One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson Page B

hadn’t benefited from the arrangement, whereas American farmers had been enriched by $45 million. Congress, unmoved, insisted on payment. Such actions fed America’s prosperity but did nothing to enhance its popularity or prestige abroad.
    None of this rebounded on Hoover, who seemed to enjoy a permanent immunity from blame. In fact, closer investigation shows that Hoover was not as heroic or noble as most of his contemporaries thought him. An investigative reporter named John Hamill, in a book called The Strange Career of Mr. Hoover Under Two Flags , claimed that Hoover profited personally, and substantially, from the Belgian food relief program.That charge was never proved—possibly, it must be said, because it was baseless—but another, more serious charge was true. During the war, as part of his business operations, Hoover illegally bought chemicals from Germany. This was an exceedingly grave offense in wartime. Remarkably, he did so not because the chemicals were unavailable in Britain, but simply because the German ones were cheaper. He saw no moral inconsistency in supporting the German economy even as Germany was trying to kill the sons and brothers of the people with whom he worked and lived. It is extraordinary to think that only a little more than a decade before he became president of the United States, Herbert Hoover, the Great Humanitarian, was engaged in an act that could have led to his being taken outside, stood against a wall, and shot.
    In 1919, his work in Europe done, Hoover returned permanently to the United States. He had lived abroad for twenty years and was something of a stranger in his own land, yet he was so revered that he was courted as a potential presidential candidate by both political parties. It has often been written that Hoover had been away so long that he didn’t know whether he was a Republican or a Democrat. That is not actually true. He had joined the Republican Party in 1909. But it is true that he wasn’t terrifically political and had never voted in a presidential election. In March 1921, he joined Warren G. Harding’s cabinet as secretary of commerce. After Harding died suddenly in 1923, he continued in the same post under Calvin Coolidge.
    Hoover was a diligent and industrious presence in both administrations, but he was dazzlingly short on endearing qualities. His manner was cold, vain, prickly, and snappish. He never thanked subordinates or inquired about their health or happiness. He had no visible capacity for friendliness or warmth. He did not even like shaking hands. Although Coolidge’s sense of humor was that of a slightly backward schoolboy—one of his favorite japes was to ring all the White House servant bells at once, then hide behind the drapes to savor the confusion that followed—he did at least have one. Hoover had none. One ofhis closest associates remarked that in thirty years he had never heard Hoover laugh out loud.
    Coolidge kept an exceedingly light hand on the tiller of state. He presided over an administration that was, in the words of one observer, “dedicated to inactivity.” His treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, spent much of his working life overseeing tax cuts that conveniently enhanced his own wealth. According to the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., with a single piece of legislation Mellon gave himself a greater tax cut than that enjoyed by almost the entire populace of Nebraska put together. Mellon had the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) send its best men to prepare his tax returns for him with a view to keeping them as small as possible. The head of the IRS even helpfully provided a list of loopholes for Mellon to exploit. As Mellon’s biographer David Cannadine notes, Mellon also illegally used his position to promote his business interests—for instance, by asking the secretary of state to help one of his companies secure an engineering contract in China. Thanks to these maneuverings, Mellon’s personal net worth more than