the Republican Presidential nominee in He said then: "We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land." His election seemed to