National Archives and Records Administration

Introduction Activity 1 Activity 2 Activity 3

[A photo displays a young Herbert Hoover in glasses. The photo is framed in drawings of robed women pouring out coins from cornucopias. A label under the photo reads, “THE HIGHEST SALARIED MAN OF HIS AGE IN THE WORLD”]

    HERBERT C. HOOVER, a young graduate of Stanford University, is supposed to be the highest-salaried man of his age in the world. Before he was 28 he was being paid a salary of $33,000 a year for his services as a mining expert conducting extensive explorations in China for English capitalists.

    Five weeks ago Hoover passed through San Francisco on his way to London, whither he had been invited to take a junior partnership in the famous firm of Bewick, Moreing & Co., perhaps the most notable mining syndicate on earth. He had just disposed of his personal interests in a great Chinese coal mining company at a personal profit said to be in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million dollars. He had earlier seen the opportunities in the coal fields of China, had made a trip to London, had interested capital, had returned, organized a company and outlined its work. Then, when the opportunity came to make his permanent home in the world’s metropolis and away from the discomforts of life in the Oriental empire, he shrewdly sold out for a handsome sum and started with his young wife for England’s capital.

    Ten years ago Hoover entered Stanford University a poor boy. He had to work for the money that paid his modest expenses at college. He was a hard student. Men and women who were at Stanford those first four years of the young university’s life will recall Hoover as a quiet young fellow who was habitually deep in some treatise or close over some fossil specimen, or profile map in the geological laboratory. His eyes usually had the appearance of severe study; they looked inflamed, and he instinctively squinted when he came out into the broad daylight. As a lower classman he seemed almost the typical “dig” in his exclusive devotion to books.

    As an upper classman, surer of himself and better trained in economical methods of study, Hoover became a college politician of pronounced power. Hardly a campus election was free from his shrewd planning, but never for his personal ends. He went into the campaigns for the pleasure each struggle gave him as a quiet manipulator of political destinies. He was one of a powerful trio of non-fraternity politicians, but his support was sometimes back of a fraternity man with as much vigor as though he were personally affiliated with the particular society to which the candidate belonged. In his senior year Hoover was elected treasurer of the student body, an office in those days considered the most responsible within the gift of the campus community. That office and his participation in the political destinies of his fellow-collegians were all the outside activities that supplemented Hoover’s regular college training. Athletics and social life and undergraduate dissipations were strange to him.

    Few ever knew what Hoover did during the summer vacations, but those few were his chief professors. Hoover really had no vacations. He worked every summer gaining practical knowledge of his future profession and storing up the little funds that should help to carry him through another year in the university. He went way back to Arkansas the first two summers and plodded all over that State helping to make a fine profile map that attracted considerable notice at the World’s Fair at Chicago. He was no more afraid of hard manual labor and tedious tramping than he was of long hours at his study table at night.

    The writer happened to be one of a party of five, along with Hoover, that visited the Yosemite valley in the summer of 1894. It was Hoover’s last vacation, and he expected to spend part of it in recreation. One night in June there was a college reunion, there in the grand old valley, something over thirty different colleges being represented by nearly seventy men and women, and the lovable old Professor Joseph Le Conte, University of Georgia, 1841, was the head of the joyous lock-step parade as it finally wound up the evening’s singing and story telling and instrumental music with a sort of hilarious war dance around the giant bonfire built in an ampitheater [sic] of bowlders [sic] and pines close to the Royal Arches. It chanced that about a half dozen members of the California Glee Club, out on a roughing trip with a burro train, were present for that reunion. They sang gleeful airs with true college zest. And after each favorable impression from California’s representatives some of the strange men from out of the East would call from the flickering circle, “Now, for a Stanford song.” But the Stanford men were truly “a stupid lot,” as a schoolteacher informed them the next evening, when they stopped for an unconventional call at one of the numerous camps and joked for a half hour with the fair gathering, and then, with their identity still unknown, drove away into the darkness with a convincing Stanford yell that echoed from both sides of the mighty walled valley.

    That visit to the Yosemite was during the great railroad strike. A telegram came one day informing Hoover that his application for a position with the State geological surveying party had been granted. Train and stage transportation were stopped. It was nearly 100 miles to Stockton, where Hoover could take the boat to San Francisco. He said nothing, but cooked himself some flapjacks, cut off a hunk of bacon, measured out some coffee, took his tin cup, a small fry pan, a pair of blankets and said good-by to his camp companions. It was hot weather in midsummer, and three days of very long marches before him up and down mountain roads. But Hoover went at it without a word and never mentioned it afterward.

    When Herbert Hoover received his university degree he came to San Francisco, practically without a dollar, and secured a place in the office of Louis Janin, the mining engineer. Within a few months his expert reports on Colorado mines that he had been sent out to examine had attracted special attention from English investors. Hoover’s services were personally engaged by London exploration agents seeking Western mining investments. So Hoover opened an office on his own account in the Mills building and seemed to be kept very busy. Within two years after his graduation he was offered the position of expert in charge of extensive gold-mining districts. Then it became known that Hoover had gone to Coolgardie, in West Australia, at a salary of $15,000 a year, though he was but 24 years of age. There, in that dreary, sweltering part of the lone continent, Hoover gathered about him as assistants several other California boys who had received their geological training at Stanford.

    A year later Hoover’s name had become so well known to London mining concerns that another big syndicate chose him to go to China at the head of a party to make extensive explorations of China’s gold possibilities. And his salary was increased to $25,000 a year, with hopes of a better environment than that of cheerless Coolgardie. Hoover went to China by way of London and San Francisco, and while in this city stayed at the Palace Hotel and entertained some of his old college associates to fine dinners and expensive cigars – the same Hoover who had complained that he could not afford to pay 50 cents for a country hotel meal during the trip to the Yosemite four years before. In China, as in Australia, Hoover remembered and favored the men who had studied geology with him in the University and had several California boys on his staff.

    After a year in China Hoover returned for a business visit to London, and for another Stanford assistant, a girl who had been a beginner as a geology student in the big laboratory while he was an upper classman. He went down to Santa Cruz, and in his characteristic way persuaded one of Santa Cruz’s most popular daughters that her college degree and her geological training could be very happily turned to sympathetic account by becoming Mrs. Herbert C. Hoover.

    And Hoover and his bride went to Tien-tsin to live. They were there during the Boxer bombardment of the city, and their pretty Oriental home was wrecked. But Hoover had made many friends among the influential Chinese and personally was quite safe among the natives. He had been commissioned chief expert of the Board of Mines of the Chinese Government, and he became general manager of the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company, a concern he organized with London capital to develop rich coal fields. And Hoover was having his salary increased. The London mining investor has a tremendous respect for California trained mining experts, men who have studied the theory and had the practice of mining in a land of gold mines. Hoover’s enterprise, the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company, was disposed of for $1,500,000. It is destined to be heard of in San Francisco. It is operating a large bituminous coking coal field sixty miles from Tien-tsin, constructing a harbor at Ching Wan Tow, seventy miles from the mines, and preparing with large new freight ships to carry coking coal across the Pacific, land it in San Francisco for $6 a ton for ore smelting purposes and have the steamships return laden with freights at low rates. That was Hoover’s plan, and if it succeeds it will have an effect on Oriental traffic with this port and on manufacturing interests near San Francisco bay.

    Personally, Hoover is tall and spare, of quiet bearing and of cautious and analytical speech. He was born somewhere in Indiana and lived for a time in Oregon, and then came to California, where he received the specific impulse that made him, within five years after his graduation, probably the highest salaried individual that any college has produced the last decade. Income is a financial revenue not necessarily merited, but salary is the cash measure others place upon and pay for the services of a person. And Hoover is thought to know his business thoroughly, as President Jordan said at the recent convention of the California Miners, “not from the bottom up, but from the top down.”