U.S. President Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) was an alumnus of Stanford University, graduating in 1895 to become a mining engineer.[1] Successful in business enterprise from an early age in a managerial capacity, Hoover also developed a deep affection for book collecting, building an impressive personal collection.[1]
When World War I erupted, Hoover found himself in Europe, quickly becoming involved in ongoing efforts to provide relief aid to wartime refugees.[1] In 1915 Hoover's professional life intersected with his bibliophilic proclivities when his friend Ephraim D. Adams suggested that Hoover take it upon himself to preserve the records of the organization he directed, the Commission for Relief in Belgium.[1] Hoover accepted this task and began assembling the mass of books, posters, and documents which would become the foundation of the so-called "Hoover War Collection"—earliest incarnation of the Hoover Institution Library and Archives.[1]
Hoover also later recounted that he was further driven in the task of systematic archiving by his own wartime research as food administrator. In the first volume his memoirs, published in 1951, Hoover wrote:
I did a vast amount of reading, mostly on previous wars, revolutions, and peace-makings of Europe and especially the political and economic aftermaths. At one time I set up some research at London, Paris, and Berlin into previous famines in Europe to see if there had developed any ideas on handling relief and pestilence. ... I was shortly convinced that gigantic famine would follow the present war. The steady degeneration of agriculture was obvious. ... I read in one of Andrew D. White's writings that most of the fugitive literature of comment during the French Revolution was lost to history because no one set any value on it at the time, and that without such material it became very difficult or impossible to reconstruct the real scene. Therein lay the origins of the Library on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.[2]
Andrew D. White donated his vast collection of ephemera from the French Revolution to Cornell University in 1891.[3] A full account of the founding of the Hoover Institution Library and Archives is provided by George H. Nash in "Herbert Hoover and Stanford University," published by the Hoover Institution Press in 1988.
In February 1919, Congress established a new agency known as the American Relief Administration as a mechanism for the supply of food aid to the hungry people of post-war Europe. Herbert Hoover was tapped by President Woodrow Wilson to head this agency, and the records of this great enterprise were also incorporated into Hoover's archival holdings.
The initial holdings documented the end of World War I and the peace conference at the end of the war.[4]
Development
The reading room at the Hoover Institution Archives in June 2011
Starting in 1919, Hoover donated the collected materials to Stanford, his alma mater, along with funds to maintain and develop the documents. The collection was called the Hoover War Collection and later the Hoover War Library. In August 1920 the first permanent curator of the collection, Frank A. Golder, headed a team which traveled across Europe to acquire materials.[5] A massive number of books, pamphlets, documents, and posters were acquired, crated, and shipped back to California on behalf of the project. By 1923 more than 40,000 items had been obtained for the collection.[4] The documents were initially housed within the main Stanford Library, but by 1929 the collection had reached 1.4 million items and space was becoming a problem. In 1941 Hoover Tower was completed as a repository for the growing collection, which was eventually named the Hoover Institution and Library on War, Revolution and Peace.[6]
Staff members in subsequent decades have continued to expand the collection systematically. The current holdings include 6,000 separate collections that encompass an estimated 50 million original documents.[4]
As of July 2013[update], the director of the library and archives is Eric Wakin.[7]
Key collections
The archive is a valuable resource for the following subjects related to Russia: the rise of political parties, Imperial Russian diplomatic archives, the revolutionary movement, Asiatic Russia and its colonization, the "Okhrana", the Russo-Japanese War, and Russia's participation in World War I.[4]
Other special collections include the Hoover Institution/Research Libraries Group, Inc. (RLG)/Russian State Archival Service Cataloging Project and the Soviet Communist Party Archives Microfilming Project.[4]
Digitized audiovisual recordings and transcripts of more than 1,500 Firing Line episodes were contributed to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting[8] via external links from The Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University.[9]
The Hoover Institution hosts the Chiang Kai-shek diaries and the opening of the diaries for study has contributed to a surge in academic publishing China's Nationalist period.[10]:68
↑ Emmons, Terence; Patenaude, Bertrand M., eds. (1992). "Introduction". War, Revolution, and Peace in Russia: The Passages of Frank Golder, 1914–1927. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. p.xvii.
Anna M. Bourguina and Michael Jakobson (eds.) Guide to the Boris I. Nicolaevsky Collection in the Hoover Institution Archives. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1989.
Rita R. Campbell, "Machine Retrieval in the Herbert Hoover Archives," The American Archivist, vol. 29, no. 2 (April 1966), pp.298–302.
Peter Duignan, The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace: Seventy-five Years of its History. Foreword by W. Glenn Campbell. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1989.
Peter Duignan, The Library of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1985.
Peter Duignan, "The Library of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace: Part 1: Origin and Growth," Library History, vol. 17, no. 1 (2001), pp.3–19. "Part 2: the Campbell Years," Library History, vol. 17, no. 2 (2001), pp.107–118.
Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Archival and Manuscript Material at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace: A Checklist of Major Collections. Stanford, CA: Stanford University, July 1975.
George H. Nash, "Herbert Hoover and Stanford University." Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1988.
George H. Nash, "The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Humanitarian, 1912-1917." New York: Norton, 1988.
Charles G Palm and Dale Reed, Guide to the Hoover Institution Archives. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1980.
Bertrand M. Patenaude, A Wealth of Ideas: Revelations from the Hoover Institution Archives. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
James McJ. Robertson, "The Hoover Institution Collection on the German Working Class Movement 1870/71-1933," International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 12 (Nov. 1977), pp.10–18.
Witold S. Sworakowski, The Hoover Library Collection on Russia. Collection Survey No. 1. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1974.
Herbert Clark Hoover was the 31st president of the United States, serving from 1929 to 1933. A wealthy mining engineer before his presidency, Hoover led the wartime Commission for Relief in Belgium and was the director of the U.S. Food Administration, followed by post-war relief of Europe. A member of the Republican Party, he served as the U.S. Secretary of Commerce from 1921 to 1928 before being elected president in 1928. His presidency was dominated by the Great Depression, and his policies and methods to combat it were seen as lackluster. Amid his unpopularity, he decisively lost reelection to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932.
The Hoover Institution is an American public policy think tank which promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government. While the institution is formally a unit of Stanford University, it maintains an independent board of overseers and relies on its own income and donations. It is widely described as conservative, although its directors have contested the idea that it is partisan.
Robert John Service is a post-revisionist British historian, academic, and author who has written extensively on the history of the Soviet Union, particularly the era from the October Revolution to Stalin's death. He was until 2013 a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and a senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is best known for his biographies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Leon Trotsky. He has been a fellow of the British Academy since 1998.
Bertram David Wolfe was an American scholar, leading communist, and later a leading anti-communist. He authored many works related to communism, including biographical studies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Diego Rivera.
The Russian famine of 1921–1922, also known as the Povolzhye famine was a severe famine in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic that began early in the spring of 1921 and lasted until 1922. The famine resulted from the combined effects of severe drought, the continued effects of World War I, economic disturbance from the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War, and failures in the government policy of war communism. It was exacerbated by rail systems that could not distribute food efficiently.
American Relief Administration (ARA) was an American relief mission to Europe and later post-revolutionary Russia after World War I. Herbert Hoover, future president of the United States, was the program director.
Hoover Tower is a 285-foot (87 m) structure on the campus of Stanford University in Stanford, California, United States. The tower houses the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, an archive collection founded by Herbert Hoover before he became president of the United States. Hoover had amassed a large collection of materials related to early 20th century history; he donated them to Stanford, his alma mater, to found a "library of war, revolution and peace". Hoover Tower also houses the Hoover Institution research center and think tank.
Benjamin Martin Golder was a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives, representing the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's Fourth District.
The Commission for Relief in Belgium was an international, predominantly American, organization that arranged for the supply of food to German-occupied Belgium and northern France during the First World War.
Harold Henry Fisher (1890–1975) was a US historian specializing in Russian history.
The Russian Famine Relief Act of 1921 was formed by the United States Congress on February 24, 1919, with a budget of 100 million dollars. Its budget was boosted by private donations, which resulted in another 100 million dollars. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the program delivered more than four million tons of relief supplies to 23 war-torn European countries. Between 1919 and 1921, Arthur Cuming Ringland was chief of mission in Europe. ARA ended its operations outside Russia in 1922; it operated in Russia until 1923.
The United States Food Administration (1917–1920) was an independent federal agency that controlled the production, distribution, and conservation of food in the U.S. during the nation's participation in World War I. It was established to prevent monopolies and hoarding, and to maintain government control of foods through voluntary agreements and licensing. The agency was established by Executive Order 2679-A of August 10, 1917, pursuant to the Food and Fuel Control Act, and was abolished by Executive Order 3320 on August 21, 1920. Herbert Hoover was appointed to serve as Food Administrator.
George H. Nash is an American historian and interpreter of American conservatism. He is a biographer of Herbert Hoover. He is best known for The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, which first appeared in 1976 and has been twice revised and expanded.
Frank Alfred Golder was an American historian and archivist specializing in the history of Russia. Golder is best remembered for his work in the early 1920s building the seminal collection of Slavic language materials residing today at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University in California.
The Stanford University Libraries (SUL), formerly known as "Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources" ("SULAIR"), is the library system of Stanford University in California. It encompasses more than 24 libraries in all. Several academic departments and some residences also have their own libraries.
Charles Callan Tansill (1890–1964) was an American historian and the author of fourteen history books. He was a professor of history at American University, Fordham University, and Georgetown University. An isolationist before World War II, he was accused of revisionism after the war.
Carl Fremont Brand was an American historian. He was a professor of history at Stanford University for thirty-four years, and was one of the leading American authorities on the history of the British Labour Party. His books, British Labour's Rise to Power (1941) and The British Labour Party (1964), are regarded as definitive works in this field. He built the Hoover Institution's collection of Labour Party documents, long recognized as the finest collection outside of the United Kingdom.
Lewis Henry Gann (1924–1997) was a historian, political scientist and archivist in the United States. He researched African history and specialized in the history of Central Africa in colonial era, writing a number of works in collaboration with Peter Duignan. He also worked on aspects of the history of the United States, European history, and plural societies.
The following is a list of important scholarly resources related to Herbert Hoover, the 31st president of the United States. For recent work see Ellis W. Hawley (2018). For older studies see Patrick G. O’Brien and Philip T. Rosen, (1981), 25–42, 83–99 and Patrick G. O’Brien, (1988).
Foreign policy of Herbert Hoover covers the international activities and policies of Herbert Hoover for his entire career, with emphasis to his roles from 1914 to 1933.
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